Everything All at Once: How to unleash your inner nerd, tap into radical curiosity, and solve any problem

by Bill Nye

  So in Science Guy land, we kept merrily going the opposite way, fixating on every scientific and engineering aspect of the show. One day, we were doing the episode about digestion. (It’s number 7 if you’re following along with us at home.) To make the important point that we humans get our energy to grow and move from our food, we planned to use a miniature car that was to be powered, not with batteries or gasoline, but with a steam engine—a steam engine whose heat would be provided by the combusting of sugary breakfast cereal, specifically Frosted Flakes. The chemical energy released by burning the cereal is much the same as the chemical energy released when your body breaks it down. The big difference between a flame and your stomach is the temperature. Your body uses amazing enzymes capable of combining sugars with oxygen at the moderate temperatures of biology. In regular combustion, a chemical reaction releases heat energy much more quickly, which produces the fiery temperatures we all recognize in a candle flame, a rocket’s exhaust . . . or a steam engine.

  As we were preparing for the episode, the question was raised: What should a Frosted Flake–powered Digestion Car of Science look like? After just a moment of consultation, Bill Sleeth, the set designer, and I agreed that such a vehicle should look, and I’m quoting the both of us here, “Just like the real ones.” Generally speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a Frosted Flake –powered car. Nevertheless, we all immediately knew what we were describing: a machine that displayed its functional mechanisms openly and honestly. The viewer would see the technology we used, not some kind of whimsical cartoon version of a car that kept the working parts hidden. It would have been easier to build an electric, remote-controlled toy car carrying a dish of stand-in cereal, but then I would have been forced to tell the viewer something like, “This is a representation.” That’s not how we did it.

  Bill Sleeth and his guys ended up creating a hobby-size steam engine mounted on Erector Set parts. You could run your eyes across our Digestion Car and tell exactly where the combustion happened, where the heat from the burning flakes created steam, where the steam moved a piston, where the moving piston turned the wheels. It was a model of nerd honesty. Yes, we could have made it prettier and shinier, but then the car wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining. It was entertaining because it advertised its function and invited you, the viewer, to understand exactly what was going on. Bill’s team pulled it off perfectly. All the while, those same two Disney executives were shaking their heads at us country bumpkins and our silly ideas about trying to do it all as though we were really doing it. But we did, and it paid off. My sources assure me that The Science Guy show remains the primary income generator for the arm of Disney called Disney Educational Productions, and I maintain that the nerd honesty embodied in the Digestion Car is the essential reason for its success.

  Reflecting on the beautifully naked functionality of our little contraption has helped me tremendously in many different parts of my life. I hope that kind of authenticity will help you, too. Certainly it would have helped many of the engineering bosses and television producers I’ve worked with over the years, not to mention a lot of the politicians and would-be scientists I’ve encountered. That thought inspired me to write up a short guide to keeping it real.

  These may seem like sweeping lessons to take from a balloon, some bricks, and a cereal-eating car, but just imagine if more of us lived by those principles. It would mean not having to wonder whether a salesperson you’re working with has an ulterior motive, not worrying that a contractor is cutting corners just to finish your job faster, not having to question whether someone is telling you the truth or skewing toward some personal agenda. It would mean being honest with your audience, customer, engineer, whatever, and, above all, with yourself—not just some of the time but all of the time, even when cutting corners looks oh so tempting. It would mean thinking through each step of the process to the best of your ability, stretching and learning as you go. And then carrying out your plan with nerd stubbornness until you get exactly where you want to go, whether conventionally or cereal-poweredly.

  With that in mind, here’s my Nerd Code of Conduct:

  ■Be open and be honest.

  ■Don’t pretend you know what you don’t know (often a little too easy to do).

  ■Show the world as it is, rather than the way you wish it would be.

  ■Respect facts; don’t deny them just because you don’t like them.

  ■Move forward only after you trust your design.

  CHAPTER 15

  Resonating to the Nerd Beat

  For me, television has been a wonderfully effective way to break down barriers and to help spread the nerd worldview. That is why I abandoned my life as a full-time engineer. When I walked off the stage after performing as Bill Nye the Science Guy for the first time, on January 22, 1987, I was pretty sure I had made the right decision. I felt as though I had “killed it,” as we say in comedy. Aside from my tongue still being a little cold from chewing marshmallows frozen in liquid nitrogen, it seemed natural, even. Much as I loved getting laughs, though, I wanted to fold in more real information. My short Almost Live! bits were really short and more about laughs than ideas. I could sense the potential for a fun, educational television show hosted by none other than . . . me. So I decided to discuss my career with someone who knew a whole lot more about hosting science TV than I did: Carl Sagan.

  Because of good dumb luck, I had taken an astronomy class with Professor Sagan when I was an undergraduate at Cornell. This was 3 years before his famous Cosmos series aired, but he already had the passion that made him a compelling lecturer. By 1987, he also had the experience and knowledge of how to talk about science on TV. I figured, “Man, this guy is the expert of experts. I’ve got to talk to him about my idea for a career.” Why not? My 10th college reunion was coming up, and I was going to be in Ithaca, New York, anyway. I contacted his office, and I eventually managed to convince his secretary to schedule 10 minutes with Professor Sagan. I told him about some television segments I’d been working on called Bill’s Basement, and described my vision of the much greater things I wanted to do as the Science Guy. He listened thoughtfully. He said that he liked my concepts on the whole but advised me to avoid engineering demonstrations and to instead focus on pure science. His explanation was as succinct as it was memorable: “Kids resonate to pure science.”

  “Resonate.” That was the verb he used. “Resonate” is a wonderful word that appears in a great many different disciplines. Professor Sagan had talked about resonance from time to time in class when he was describing the coupling of a planet’s orbit with its spin. The Moon spins exactly once during each orbit around our Earth. The motions of the two bodies are locked together in synchronous resonance. When you ride a swing or give a kid a push on a swing, you do so in synchrony with the swing’s motion. You add energy at its resonant frequency. Resonance is what happens when objects vibrate at their natural rhythms, so that they respond strongly to small impulses. It is also how we make music. When you pluck a guitar string, blow into a flute, or crash a stick on a cymbal, you are putting energy into the musical system—the string, air, or metal—at just the right rate to activate the material’s natural tendency to vibrate. You can produce a lot of sound with a small amount of breath or motion. You pluck the beauty of resonance right into thin air. But here he was, Professor Sagan, talking to grown-up young me about resonance in yet another, quite different context.

  I heard a powerful metaphor in there. Educators embrace the idea that a single lesson delivered in just the right way will resonate with kids, producing a lifelong change in them and the way they think. It is the dream of every teacher and every parent. It is something that television might be able to do, too, I thought. It seemed reasonable, since I had experienced it myself. In high school my buddy Ken Severin and I had watched Frames of Reference, a film about inertia and motion, presented with spot-on wit by Drs. Hume and Ivey, over and over again in the physics lab after school. Incidentally, I’v
e long since let go of the dream of doing anything as good as Frames of Reference. Nevertheless, I carry on. I aim for resonance in all my talks, and I aim for it in this book, too.

  By itself, a film, show, book, or rally is just a small, good thing. But if a TV show is done well and really connects with its audience, I realized (and hoped), its influence can grow to be enormous. In technical terms, I might say that the amplitude of the resonance can become far greater than the amplitude of the forcing function. In regular terms: Small science lessons—delivered with enough humor, energy, and empathy—can do more than change minds. They can potentially change the world. So after a pep talk from Carl Sagan, that is pretty much what I set out to do.

  I thought a lot about how to capture the essence of nerd thinking and the scientific method. I poured all those ideas into the television show Bill Nye the Science Guy on the Disney Channel. The show won 18 Emmys and is still shown in schools, so I guess things worked out okay. Professor Sagan’s insights opened my mind, my show opened a lot of other minds, and today the process is still going and going. I like to think kids still resonate to the science the crew and I showed them. I hope that my fans, in turn, are doing a lot of resonating of their own.

  Carl Sagan’s whole career is a fascinating case study in nerd resonance. He is probably most famous for his 1980 television series Cosmos, which vibrated off his popular science writing and television appearances of the 1970s, which built on his planetary research of the 1960s, which began with his scientific passions as a student at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. The 1960s were the height of the Cold War, when it seemed as though the world’s nuclear powers were about to start a nuclear war in response to a random provocation, or even by accident. Yet not long after Nikita Khrushchev was warning the United States, “We will bury you,” Sagan was working hard to engage Russian and Soviet bloc colleagues in scientific collaboration. While much of the public’s focus was on missiles and warheads, he was directing our attention to the worlds of the solar system. The United States landed the twin Viking spacecraft on Mars. The Soviets landed the Venera spacecraft on Venus. Planetary scientists on those missions shared visions that transcended national boundaries. Sagan especially was vibrating with everything all at once, connecting seemingly disparate ideas across the disciplines of science.

  One of the hottest topics in planetary science in the ’50s and ’60s was the study of craters. Researchers had only recently converged on the idea that most, if not all, craters on the Moon were caused by asteroid impacts, not by volcanoes. When you look at the Moon, you see that it is pockmarked everywhere, so you infer that an enormous number of impacts happened in the primordial solar system. But if that’s true, where were the impacts on Earth? When you look at our own planet, you don’t see many craters at all. But then scientists realized that we weren’t seeing the full picture. Earth’s surface has a lot more going on than the lunar surface does. Earth has an atmosphere. We’ve got rain and snow and wind, and with those come erosion and weathering. Most importantly, the surface is continually being reshaped on a global scale. Geophysicists at the time were just starting to figure out that Earth’s crust is comprised of enormous slabs that came to be called tectonic plates. Their motions are driven by slow, powerful forces deep inside the planet.

  Plates move exceedingly slowly, at about the rate your fingernails grow, but given enough time, the movement of Earth’s crust does an excellent job of erasing craters. Tectonic plates grind against each other. They slide under and over each other. They trigger volcanoes and drive up mountain ranges. Even if these things don’t make craters vanish entirely, millions of years of weathering render them nearly impossible to recognize. The Moon and Mars don’t have plate tectonics, and Mars has only a wisp of an atmosphere, so once an impactor impacts, the scar lasts a long, long time. Here on Earth, craters fade away.

  Carl Sagan and his contemporaries, including early crater experts Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, got to thinking about how many impacts there must have been on Earth over its 4.5-billion-year age. The Moon offered some clues. In 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 space probe flew by Mars and showed a shocking number of craters there, too. Earth is a bigger target and has more gravity, so it probably has been hit more often than Mars and far more than the Moon. Sagan, the Shoemakers, and others wondered about the effect of a major asteroid impact here. It would kick up colossal clouds of dust. The enormous amount of heat unleashed by the energy of the primary impact and by all the secondary material it ejected would trigger a worldwide firestorm. All that smoke and dust would block out sunshine and cool the planet for many, many years afterward. It would be a climate catastrophe.

  In 1977, when I took Professor Sagan’s astronomy course at Cornell, he talked to us students about a new line of research he was pursuing. Asteroid impacts are not the only thing that could catastrophically alter the Earth’s surface, he noted. The detonation of nuclear weapons would also cause huge environmental disruption. In collaboration with atmospheric scientist James Pollack, Sagan had worked up a computer model predicting what would happen to Earth’s climate in the event of a full-scale nuclear war. The result of Sagan and Pollack’s simulation looked eerily familiar: fires, enormous clouds of debris and dust, and then a long cold spell. The consequences were not unlike those of an asteroid impact, but a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed a lot more likely.

  Sagan and Pollack called the phenomenon they discovered “nuclear winter.” Sagan described it in detail for us in class. He wanted to convey to us the power and significance of computer models and how different scientific ideas can connect. I believe he also wanted to impress on us the importance of a scientist’s responsibility. If we wanted to avert nuclear war and nuclear winter, we had to do something about it. Both parts of his message reverberated and made a deep, lasting impression on me.

  There was another, quite different, er, fallout (sorry) from all that study of nuclear winter and asteroid impacts. In the late 1970s, the father-and-son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez—physicist and geologist, respectively—were looking for chemical clues about how quickly the ancient dinosaurs died off at the end of the Cretaceous period. Along the way, they discovered an intriguing geological layer enriched in the element iridium. It shows up in rock layers of a particular age, all around the Earth. That was odd because you wouldn’t expect to find iridium anywhere near the surface. It is a very dense metal, twice as dense as lead. When Earth was young and molten, geophysicists presumed, almost all the iridium must have sunk toward the planet’s core, far below the crust. But studies of meteorites had revealed they often do contain quite a bit of iridium. Meteorites are generally too small to have stayed molten long, and they generally didn’t have enough gravity to sort material by density the way Earth did. The Alvarezes reasoned that their layer of iridium couldn’t have come from Earth’s insides, so it must have been deposited here from the outside . . . by an asteroid.

  Here comes the really exciting part: The iridium layer shows up in rocks that are 65 million years old, from exactly the time when the ancient dinosaurs went extinct. It is strong circumstantial evidence that an asteroid impact triggered a mass extinction and wiped those creatures out. The discovery answered a long-standing question about what happened to the ancient dinosaurs. I found that answer very satisfying, particularly in the face of other leading theories of the time. When I was in 2nd grade, my teacher, Mrs. McGonagle, read to us from a big book claiming that the ancient dinosaurs died out because some mammals took all their food. Even Mrs. M recognized that explanation was pretty lame. A Tyrannosaurus getting her or his lunch money stolen by a sort of proto-rabbit? Seemed more likely to me that T. rex would squash the bunny the way an elephant might smite an ant. Starting from the evidence of that iridium layer, we now have a vastly better explanation for what happened lo those many years in the past.

  The Alvarezes realized that an impact big enough to blanket the whole Earth with that much iridium would have l
eft a gigantically huge crater—so big that some trace of it should still be visible today, despite the dynamic Earth’s great obscuring powers. If they could find that crater, they knew, it would greatly strengthen their theory of what happened to the dinosaurs. Walter Alvarez had started out as a geologist in the oil industry. Petroleum geologists routinely use magnetometers (which are like a sensitive compass) to map buried geologic structures. Some chemist colleagues published data that revealed traces of iridium in a huge crater, which is mostly submerged and buried in sediment. All the evidence links the long-ago extinction to that 180-kilometer-wide crater, called Chicxulub, which lies along the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in eastern Mexico.

  So the story went like this: Studies of the Moon and Mars showed that asteroid impacts must have had a major influence on our planet. Building on that idea, Carl Sagan started talking about nuclear winter in a “listen, people, we have gotta get our act together” kind of way. Luis and Walter Alvarez really made his point by showing that an extreme version of nuclear winter, caused by a huge asteroid impact, seemed to have devastated the planet and wiped out the ancient dinosaurs. Plate tectonics had erased most of the evidence, but a layer of iridium proved that it happened anyway. And a big hole in the ground near Mexico was revealed to be the scene of the whole event. That’s a pretty compelling story of scientific resonances.