While theatergoers bawled in their seats over the tragic ending of “Titanic,” Neil deGrasse Tyson fumed.
As Rose lay on her plank in the freezing ocean, with Jack treading water next to her, she looked up at a dark canopy of inaccuracy.
“We know the time, date, longitude and latitude of where and when it sank,” Tyson said from home in New York City. “We know there were no clouds and no moon, so when the ship sank and Rose is on the plank looking up there’s only one sky she should have seen and it was the wrong sky. And not only that, but the left half of the screen was a mirror reflection of the right half of the screen. That was a lazy sky.”
But why did the famous astrophysicist care so much? Because director James Cameron went to great pains to make sure everyone knew he’d gone down in a submersible to the ocean floor to visit the remains of the great ship. In doing so, he knew the rivets on the hull, the china patterns, the staterooms.
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“He had details nobody ever had before, and he captured them in this film,” Tyson said. “If you’re going to make an effort to make it precise and none of us can check it, at least get the sky right. He set the standard for me to pass judgment.”
Fifteen years later, Cameron recut the 1997 movie for a centennial edition to mark the 1912 sinking of the ship. Much to Tyson’s surprise and pleasure, the director, who knew of Tyson’s grievances with the original film, had a producer call the scientist and request help with the correct sky. That version of the film was the one that went to IMAX.
Tyson will talk about “Titanic” and other movies during one of his favorite traveling talks, “An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies,” Wednesday at Pikes Peak Center.
The evening’s presentation will feature clips from “Armageddon,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Thor,” “The Breakfast Club,” “The Expendables 2,” “Frozen,” “The Matrix” and others, while Tyson discusses which movies got the science right and which did not, and the role science can play in storytelling.
“There are scenes, moments, dialogue that touch on science whether you even knew it at the time,” he said. “I’m not talking about mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. I’m talking about the science that might have been omitted, which had they included it would have told a richer story.”
He cites the 2013 movie “Gravity,” starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as two astronauts in space.
“They did all the zero-G scenes well. A lot of attention was given,” Tyson said. “Except Sandra’s bangs always knew which way down was. They missed that one. They were doing so well up until that point.”
It’s been a long life of studying the wonders and intricacies of the universe. Tyson was only 9 when he first visited Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, but he was old enough to know how he’d spend his life.
“It was the universe in particular,” he said. “I was star struck. The lights dim, the stars come out, and the infinity of the universe was simultaneously scary and beautiful to me. I wanted to be on that frontier.”
It took him two years to figure out how to make a career out of that passion, but he also had an answer to the worn-out question adults always ask kids: “What are you going to be when you grow up? It was astrophysicist. They’d shut up. There’s no comeback to that. It was a pretty short conversation,” Tyson said.
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, he earned a bachelor’s in physics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia University. Among his many accomplishments are appointments by President George W. Bush to serve on commissions about the future of the aerospace industry, a number of books on astrophysics, including the 2017 New York Times bestseller, “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry,” and a role as host of several PBS NOVA series.
His latest books, “Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization” and “To Infinity and Beyond: A Journey of Cosmic Discovery,” the latter of which was co-written with Lindsey Nyx Walker, came out last year.
And he also remains true to his roots, as he leads the same planetarium where he fell in love with the universe. He’s also a research associate in the museum’s astrophysics department.
“If a day goes by where I don’t learn anything, I feel bad,” Tyson said. “There’s an old saying: If you wake up one day and you’re the smartest person in the room, change rooms. Every person knows something you don’t know. If I’m at a party, I will always want to know what the other person is into.”
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