Dinner with Neil

I once had dinner with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Not alone, of course. I'm not that well-connected or important. But I was one of a few astronomy and physics grad students who were lucky enough to be treated to a delicious dinner (Cornish game hen, if I recall) at the Cornell Hotel School. It was a relatively small setting, and, as I was still reasonably brash, I couldn't resist busting his balls a bit about Pluto. (Tyson, as director of the Hayden Planetarium, had recently and conspicuously demoted Pluto in the Hayden's planetary exhibit.) He responded with good humor, and, I believe, some semi-serious discussion about the reasons for it. (I might discuss this in a separate post, if there's interest, including some speculation as to the timing of the IAU decision -- after New Horizons had been launched.)

During his public talk, after the reception, he did make a great joke about Pluto -- "The real reason it got demoted? It was too small for New York! Ha ha!" He has an infectious laugh.

If memory serves, that same talk, he ventured into what then, and probably now, is controversial territory -- that scientific advances stop when an investigator self-limits, often by invoking God.

But what I remember most of all is running into Tyson and Jim Bell (our grad department chair and one of the lead researchers on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission) at the hotel bar afterwards. They were watching a baseball game.

It was interesting seeing Neil deGrasse Tyson "off". He is a presence, and a performer, and an educator. But like many, he has a stage personality and a normal personality. It wasn't a dramatic difference, but he was less jovial, and probably tired after a long day. I don't know if I was with another student, but we joined them and talked for a bit. He discussed some serious things -- about academia, about his wife and her experiences in it, careers in astronomy, etc. I think I must've confessed my unhappiness at some point.

Anyway, at some point, I think we, the grad students, realized we were intruding on their private time. They weren't, at the moment, lofty role models. They were just a couple guys drinking beer and watching a ball game.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is hated by some astronomers. Leading up to his arrival, a couple emails went around by some lower-ranking staff scientists and researchers (not professors), complaining that he wasn't a real astronomer and that he had done a crappy PhD thesis. At that point, I knew enough about the people on the email list to suspect something less than clear-eyed objective analysis in their judgment.

I encountered similar sentiments in a dinner at UCLA with a couple astronomy professors. I had become a lay person by then, but through a sequences of events, I ended up joining them. There was discussion that he hadn't, in fact, done a stellar job on his thesis, which I think had to do with galaxies -- possibly radio or UV observations. I forgot whether or not I weighed in, but given that I was a guest, and no longer an astronomer, I probably was less brash and more passive this time around.

I haven't seen Cosmos yet. I hope to get around to it. But, unlike many people I know, I never saw it growing up. I hadn't read a single Carl Sagan book before I attended Cornell, and didn't even know he had been a professor at Cornell until I showed up as a grad student. So I don't have a lot of emotional attachment to it.

Interestingly, one did get the impression that Carl Sagan himself was not particularly popular in Cornell's Astronomy department. There was a plaque and a photo. But he wasn't referred to often. No doubt some of the professors had worked in the shadow of his popular image, and that it probably was good for the department to not be anchored to the past. Still, it seemed odd, given the amount of effort made to do outreach, how little it was discussed. At this point, his absence was not deafening, but it was a discernable murmur.

(I once talked with an impressive Cornell grad alum who was active in both science policy and astro research, and one of Sagan's students. He said he had come back only once to the department, for Carl's funeral. I think his words were, "there's nothing left for me here." Perhaps an over-harsh indictment, especially given some of the amazing humans there. But that gives you a sense of the degree of alienation some of Sagan's students felt toward the rest of the department.)

There are people who decide and rank scientific research. It's generally done by peers, and is seen to be a decent system for sorting great ideas from good, and good ideas from terrible ones. It doesn't always work, and the pressures inherent may lead to a host of sins, cardinal and venal. But it's good enough, I suppose, for it to keep going. The process by which Pluto was downgraded was generally accepted within the astronomical community, even if it did arouse controversy within and outside of astronomy.

Yet it always irked me that some scientists -- generally not the best, mind you -- felt that this meant there was a clear measure of defining science in general, value in general, and value of people to science. I couldn't shake the notion that some of these critics of Tyson couldn't handle the idea that the value system they possessed, one ingrained into them since the beginning of their careers, one in which they were completely invested, one which, to varying degrees had rewarded them, might not be universally true. Maybe it takes a level of buy-in in order to make it far enough. But it seemed... myopic, and self-defeating.

How did Tyson's success take away from theirs? How was the popularization of astronomy damaging their work? It didn't make sense, but people do tend to react badly when you question their value system, even obliquely.

I left the faith a while ago, and so I don't have anything to say specifically on astronomy. What I do know is that, looking back, I remember the tired, quiet men at that hotel bar table.

And I realize now that I'm jealous of them -- not because they are successful, respected and reknown, each in his own way. I'm jealous because they can sit down and enjoy a ball game with a friend, and put aside all the other things associated with their jobs and lives. They valued their time, and their friends.

They valued baseball.

Once, one summer, Jim Bell gave me a ride to our Astro baseball team practice. (The team name: The Big Bangers.) I was incredibly depressed at that time, and all I could think of was how grateful I would've been for a dad like Jim to take me to baseball practice. But how could someone say that? So this someone never did, until this moment, though I think he noticed a few tears.

I failed to become a scientist, not because I didn't study enough, or try hard enough. I failed because at some point I separated science from being a person, and failed to build those relationships with other human beings that make a person whole. And part of that is putting aside everything else for time with people.

I'm going to see Cosmos. But I'm going to see it because it gives me a chance to spend time with my mom, and maybe, make up a bit of that lost time.