by Bill Nye
My journey as a comic is far from complete. High on my wish list is hosting Saturday Night Live, where Steve Martin worked up some of his greatest bits. I especially loved “Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber,” in which Mr. Martin’s character would start by recommending antiscience remedies like bloodletting for his patients. Then he would pause and launch into a what-if vision of enlightenment, one that would sweep away all his brutal practices and replace them with a description of our modern scientific method. He’d reach a crescendo of excitement—and then dismiss it all with a derisive “Nahhhhh.” Theodoric expressed the two sides of what is inside all of us: an impulse toward greatness with a heavy yoke of laziness and self-doubt. In seeing the absurdity of this character, it is impossible not to wonder what we all might achieve if we made a radical embrace of reason. It makes us laugh at our reasons for holding back.
Comedy and engineering were my path, but in many ways, my story can be your story, too. I hope you enjoy punning and playing with new words. Try to see the world from other people’s perspectives. Find the comforting humor in your setbacks. Think about how a joke can bring a group of disparate people together. In short, be a comedy nerd. Using comedy to break away from old preconceptions opens you up to innumerable insights you would miss otherwise. It is exactly what you need to improve your design skills, whether the thing you are designing is a 747 control surface, a job application, a watercolor painting, or a great sight gag. It opens you up to connections and collaborations with people you might otherwise overlook. It’s a gateway to expertise. Oh, and it can make life a lot more fun.
Once you break through and laugh, you are liberated. You also tend to become well liked (or well-enough liked) by those around you. Leastways, that’s what I’ve heard. Very nerdy can be very funny. What’s not to love?
CHAPTER 14
Not Faking It
What is the primary industry of Hollywood? Blockbuster action movies? Fashion and glamour? Celebrity gossip? I maintain that the real industry there is storytelling. Everything else, including the enormous flow of money, begins with a well-told story. That makes Hollywood a fascinating and instructive paradox. Almost all those stories are fictional (even the “based on a true story” stories often involve a great deal of imagination), and yet they also have to be rigorously honest. Engaging and holding a viewer’s attention is no simple task. If a story does not feel urgently, compellingly, rivetingly true, the audience goes away.
In case you opened straight to this page, in 1990, 2 years before launching The Science Guy, I took my plunge into that great paradox. I was working 26 weeks a year on the Almost Live! comedy show while still freelancing as a mechanical engineer. I wasn’t sure what was next for me, but I was open to new adventures. Those are exactly the times when adventure happens. Steve Wilson, the director of Almost Live!, had a friend named John Ludin, who was a producer in LA. John, along with the writer Bob Gale, was creating a Back to the Future Saturday-morning cartoon show for CBS based on the movie trilogy that had just concluded. The concept was that every episode would have an educational component. The characters would get into a predicament, and then they’d have to resolve their troubles with, you guessed it: science. Having seen my bits on Almost Live! (and liking them—go figure), John asked me to be the on-camera guy for short, live-action educational videos that would run in the middle of the animated main show. Fact and fiction, side by side.
Now I should tell you, for me, there’s hardly a better, more fun science fiction movie series than Back to the Future. (Hear me out, Trek and Star Wars fans.) First of all, the three interlocking stories all involve time travel and far-out technology, and who doesn’t love all that? Second, the heroes of the series are creative thinkers—cunning everykid Marty McFly and his time guide, the wild-eyed inventor Doc Brown—while the villains are the kind of people who care only about money and power. Third, Back to the Future presumes an optimistic world of the future, with ever-improving science and enough human ingenuity to figure out how to harness science for good rather than for evil. When John contacted me, I said yes in a heartbeat.
Suddenly I had a regular gig on national television as the presenter in what was called the “Video Encyclopedia” in the Back to the Future cartoon. It was a fine idea. The producers hired Christopher Lloyd, the actor who originated the role of Doc Brown in the movies. He has a marvelous, absentminded-professor manner and voice. With Marty and his team stuck somewhere in time, Doc Brown would suggest we look this or that up in the Video Encyclopedia. Then the show would cut to a very noncartoon Bill Nye in a white lab coat, gray shirt, and signature bow tie. Without speaking, I’d demonstrate how to make batteries out of lemons or why a curveball curves. In those days, camera operators would shake their heads at pure-white clothing, believing that it was too bright and overwhelmed the video fidelity in any scene. So I, as the Science Guy, wear a light-blue lab coat (always have). When producers and costumers hear “lab coat,” they typically go for a white one, unaware that there’s a whole light-blue world out there. I shake my head.
In those Back to the Future vignettes, generally no more than 2 minutes long, I came up with the demonstrations, so I had the chance to control things. I thought, “This is cool. I can be an educator on TV.” One of the most important things in science is nerd honesty. If you fudge your research data, that is not merely an act of fraud. Falsified data disrupts the entire process of testing hypotheses and finding better answers to questions about how things work—whether those things are distant stars, brain tumors, or the hydraulic linkages on a 737 airplane. You put a lot at risk by letting results that are even a little bit wrong move forward by accident, and you should never ever deliberately let bad data be treated as fact. So I automatically assumed that my science education Video Encyclopedias would be honest, too.
In one of the early animated adventures, our heroes had an encounter with shocking high-voltage static electricity. As the on-camera demonstrator, I approached this scene like a standard science educator. I hung a balloon on a string from a small laboratory stand, just a vertical metal rod and a clamp to let the string-slung balloon swing freely in response to a positive or negative electric charge. This is a classic demonstration. The idea is to rub a second balloon on your hair, in this case my hair, and build up a static charge; then I would bring the charged-up balloon near the hanging balloon. When this experiment is done normally, the balloons carry enough electromagnetic charge to repel each other at first but then attract each other after the hanging one spins halfway around. The big finish is to pull one balloon with another one. The generally negatively charged balloon in your hand attracts the complementarily positively charged one. An observer (like the viewer at home) can easily see the movement. Whether I am in a classroom or the Irving Plaza theater, I then explain what was and wasn’t happening in some hilarious way.
We were all set on the set, about to shoot the compelling and amazing, albeit pretty small, movement of the balloon due to static electricity. But before the shoot began, the director decided that he wanted to reposition one of the shades on one of the lights to highlight the effect. Meanwhile, I stood there and waited with charged-up balloon in hand and standard hair stylists’ “product” in hair. When the director finally called, “Action,” not much happened. I moved the balloon in my hand toward the one hanging by the string, but there was hardly any interaction. The problem was that we had waited too long. While the camera was close up on the balloons, the director hadn’t wanted me to move at all, leaving me and my balloon hanging. Air, especially moist air, is slightly conductive, so static charges typically dissipate after a few minutes. By the time the director was done making the endless lighting adjustments that unchecked gaffers will engage in, the balloon in my hand had lost most of its charge to the surrounding air.
Now, I’ll admit that in this demo the balloon often doesn’t get pulled very far, but there’s always some swinging and spinning—and it’s real. For whatever reason, though, the assistant
director was in some kinda don’t-pay-attention-to-anything-else-we-gotta-move hurry. He immediately called for “the glue.” A stagehand showed up and sprayed adhesive from a can onto the hanging balloon. After that, as you might imagine, the balloons stuck together like crazy. Under pressure to perform, and being the lowest link in this chain of command, I went ahead and smooshed one balloon into the other to get them to stick together, with the glue doing all the work. But it wasn’t real. They were not sticking to each other because of the electrical attraction from static charge, which was the whole point of my demonstration. Instead, I was basically miming what the experiment should have looked like if done correctly. It was a small thing, but I still regret letting it happen. To this day, if I watch that bit, I just shake my head. It does not look right, not at all. What in the world were we doing there if not to capture the science, the real action, and show the viewer what we were describing?
You might say, as most of the people on the set that day said, “Bill, get over it. It’s a small thing.” My, oh my, I did and I still do worry about it. Science depends on honesty, but what I had presented was basically a lie. Even a little lie is still a lie. I turned that negative experience into a positive, you might say. I vowed then and there that if I ever got a show of my own, we would show only real science. To this day, I use this story to remind the people I work with now that the science has to come first. Fortunately, I did get a shot at (re)running an experiment with static electricity. It’s in Bill Nye the Science Guy episode number 25.
By showing only real science on the kids’ show, we established a trust between us and our audience. Like magic, much of our video entertainment these days features tricks, which are almost fibs. People fly on electronically erased ropes. People run at “vampire speed” on winch-driven plastic belts through the woods. Films and television exaggerate so much that viewers pretty much assume they’re seeing an exaggerated view, which creates an expectation of deceit. I think that cynical expectation has contributed to the widespread cultural attitude right now that almost every perception or experience is subjective. But that ain’t how it is, in science especially. Dedication to reality—to showing the amazing things around us in the real world—is my way of fighting back. It’s my little statement that there are such things as inviolable truth and facts and that objective reality is well worth pursuing because it’s exciting, enduring, and essential for creating a healthy and safe world.
On The Science Guy show, keeping it real sometimes took extra effort. That static-electricity demonstration wore me out; it was surprising how tired I was at the end of the day, if you get my drift. For the show, I was exposing myself to a Van de Graaff generator: a rubber-belted, static-electricity machine named for one of the guys who helped develop the atomic bomb. You may have seen one at a science museum, where a demonstrator asks for a volunteer with long hair to put her (or his) hand on the device. With the volunteer standing on an insulated platform, her hair will stand dramatically on end, each fiber repelling the adjacent ones. That’s exactly the effect I wanted to demonstrate, so I donned a long wig—the “Rocker Wig of Science,” I called it—with the intention of making my hairs stand on end in crazy-man fashion. I am confident that everyone reading along here has at some point in life received a static-electricity shock. You may have reached for a doorknob on a dry winter day. You may have put on an especially sparky sweater. You even may have gotten a pretty good shock from the hot wire of an electric fence for a garden or horse pasture. I’m sorry for any discomfort I may have dragged up by reminding you of the occasion. In any case, it’s one thing to get a shock. It’s quite another thing to get hundreds of shocks during the course of a long day of video recording, take after take.
But after all the work and discomfort, we got the experiment exactly right. We showed the balloons attracting each other. We showed how a lightning rod works. We did not fake any part of it. Was setting up every static-electricity shot for real more trouble than spraying glue on things? In the pragmatic sense, yes. In the meaningful, authentic sense, no, absolutely not. I strongly believe this gave the show an authenticity that viewers admire and appreciate. Certainly it was and continues to be very much appreciated by my beloved colleagues in science education.
In analogous ways, we all have to define our place of authenticity and always be prepared to defend it. You will meet people who want things to happen quickly and are willing to cut corners to do it. Just as many people try to race through the bottom part of the inverted pyramid of design, they often settle for compromise in the overall honesty and truthfulness of the project or product. And by “they,” I include myself. You, too, I’d bet.
When it happens, I urge you to embrace the honesty and integrity of the nerd culture. In the short term, faking can often be faster and seem simpler, but it is never better. You may run into problems halfway through and have to start your project all over again. Worse, you may get all the way to the end and find that you have produced a Ford Pinto—something far more serious and dangerous than a dishonest demonstration of static electricity, but born from the same desire to get results fast and keep things moving forward. Either way, you are shortchanging yourself in the process. The authentic approach forces you to understand your thing or idea fully and to explore the optimal solutions to any problems you encounter. It encourages innovation, and it helps you become aware of any fakery that might be around you.
Note that authenticity is integral to the way science works, at least when it is working right. The great power of the scientific method is that it demands evidence to back up an idea. You can think of it as the nerd code of conduct. Scientific frauds might sneak by for a while, but in the long run, the truth always wins out. Probably the most famous hoax in history was the 1912 “discovery” of Piltdown Man, an alleged bridge species between humans and apes. For a period, it was an accepted species, although many scholars were dubious from the start, and years of sleuthing conclusively proved that the remains were a fraud. A more recent and pernicious example of fraud came from Andrew Wakefield, the British medical researcher who published a paper claiming a link between vaccines and autism. Other scientists became suspicious when they couldn’t reproduce his results; later investigations revealed that Wakefield had altered his data. His paper was retracted and he was barred from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom, but his false claims continue to bolster anti-vaccine suspicions. The more you embrace authenticity, the easier you will find it to sniff out the frauds, whether they are frivolous or potentially fatal.
The benefits of rigorous nerd honesty are hardly unique to science. Think about your friends who are open and direct with you. Aren’t they the ones you feel closest to? Think about the people on your crew or in your office who have instant credibility when they speak. Aren’t they the ones you want to work with, and isn’t that because you trust them to do the right thing? Following the nerd code of conduct makes life easier and more pleasant all around. Not that nerds are immune to mendacity and duplicity (if only it were so), but authenticity land is hostile territory for those kinds of things. I do my best to stay in the zone, and I find it a daily source of relief. As a design principle, it is so simple: Don’t say or show things if you know they aren’t real! I’ll admit to exaggerating sometimes, especially if I really want my exaggerations to be true. But I do my best to keep myself grounded in reality, and I remind myself often that what’s most amazing is when you can work within the constraints of reality to achieve amazing results.
While we were shooting season 1 of Bill Nye the Science Guy for the Disney Channel, we fell a few days behind in getting an episode shipped to the Disney technicians in Burbank, California. The company dispatched two well-suited executives to visit our studio in Seattle and find out why. They walked onto our set, which was in a warehouse near the waterfront, and immediately thought they saw the problem. They said, with barely veiled condescension, “Why did you guys ‘run brick’ all the way up there?”
It took me
a beat or two to comprehend their concern. These big-time TV people were used to Hollywood soundstage sets that could be rapidly disassembled and reused. They were looking at the Nye Labs set, which was two-plus stories high, and couldn’t understand why we’d wasted so much time and money building an oversize fake brick wall. I eventually managed to explain to them that we hadn’t “run brick” on a knockdown set; we were shooting in an actual building made of actual bricks. Well, my Disney execs were a little embarrassed, but I didn’t blame them for their mistake; we got along well enough once I cleared up the confusion. They were so used to the artifice of those fake sets, so accustomed to a particular way of doing things that included fake brick and spray glue, that they weren’t able to recognize a real brick wall when one was in front of them. Really, almost any one of us could make a mistake like that. We live surrounded by little glowing screens displaying flashy, escapist entertainment. Even sensible people start to think they understand combat because they’ve watched movies about World War II, or they embrace dubious stories about an inventor who created a warp drive because something similar happened on TV. Fakery can blind us to the world right in front of us, leaving us unable to see the brick wall—until we smack right into it.
