Neil degrasse Tyson goes Hollywood (if he wasn't already.)
I'm generally fairly jaded about scientists who become famous for popularizing science, which often involves "dumbing it down," or worse positioning themselves as if they were somehow an "ultimate authority."
I have very little use for Michio Kaku for instance, and really, I got really tired in the 1970s and 1980s with hearing that Carl Sagan smoked pot and therefore pot was good for your brain. (It isn't.)
This said, I rather like Neil degrasse Tyson despite his role as a populizer of science: He has a sense of humor for one thing, and asks a lot of questions as opposed to pontificating like an oracle, in his wonderful video series Startalk, in which he includes jokey but curious nonscientists, a soccer pro for instance, in his at least if the one (the only one I confess to watching) with David Krakauer, Director of the Santa Fe institute (a very serious guy) is an example:
(I saw a talk by David Krakauer at Princeton, and it blew my mind. I commented here:
Have you ever been to a lecture where the speaker is so smart people are afraid to ask a question? )
On Saturday, my wife wanted to see the movie Project Hail Mary because my nephew, and my son (the nonscientist son, the artist) liked it.
So we went.
It was a cute movie, I guess, but I thought the science was appalling. The film is built around the premise that a carbon based life form (which if I recall Gosling's character described as having carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, omitting nitrogen) was infecting the galaxy, eating stars in any planetary system having a hot planet with a carbon dioxide atmosphere, Venus in our case.
Eating stars? You don't say?
How would a carbon based life form avoid being converted into a disordered plasma while eating a star?
Um, um, um...
The movie, a special effects extravaganza, in my opinion mangled science badly.
I cruised around the internet to see what real scientists were saying, and surprisingly many of the comments were conditionally positive, although I found myself on a TikTok site where a bunch of graduate students were complaining about the way Gosling's character failed to balance his centrifuge:
Project Hail Mary: Graduate Students and that thing about the centrifuge. (The best comment, the first one, not spoken was pretty funny: "The most unrealistic thing about the movie Hail Mary is that someone read his Ph.D thesis." I do, I read Ph.D. theses, but that's just me.)
Any way, the movie people say that Neil degrasse Tyson said that Tyson said "We got the science right."
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-Xm46-o_6Ys?feature=share
Hearsay, but if true, disappointing.
And no, one cannot travel to another star and have people waiting for you back home. And no, microscopic carbon based life forms cannot carry enough energy in their bodies to propel space ships.
My wife called it right, "A cute latter day version of "ET."
It's a fantasy movie, which is OK, but I object to people running around asking scientists if they got the science right, and I'm disappointed that some of them, even with qualifications, answer in the affirmative.
The question is an opportunity to explain science is not fantasy.
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