HopDavid

He's really, really bad at history. His most famous history flub was his Bush and Star Names story: Link. In Neil's account of Bush's 9-11 speech he had Bush bragging that his God was the God that named the stars. He called the speech "an attempt to distinguish we from they". When Bush's actual 9-11 speech was titled "Islam Is Peace". It was a call for tolerance and inclusion delivered from the Islamic Center of Washington D.C. on September 17, 2001: Link. In this case Bush was exactly the opposite of the Arab bashing demagogue Tyson described. This fiction was a standard part of Tyson's routine from 2006 to 2014. In 2014 Sean Davis of The Federalist challenged Neil to provide the speech he described. Of course he could not. Neil eventually admitted that he had confused Bush's eulogy for the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts with his 9-11 speech. He reluctantly apologized to President Bush for mischaracterizing his quote. See The Washington Post piece: Link. ---- Another piece of wrong history is Neil's Newton timeline. Tyson has a friend asking Newton why do planets follow elliptical orbits. Newton replies "I don't know, I'll get back to you". Newton goes home, invents calculus to get the answer and comes back two weeks later to get the answer. And then turns 26. Link. It was in Principia that Newton explained elliptical orbits. And it was Edmund Halley's famous question that prompted Newton to write Principia. Halley asked the question in 1684 when Newton was in his 40s. Nearly everything Neil says about Newton is wrong! History Thony Christie takes a look at Tyson's timeline: Link. ---- There are many examples of Tyson getting history wrong. He also frequently flubs math, biology, medicine, even basic physics and astronomy. If there's an interest I can list more examples. .