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Astronomer and author throws out the Hollywood science book and gets down to the facts

Friday, April 12, 2002

By Adrian McCoy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

An egg will stand on end during the vernal equinox.

	Philip Plait WHEN: Tomorrow at 3 and 5 p.m., and Sunday at noon and 2 p.m. WHERE: Carnegie Science Center.

Water rotates one way as it drains in sinks in the northern hemisphere and the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere. This is caused by Earth's rotation.

Meteorites cause small fires.

Wrong, wrong, all wrong. People get some pretty crazy ideas about science, and astronomy in particular.

Philip Plait is an astronomer at Sonoma State University and author of "Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax.' " The book is a lighthearted collection of cosmic urban myths which he cheerfully debunks. He'll be at Carnegie Science Center tomorrow and Sunday as part of the Astronomy Weekend activities.

The book came out of a Web site Plait started in grad school. He began noticing the numerous scientific errors that were being reported as fact in the media. The Web site (www.badastronomy.com) is a collection of Plait's efforts to set the record straight. It features movie reviews, where Plait challenges the bad science behind movies like "Armageddon" and "Tomb Raider."

Hollywood and the special effects whizzes are partly to blame for many of our misconceptions, Plait says. "A lot of people saw [the comet] Hale-Bopp. But you wonder, did they really remember what it looks like, or did they remember the comet from 'Deep Impact' better? The images in that movie are more likely to be remembered than something you may have seen one cold night looking through a telescope. These movies tend to worm their way into our brain. If there are misconceptions in the movie, they just reinforce what's already there."

Plait will give two talks this weekend. The first will dispense with the vernal equinox egg myth and move on to the seasons, comets, asteroids and meteors -- complete with clips from "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon."

"I can't cover every single wrong thing in the 'Armageddon' clip because that would take three hours. And it's only a two-minute clip.

"That's the problem with debunking. It takes 10 times as long on average to debunk than it does to just say it wrong in the first place."

The second talk will be a "very thorough trashing of the people who think that NASA faked the Apollo moon landing," Plait says. "This conspiracy theory has been around for decades, but last year Fox broadcast a TV show, which really made it mainstream."

Using humor and wit to dispel these cloudy notions can be an effective way of teaching people the facts, Plait says. "There are two points -- one is to correct misconceptions that people have. The more general goal is to make them think more critically about what they hear."

Will there be a sequel to "Bad Astronomy"? "Unfortunately there's no end of material. I'd like nothing more than to be able to stop talking about this stuff, because that would mean everybody's got the right information. But it's one of those things that will never end."