A wonderful episode from one of my favorite shows as a kid:
What a fantastic piece of scientific advocacy, not to mention all the nuggets of skeptical goodness in there! It’s funny, it’s approachable, it offers practical ways to test pseudoscience yourself, and best of all it stresses the power of science and how it can help us discover the universe. James “The Amazing” Randi, of the very educational foundation with whom I am a research fellow, even shows up!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof…
Bill Nye’s show definitely put me on the track to becoming a scientist myself, and the healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking in the episode above is something that all children should receive. Though I’m sad I didn’t realize how jam-packed the episode was with modern skepticism at the time, I’m so grateful that shows like this were out there, advancing reason in the face of superstition.
Science-Based Life 
I love Nye! One of my favourite shows on TV growing up.
Now, just imagine you were alive before Gallileo claimed he could prove the Earth was round. What would you think? (Hopefully you’d be open-minded to scientific evidence, no matter which views the larger science community or political parties held at the time.)
Getting a little uncomfortable? Well, imagine now that Isaac Newton claims that according to his laws of physics, a building CANNOT collapse at the acceleration of gravity AND do work by crushing itself on the way down. What would you say? Is that science, or psuedo-science, according to Nye?
Now one step further, what if a government-hired scientific body of researchers would not release their computer simulation model data (even with FOIA requests) on how they tried to demonstrated that indeed a building could perform that feat? Is that science, or psuedo-science, according to Nye?
*Sigh*
Please stop comparing the 9/11 conspiracy theory to Galileo. His theories and predictions were backed up by hundreds of years of further study and evidence, as was Newton.
Again, physics does allow for the collapse that we saw in the WTC towers. Here’s a short section of a video that makes a similar point.
Don’t you ever get tired of shoehorning the 9/11 conspiracy into every discussion of science? But then again, dogmas are like that.
You know, watching this episode made me realize how much i took the entire show for granted. Would it be weird if I saw them again? just for fun?
Good episode. I forwarded it to my 10 yr old daughter to watch on her ipod. She says they show some of his episodes in school and she “loves that show”. I grew up with Mr. Wizards World on Nickelodeon in the 80’s.
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