Neil deGrasse Tyson -- a liability

[Shepherd]

He's comparing apples and oranges here.

Given that avg. radius of the earth is 6,400km, and that of the atmosphere is by the Karman line (110km), you have the equivalent of 110km/6400km or 1.7cm %. So far, so good.

The trouble is when you force fit your other data on the apple side.

Apples range from a size 64 to a size 216 (http://stemilttrade.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/AppleSizing.pdf). All of these would be cited as a "ordinary" apple.

Skin thickness also sorts out from a low of 33um up to 76um, with variation between different thicknesses on the same apple. (http://www.agriculturejournals.cz/publicFiles/51351.pdf)

Putting these two apple facts together, we get a broad range of values - from 4.3cm 4.6 cm radius down to 2.31cm 2.9 cm radius, combined with .033cm 0.0033 cm to .076cm 0.0076 cm --> yielding a low of .0076 0.00072 or 0.072% and a high of .0239 0.0026 or 0.26% ... way outside our range.

Could you find some set of apples where his example would be true? Yes. Good luck with that.

The take home lesson is not to make fruit analogies for planets.

Sorry, but you also seemed to have some errors with your units and conversions.

First correction, I assume you meant to express what should have been a dimensionless ratio as a percentage.

I'm not sure what happened when you converted apple diameters in inches to radii in centimeters. I think that is what you were attempting.

Also, a micrometer is 1/10,000 of a centimeter, I believe, and not 1/1000.

If you got your apple skin sizes from the abstract of the pdf file to which you linked, then your 76 um probably should have been a 73 um, too, but I let that slide.

I wouldn't want to add to the confusion. ...lol

 

[marplots]

But it's not wrong. At least according to your numbers.

I will accept "less than right."

Here's a blog post about an actual experiment where it "comes out wrong" but gets massaged into being right anyhow:
"I just did it with a golden delicious apple. My stack of 10 layers had a measured thickness of 11 mm, corresponding to 1.1 mm for a single layer–which is the thickness of the apple skin. The apple has a diameter of 80 mm. So the diameter of the apple is only 80 / 1.1 = 72 times the thickness of the skin. Comparing that to Earth’s diameter equal to 127 times the thickness of the atmoshere means the Jeffism (at least with my apple) is confirmed!"
http://blogontheuniverse.org/2009/05/21/apples-and-you/

 

[marplots]

Sorry, but you also seemed to have some errors with your units and conversions.

First correction, I assume you meant to express what should have been a dimensionless ratio as a percentage.

I'm not sure what happened when you converted apple diameters in inches to radii in centimeters. I think that is what you were attempting.

Also, a micrometer is 1/10,000 of a centimeter, I believe, and not 1/1000.

If you got your apple skin sizes from the abstract of the pdf file to which you linked, then your 76 um probably should have been a 73 um, too, but I let that slide.

I wouldn't want to add to the confusion. ...lol

Thankfully, I am not a popularizer of science.

 

[acbytesla]

More than pedantic: choosing a definition intended to belittle Tyson's analogy rather than the one most of his audience would use.

I don't get this entire thread. There seems to be a hate-on for Tyson that is inexplicable to me. Is. I'm a science fan, not a scientist. The difference is very important. Tyson is attempting to convey the overall story to laymen not specific details to grad school physics students.

I want to understand why Einstein and Newton are so revered and why The Principia Mathematica and the Theory of Relativity are amazing and important. Sure, Tyson could get bogged down into the minutiae that would lose his audience (Me). But what purpose would that serve? I generally understand the subject now so Tyson did his job.

 

[BStrong]

It's about 13 doses. Which is a lot of coke.

I have no opinion on NDT, but I know a hell of a lot about cocaine users.

Funniest line ever said by a coke guy was the time where I was asked if I knew the best time to snort a gram of blow.

I didn't.

The guy told me the best time to hit that gram was after you already snorted an ounce. And he was still a very happy fella on the back seat ride to county jail.

8-balls (eighth of an ounce, 3.5 grams) isn't much more than an appetizer for folks into it. I've been involved in busts where we found ounces of coke with zero indication it was being trafficked or sold - possession for personal use - and the individual with it in possession was charged with simple possession.

That changed later on when possession of specified amounts of powder or crack became sentencing enhancements whether or not there was evidence of intention to sell or not.

Please note - these weren't cases involving highly diluted samples either. Our agency confiscated powdered coke on a regular basis in the high 80's mid 90's purity level - the old story about powdered coke being 20% - 25% pure might be true somewhere, but not in the S.F. bay area in the 1980's into the 2000's.

 

[marplots]

I don't get this entire thread. There seems to be a hate-on for Tyson that is inexplicable to me. Is. I'm a science fan, not a scientist. The difference is very important. Tyson is attempting to convey the overall story to laymen not specific details to grad school physics students.

I want to understand why Einstein and Newton are so revered and why The Principia Mathematica and the Theory of Relativity are amazing and important. Sure, Tyson could get bogged down into the minutiae that would lose his audience (Me). But what purpose would that serve? I generally understand the subject now so Tyson did his job.

I just have a few nits to pick with his presentation. I don't dislike the guy. And it's not like I'm the only one - I didn't start the thread.

 

[Roboramma]

I will accept "less than right."

Here's a blog post about an actual experiment where it "comes out wrong" but gets massaged into being right anyhow:
"I just did it with a golden delicious apple. My stack of 10 layers had a measured thickness of 11 mm, corresponding to 1.1 mm for a single layer–which is the thickness of the apple skin. The apple has a diameter of 80 mm. So the diameter of the apple is only 80 / 1.1 = 72 times the thickness of the skin. Comparing that to Earth’s diameter equal to 127 times the thickness of the atmoshere means the Jeffism (at least with my apple) is confirmed!"
http://blogontheuniverse.org/2009/05/21/apples-and-you/

So the thickness of the skin/apple is within a factor of 2 of the thickness of the atmosphere/earth. That sounds like it supports the analogy to me. If the range of apples includes apples that have the same ratio as that of the earth, and most apples are within a factor of 2 or 3, I'd say the analogy is pretty good.

Did you think he meant that the thickness of the skin of every apple is exactly proportional to the thickness of the atmosphere of the earth?

That would be pretty damn cool. I'd start wondering if apples had maps on them under the peel...

 

[acbytesla]

I just have a few nits to pick with his presentation. I don't dislike the guy. And it's not like I'm the only one - I didn't start the thread.

Nitpicks are fine, even somewhat important.

 

[Shepherd]

Maybe a better analogy would be the hairy layer of one of those blue-green mold covered oranges. Am I the only one to have seen those?

 

[Roboramma]

I don't get this entire thread. There seems to be a hate-on for Tyson that is inexplicable to me. Is. I'm a science fan, not a scientist. The difference is very important. Tyson is attempting to convey the overall story to laymen not specific details to grad school physics students.

I want to understand why Einstein and Newton are so revered and why The Principia Mathematica and the Theory of Relativity are amazing and important. Sure, Tyson could get bogged down into the minutiae that would lose his audience (Me). But what purpose would that serve? I generally understand the subject now so Tyson did his job.

The OP outlined some ways in which he wasn't just inaccurate, but actually intentionally misleading. That's a very different claim and one that I personally do find important to consider.

 

[Giordano]

This is the kind of apologetics it takes to make it all work out, but it's still wrong.

Consider what a science advocate is challenged to do. He's responsible to put a little work in. It's sloppy. What am I to make of an analogy that fails so miserably? If I am in his target audience, I'll look into it myself, and find out the trick. What then does it say for the next think he tells me?

He should drop it.

No, Tyson has precisely the correct analogy for the people to whom he was speaking! it is an analogy, right? A way of allowing someone not familiar with the actual discipline to obtain a type of understanding? Why not just complain that the earth is not an apple! I presume that you would instead first explain that the various definitions of each of the layers of the atmosphere, explain the Katman line, note the differences at different seasons and latitudes, then present your data on the variation of apple and apple skins. Great! I'm certain that will really help most people understand how thin the earth's atmosphere is much better than Tyson's "sloppy" approach.

 

[Giordano]

I don't get this entire thread. There seems to be a hate-on for Tyson that is inexplicable to me. Is. I'm a science fan, not a scientist. The difference is very important. Tyson is attempting to convey the overall story to laymen not specific details to grad school physics students.

I want to understand why Einstein and Newton are so revered and why The Principia Mathematica and the Theory of Relativity are amazing and important. Sure, Tyson could get bogged down into the minutiae that would lose his audience (Me). But what purpose would that serve? I generally understand the subject now so Tyson did his job.

For me it is hard to not see Tyson as playing a role much like that of Carl Sagan. Sagan also had nitpickers angry at him. But I think a lot of it comes from conservatives who do not like Tyson's takes (based in science) on global warming, theology vs. science, etc. Among some critics outside this forum I also suspect that there is some subconscious racism.

 

[C_Felix]

...blah blah blah...snip...snip...

Neil deGrasse Tyson will study a topic with half his attention and then build a story around it. Which is usally entertaining but often wrong. I don’t believe it’s his intention to convey misinformatiom. It comes from combining his flamboyance with sloppy scholarship. And his fantasies are often colored by his preconceptions and prejudices.

...blah blah blah...snip...snip...

I stopped there.

I'm assuming the rest of the dribble has evidence supporting the bolded portion?

 

[Giordano]

I will accept "less than right."

Here's a blog post about an actual experiment where it "comes out wrong" but gets massaged into being right anyhow:
"I just did it with a golden delicious apple. My stack of 10 layers had a measured thickness of 11 mm, corresponding to 1.1 mm for a single layer–which is the thickness of the apple skin. The apple has a diameter of 80 mm. So the diameter of the apple is only 80 / 1.1 = 72 times the thickness of the skin. Comparing that to Earth’s diameter equal to 127 times the thickness of the atmoshere means the Jeffism (at least with my apple) is confirmed!"
http://blogontheuniverse.org/2009/05/21/apples-and-you/

So you were off by a factor of 10 and Tyson was off by less than a factor 2 for a golden delicious and probably still closer for the range of some other apples. Damning of Tyson indeed! I concede your point, condem Tyson to scientist hell, and (really do) abandon further debate on this issue!

 

[Oystein]

I have thought this topic over, and I wonder if science presentation is itself a science or an art?

If it is an art, does it have a right to artistic license?

The job of an artist is not to hammer exact details into students' heads, but to make a larger image come to life in the minds and imaginations of an audience.

For example: I love History, and I like novels set im some historical context where the author has acquainted themselves well with what the science of history has so far figured out about that period, and he fills this up with imaginary people doing imaginary things. In important way, such imaginary stories can convey the reality of the historic setting better than the study and precise citing of extant sources and archeological finds could ever do.

Newton was at the same time a brilliant mathematician and physicist and a disturbingly errant religious nutjob, who allowed himself to be guided in part by patently false assumptions about the universe. This cannot have ended well. But how exactly did this not end well? Perhaps we do not know, cannot know - we cannot know how Newton's life and achievements as a scientist would have been different had he been an agnostic. So is it fair to make up - using artistic license - a bit of alternative history and invent a path by which he failed to acomplish more? To illustrate how religious nutjobbery deprives great minds of greater achievements?
I am split on that question. It would be cool if NDGT had written a novel in a format that readers would expect the use of artistic license. I have read such novels on Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, Gerhard Mercator, and a medieval Persian scientists whose name currently escapes me, and I found them to be illuminating and entertaining, and perhaps even true to the character, despite the inevitable inventions. It's a different beast of course if the format is a talk on science - people probably do not expect artistic license to be at play.

 

[acbytesla]

I have thought this topic over, and I wonder if science presentation is itself a science or an art?
If it is an art, does it have a right to artistic license?

The job of an artist is not to hammer exact details into students' heads, but to make a larger image come to life in the minds and imaginations of an audience.

For example: I love History, and I like novels set im some historical context where the author has acquainted themselves well with what the science of history has so far figured out about that period, and he fills this up with imaginary people doing imaginary things. In important way, such imaginary stories can convey the reality of the historic setting better than the study and precise citing of extant sources and archeological finds could ever do.

Newton was at the same time a brilliant mathematician and physicist and a disturbingly errant religious nutjob, who allowed himself to be guided in part by patently false assumptions about the universe. This cannot have ended well. But how exactly did this not end well? Perhaps we do not know, cannot know - we cannot know how Newton's life and achievements as a scientist would have been different had he been an agnostic. So is it fair to make up - using artistic license - a bit of alternative history and invent a path by which he failed to acomplish more? To illustrate how religious nutjobbery deprives great minds of greater achievements?
I am split on that question. It would be cool if NDGT had written a novel in a format that readers would expect the use of artistic license. I have read such novels on Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, Gerhard Mercator, and a medieval Persian scientists whose name currently escapes me, and I found them to be illuminating and entertaining, and perhaps even true to the character, despite the inevitable inventions. It's a different beast of course if the format is a talk on science - people probably do not expect artistic license to be at play.

It's both. Maybe a litle artistic license is fine taking into account the audience. Tyson is trying to tell an interesting story and any use of analogies is by necessity not going to be precise. While he could pepper his presentations with caveats about the lack of precision I think that would detract from his stories not enhance them.

 

[marplots]

Since I fell short of the mark with my apple example, I offer this as a bonus:

Tyon's own words here:
“With regard to the sex, that was interesting because some biologists jumped on me claiming that it’s just false. And people love nothing more, apparently, in revealing or finding that I’ve said something that’s wrong. Now, so do I. I take great joy in finding if I said something wrong, because then I’ve learned something.

“But what happened in the case of the sex hurting and the species going extinct, biologists and people were quick to say, ‘Oh, he should stick to astrophysics.’ Well, why? Oh, because there are species where sex hurts and is quite painful."

As quoted and criticized in Pharyngula: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/17/some-days-its-very-hard-to-defend-neil-degrasse-tyson/

 

[Spindrift]

Where do you draw the line?

Wherever it needs to be for a given audience.

 

[Pixel42]

I have thought this topic over, and I wonder if science presentation is itself a science or an art?

If it is an art, does it have a right to artistic license?

The job of an artist is not to hammer exact details into students' heads, but to make a larger image come to life in the minds and imaginations of an audience.

Are you familiar with the concept of lies to children?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children

A lie-to-children is a statement that is false, but which nevertheless leads the child's mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie".

It's not an excuse for carelessness, but it is sometimes justified.

 

[Oystein]

Are you familiar with the concept of lies to children?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children

Not, until now, as a lemma.
As a concept, I think it is rather trivial.

It's not an excuse for carelessness, but it is sometimes justified.

Which, in the context of this thread, raises two questions:

1.) The, say, less than accurate bits of NDGT's presentations - are they lies-to-children, or just errors?
2.) LtC, are they justified?


The WP article you link to is, IMO, poorly written - vague and repetitive. I am not sure, after spending several minutes on it, if I could tell LtC apart from simple models on one hand and fraud on the other.


I remember a science experiment from primary school, 3rd or 4th class, I guess. The objective was to show that air is approximately 20% oxygene. The set up was as follows:

A shallow bowl is filled with water
A lit candle floats on the water
Experimenter puts an upside-down beaker over the candle, dipping it a bit below the water surface, such that the volume of air inside is shielded from air outside.
The candle will burn until oxygen level inside the beaker is too low to support fire, then the candle goes out.
As a result, water from the bowl gets sucked into the beaker, such that the water surface inside is higher than outside
It so turned out that the water filled roughly 20% of the beaker's volume.​

I have never forgotten this experiment, which impressed me a lot, and I have remembered this "ca. 20% oxygen in air" very well since then. So the experiment served its purpose to teach me something true about the composition of air.
BUT it was a lie-to-children: Not little of the candle wax's chemical composition is made up of carbon atoms. Each C combines with two O-atoms from the O₂ molecules in the air to a CO₂ molecule, which is released into the beaker - replacing exactly the volume of the O₂ expended to oxidize the carbon. Most of the rest of the wax is H-atoms, four of which may react with 1 O₂ to create 2 H₂O - so each O2-molecule in the beaker that reacts with hydrogen is replaced with two H₂O molecules, which are (initially) released as a hot gas.
The main effect is that the air and exhausts inside the beaker get hot, the gas expands, and some escapes the beaker - something we failed to observe. Then, when the candle goes out, the gas inside quickly cools and contracts, sucking water up (also, the H₂O-exhaust condensates, which subtracts gas volume; this is the only part of the experiment where the volume of used O₂ is genuinly removed). I distinctly remember that much of the rise of water level inside the beaker occurred after the candle went out, but didn't make correct sense of that when I was only 9 or 10 years old.
I figured out this was a LtC only when I was already an adult.
But as I said, it served its intended purpose of teaching the O₂ level of air.