Neil deGrasse Tyson is a terrible spokesperson for scientists
Arrogance and a lack of curiosity are a bad combination
Neil deGrasse Tyson was interviewed on Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal.
On the show Jaimungal interviews a broad range of scientists and philosophers about theoretical physics, consciousness, free will, and God. Jaimungal is trained in both math and physics and he does a ton of prep before every interview. So his conversations are often very technical. Think of him as the smart man’s Lex Fridman.
I was excited when I heard about the interview of deGrass Tyson. Normally Tyson talks in sound-bites, throwing out science trivia to the astonishment of his host. I figured this one would be different, and boy was I right. Jaimungal even starts off the show talking about how the interview was surprisingly contentious.
Role of philosophy in physics
The first part of the interview was about the role of philosophy in physics [14:27].
Jaimungal: Since maybe the thirties or forties, there's been a split in the scientific community for shut up and calculate, like forget about philosophy. Philosophy is for the philosophers. Let's just even have separate departments. There's just physics.
Tyson: If you want to know, in fact, I agree with you, but I would word it differently. I would say, it's not shut up and calculate, it's philosophers who were hanging out in their armchair, deducing what they could about the world.
We learned in the 20th century that most of the world, our senses do not have access to most of what we will discover in the world as the 20th century unfolded. We needed large telescopes. We needed particle accelerators. We needed probes of the universe that do not issue forth from your senses being invoked on the couch.
Most of it. And so. because quantum physics, modern physics, basically, post classical physics, is an era that the philosopher in the couch has no access to, because the philosopher in the couch does not have a laboratory. And the laboratory became necessary in order to know the next thing that's going to happen. You're not going to deduce quantum tunneling. Somebody's got to make that measurement. Okay?So I claim, not that it was shut up in calculus, it was philosophers, you're not useful to us anymore. Sorry. We're going to keep going in our direction, find something else to do. And there's religious philosophy, there's ethical philosophy, there's political philosophy. There's no shortage of branches of philosophy, but philosophers in the driving seat with the physicists, where it had been for centuries, parted ways. That's how I see it. I don't see it as some commandment that came down from on high. I see it as a practical reality of the philosopher no longer being as useful as they once were to the physicists asking questions on the scientific frontier.
That's my view of this. If that's flawed, let me know, but that's how I see it. So I see it as, since the 40s or so, trying to wrap one's head around with what's going on in quantum mechanics was so difficult. You can't wrap your head around it. So we just do it. That's my point. That's my whole point. The world is that way. So we can say, let's try to deep, is it a multi-worlds? Is it a thing? Is, go ahead. But I'm still making experiments and I'm still deducing the nature of the world.
From those experiments and those questions a philosopher might ask, I'm just saying, have not been as useful. By the way, the physicists themselves can think philosophically and we all do all the time. I mean, we embrace as deep a thought as we can muster. So I'm not, I'm not making light of what it is to think philosophically about the world, but to go to school, to be trained as a philosopher and then knock on the physicist's door. I haven't seen one contribute in the last century. I would go back to the 1920s, not even the 1940s.
Okay sure, Tyson is an empiricist and Jaimungal isn’t, so naturally Jaimungal argued his point by pointing to some examples of ideas that could have an impact on the science that are not empirical [17:44].
Jaimungal: Okay. Firstly, there's Norton's dome, which is a philosophical experiment.
Tyson: What is that? What is that? What is that dome?Jaimungal: It shows that indeterminism is there even in classical mechanics.
Tyson: Okay.
Jaimungal: So that's a philosophical, sorry, a thought experiment.That is extremely interesting. And also-
Tyson: In what way did it affect the progress of physics? Did it? And when did it come out?
Jaimungal: It's from 2003.
Tyson: Oh, so recent.
Jaimungal: Yeah.Tyson: That's a recent thing. So did that get folded into some new science experiment and understanding? I mean, I'm just saying, go ahead. I don't want to stop y'all from thinking that way, but I have planets to discover. I have moons to measure. I have ice geysers on, you know, there's stuff out there that I care about and I want to know about. And it makes headlines and the black holes colliding. All right. These are things that... So by the way, in high school, …
So Tyson makes a bold claim how over the last 100 years physics is driven exclusively by empiricist measuring ice-caps and what not. And no philosophy has any implication on what he considers real world science. Jaimungal pushes back with an example, Tyson doesn’t know about it and immediately brushes it off as inconsequential. Oh wait, he does ask the relevance but was too busy watching black holes collide and reminiscing about high school to wait for an answer.
Jaimungal isn’t trying to set a trap for Tyson. He’s genuine about his interest and wants to have an earnest discussion. He’s just addressing the claim Tyson made that philosophy has not made any contribution to science in the last 100 years.
Tyson does end up asking about Norton’s Dome after a few tangents [23:21].
Tyson: Um, but I, Norton's Dome, I hadn't heard of this. Can you tell me more about it?
Jaimungal: Sure. So there's a way that you can set up a system such that a ball can roll to the top, and then just stay there. Okay, so it's an extremely fragile system, but it can roll from any direction and just stay there. And there's a way you can set up the initial conditions and the differential equation such that if you roll it backward, so you run the time backward, if it's at the top, it will go in some direction, but which direction it goes is undetermined. So there's one way of getting around it where you say, okay, we have to have some Lipschitz continuity.
Tyson: But what are you talking about in classical physics? Why is it undetermined? What, isn't it just, just a very high number? I mean, what?
Jaimungal: There's something called a Lipschitz continuity condition, which forbids certain equations, but then it turns out that if you assume Lipschitz condition, it's akin to saying there is no indeterminacy to begin with. So you prove there is no indeterminacy by imposing that there is no indeterminacy. But if you remove that, you get configurations like Norton's Dome.
It goes on a little bit where Jaimungal explains the concept and its implication on physics. When Tyson feels like he has enough information on this complex idea that he just learned about, he brushes it off [26:22]:
Tyson: Okay. What does that change? I don't get it. It's fine. It's great. Great result. Okay.
At this point, Tyson is basically a caricature of an empiricist. I don’t know anything about physics, but I know something about computer science. Imagine interviewing a developer:
Me: [something about the set theory]
Candidate: What’s that?
Me: [briefly explain set theory and its implications on computer science]
Candidate: Okay. What does that change? I don’t get it. It’s fine. It’s great. Great result. Okay.
This would be an immediate disqualification of any candidate. I don’t expect them to know something, but to brush it off as inconsequential after just learning about it shows an arrogance and lack of curiosity that would be infuriating to work with.
He goes on [27:08]:
Tyson: What does it need to be? If what we're doing still works, it needs to be to you, the philosopher, but to me, the practicing scientist, that's building circuit boards based on a complete understanding of how quantum physics works. I don't need to know that. That doesn't mean I don't want to know it, but the search for that answer, if it distracts me from other progress, I will make in this physical universe. And I'm a practicing scientist. That's how I'm going to choose my paths in that way. So yeah, quantum physics, who was it that said the day you understand quantum physics is the day you can be certain you don't because it's not their variations on our native senses to, to interpret. And so that's one view. You can just take the view that, Hey, whatever is useful, let me just build something with it. And that's how I think of physics. That's how I think of physics. Physics is matter, emotion, and energy. And, and every way that allows me to predict the future of those systems so that I can exploit it to the benefit of civilization and, and intellectual pursuit.
This is the junior developer equivalent of “but the code works right?” Sure, code that works is important. You shouldn’t ship code that doesn’t do what it’s intended to do. But is that really where you stop?
The interview goes on like that for a while. Tyson moves the goal posts several times and gaslights Jaimungal by stating he really only objected to philosophy majors [35:04]:
Tyson: Most of the philosophers of physics are trained in physics! This is my whole point. This is my entire point here. Okay. You mischaracterized it by thinking that I met, I said, I thought I spent at least 90 seconds saying that, um, we, we love thinking philosophically about things in our field, but training yourself to get a PhD in philosophy.
Jaimungal does a good job arguing his case. One argument I found particularly compelling [40:05]:
Jaimungal: Then you realize, okay, anytime anything's been solved by philosophy,
it then moves into another field. And so all that remains are the hard problems in philosophy. And it looks like philosophy hasn't solved anything, but we don't realize that, oh, okay, it started it in this direction and then they just let it go. And it's no longer a part of philosophy.
Again, I don’t know much about physics but in computer science I know that ideas are important and drive development. According to someone like Tyson, computer scientists should just focus on figuring out how we can get people to smash keys faster.
You can tell Tyson was not prepared for this conversation and defensively defaults to his shtick of “fun science facts” (he mentioned black holes no less than 4 times).
The conversation later goes into mounting evidence of UFOs through eyewitnesses and FOIA requests which (surprise) Tyson outright dismisses.
The whole conversation really turned me off to Tyson. His interviews are normally just a set of fun fact sound-bites or un-intuitive trivia about the cosmos. I assumed that there was more to him, but there’s really not. He displayed such a sense of arrogance and dismissiveness that I found it hard to get through the interview.
People really need a better crop of popular media friendly scientists than the likes of Tyson and Bill Nye. Thankfully we still have Scott Aaronson.