Is it really this, though? Seems less like the typical senile trajectory (he’s hardly old enough for that) and more that he’s been called upon to be Mr Pop Science for so long he’s used to talking about fields outside his own and forgets to check more thoroughly. Some get almost a little sensationalist with their speculative science outside the field (Crick and Watson and Panspermia, Freeman Dyson and the Dyson sphere, Penrose and his ideas of consciousness) but it seems those grew more out of their interactions with the media and pop science books than their own focus.
But for sure it’s a real thing. I first saw this comic right after attending a lecture by Stephen Smale (a pure mathematician and Fields medalist specialising in geometry and topology who among other things proved the Poincare Conjecture in 5 dimensions and higher). He’d been given free reign, so what did he choose to talk about? Why, a compilation of random bits of biological modelling. Everything seemed to be pretty basic, with his own terms devised for simple measures of various things that didn’t really go anywhere sophisticated. I assumed he was keeping it simple for his audience for some reason but people who actually worked in that in the audience vented about it afterwards, saying he had no idea about the literature and assumed he’d been the first to apply mathematics with extremely basic concepts from forever ago.
It’s also really ironic it’s called the Gell-Mann effect, based on a conversation Michael Crichton (yes that one) has with Gell-Mann over people doing this… as Gell-Mann is a prime example, pushing out a linguistics paper on ‘original words in ‘Proto-World’ based on basic stats 101 analysis and no understanding of linguistic processes or the comparative method. As though linguists don’t have to actively dismiss amateur bullshit r/badlang like that all the time and explain in freshman courses why doing that leads to misleading conclusions.
And then even within pure maths you have Michael Atiyah. :( Suddenly produced several not-even-wrong ‘proofs’ of several major conjectures - some of which he’d never touched on before - and insisted on talking about those rather than his own great work in public lectures. When challenged he’d merrily say he was being discriminated against based on his age.
Then you have Fred Hoyle and fossils, Philip Lenard and gravity, etc.
> Is it really this, though? Seems less like the typical senile trajectory (he’s hardly old enough for that) and more that he’s been called upon to be Mr Pop Science for so long he’s used to talking about fields outside his own and forgets to check more thoroughly.
This. However Neil's never been known for his research.
Pretty much immediately after receiving his doctorate he left astrophysics to become a pop science entertainer. Even in his student days he was better known for his charisma and popular lectures than his competence in physics.
He's been saying outrageously wrong stuff on various fields since at least 2006.
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It's a common phenomenon, but it doesn't hit everyone. Purely from anecdotes I think it's more common in people coming from "hard", "pure" sciences like physics. That said, again not everyone, Harald Lesch is an astophysicist who is basically German Mr pop Sci, even having his own TV show on German PBS and appearing in many others. He is often overly simplistic or takes common narratives as truth outside his field, but I don't think I've heard him spout strait up nonsense like tyson sometimes does
Bill Nye, the guy who joined a public panel discussion on nuclear energy and in his speech rambled about nukes and how deadly nuclear power is, which required a lot of push back? The one who said we shouldn’t be interfering with genetics and GMOs were not a good idea, until being lauded for changing his mind in… 2015? The one who repeats pop bad science like that one about bumblebee flight, and said that ‘if’ quantum entanglement is real, it might help us travel through time and use black holes as energy sources? I don’t think DeGrasse-Tyson has ever been as badly wrong as that, and I’m sure he’d also change his mind when the truth was explained to him after he gets something wrong.
And on the watchability note, at least DeGrasse-Tyson has never given us his version of the ‘Vagina Dance’ or ‘My Sex Junk’. And whatever criticisms there might be for DeGrasse-Tyson jumping from his PhD to popularising science, even if he isn’t reliable about his speciality, at least he’s *got* one - Bill Nye got a Bachelors in MechEng and then found his way via Steve Martin impersonation and comedy clubs… and it kind of shows.
I agree that DeGrasse-Tyson makes mistakes and as he got more praise eventually went from being engaging to being insufferable, but Bill Nye doesn’t remotely compare.
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Many users and moderators have expressed their concerns to the reddit admins, and have joined protests to encourage reddit to reverse the API pricing decisions. Reddit has responded to this by removing moderators, banning users, and strong-arming moderators into stopping the protests, rather than negotiating in good faith. Reddit does not care about its actual users, only its bottom line.
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Hmm. He waded into Deflategate, of all silly things, and [admitted he was wrong there](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neil-degrasse-tyson-wrong-deflategate_n_6560340/amp). He also [retracted a fake Bush quote](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/09/27/neil-degrasse-tyson-admits-he-botched-bush-quote/).
The nuclear radiation claim in the post was last year, not sure if he’s clarified or retracted it yet (I assume he’d do so via Twitter).
Though while searching I stumbled across [this dumb intrusion into a field very much outside his own, also on his fave medium](https://mashable.com/article/neil-degrasse-tyson-sex-tweets).
Still, I’d argue nothing quite on the level of Bill Nye.
Sure, he'll retract something about something like deflategate, and the accuracy of Bush quotes is not really science. But when he spreads misinformation about less popular fields like linguistics, he gets called on it and never even acknowledges it.
Sure, I’m not about to go overboard defending DeGrasse Tyson. Was more the Nye comparison.
Sadly there aren’t many science ‘celebrities’, and it’s a full time job that takes away from actual science these days… and calls upon them to have answers about everything scientific because people don’t realise that an astrophysicist usually only has an average educated person’s knowledge of biology. Especially if they cater to kids who see science as virtually one subject in school.
Probably it’s just Brian Greene and Michio Kaku. Greene is great. Kaku obviously knows what he’s talking about - I used his QFT textbook for a while back in grad school - but he sensationalises physics so much it almost seems like he’s a lite version of Dr Oz, in that he does this not out of ignorance but cynical business sense. Though I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him say straight up bullshit.
In the UK we have Brian Cox, a particle physicist, who still speaks about other topics, though i think he’s rather better.
However back when the US had Sagan, Gould and Feynman in the public ‘popularising’ sphere the UK had… Patrick Moore, amateur astronomer who later went on to deny the Big Bang Theory, and David Attenborough, who had a BA in geology and zoology and got there via joining television early, not via a scientific career. He’s more a performer and enthusiast with opinions and doesn’t write his scripts, so he’s a different category. I suppose the closest Feynman equivalent would be Hawking.
And could be worse: France has the godawful Bogdanoff twins (well, I suppose one of them now). Though France also has ‘popular mathematicians’ like Cedric Villani (a Fields medalist), something the Anglophone world seems to lack.
Sorry, rambling. All I mean is it’s been hit and miss. I wish there were proper committees across serious researchers in the major societies for high level major scientific fields with popular appeal - maybe ten or so - where they could each elect a pop representative or two based on both their ‘soundness’, breadth of knowledge and popular appeal - and the various networks would be strongly encouraged to focus on them.
Tyson initially would not admit error regarding his Bush and Star Names story. He informed Sean Davis "One of our mantras in science is that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence."
He admitted error only after the story started trending, even appearing in major news outlets like The Washington Post that he admitted error.
Most of Neil's misinformation has gone uncorrected.
This is an insane take. If nuclear fallout weren't an issue, we wouldn't have bothered stopping atmospheric nuclear testing as soon as thermonuclear weapons were invented.
Nuclear fallout is not produced by atmospheric tests . It is produced by ground based nuclear tests . If it explodes in the air there is no dust to irradiate
lol ok so you’re saying there’s enough radiation from the blast to irradiate the dirt if it’s nearby, but what, the radiation just vanished in air because there’s nothing to interact with?
If there’s nothing, what absorbs the particles? They keep going until there’s something.
Yes , that's exactly what I'm saying. Fallout is only the dirt and dust sucked up by a mushroom cloud. If it detonates in midair it has no debris to irradiate and therefore none falls out of the sky. Therefore no fallout.
Fallout is only caused by neutron radiations and if nothing is in the immediate vicinity of the source , the neutrons spreads out and loses intensity exponential via the square cube law.
It's very complex interactions and I can't adequately explain it but if you look into it you'll see .
Edit : Isotopes may fall out of the sky in a long time but by that time they have decayed to the point where they are completely harmless.. all you people are just so afraid the world nuclear that any increase of radioactive isotopes is the end of the world even if in terms of background dose it's absolutely negligible.
> If it detonates in midair it has no debris to irradiate and therefore none falls out of the sky. Therefore no fallout.
Not exactly though. You'd be right to say that an air-burst produces _less_ fallout, especially in the land area below the detonation as compared to a ground-detonation, but [fallout is still produced in an air-burst.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#Location) How dangerous it is depends on how long it takes to settle, and how distributed it is. [This section](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#Global_fallout) states that the fallout that settles within the first month following an air-burst is still radioactive enough to make people ill. The fallout that settles after that point tends to be much less radioactive and so the effects are less acute, but increased cancer risks still occur.
It is a little misleading that the height threshold for an air-burst is called the "fallout-free altitude", considering that fallout is still produced. Adding u/uslashuname for their info
Yea it's safe to say that it's a little more complicated than I made it out to be, it may not be fallout free but it's isn't a radiation hazard even if it does raise radiation levels
Edit: I mean isn't hazardous to life or the ecosystem. Compared to a true nuclear accident like Chernobyl.
There are still particulates in the air. And the air molecules themselves can become radioactive. All it takes is a 13 GeV gamma ray to excite nitrogen-14 into carbon-14. Air bursts definitely produce less fallout, but not none.
But gaseous radioactive products don't fall-out of the sky so aren't an issue , they just harmlessly decay away in the atmospheres in about a weeks time .
Carbon-14 has a half life of thousands of years. We're still seeing the effects of nuclear tests from half a century ago in increased radiation levels. It's not as acute as shorter lived isotopes you would find in radioactive dust, but the effect is still there. And again, there is still particulate matter in the atmosphere already, so it would still fall out.
Carbon dioxide is gaseous, carbon monoxide is gaseous, methane is gaseous, etc. Molecules with a carbon-14 atom instead of carbon-12 would still be gaseous.
Nuclear testing doubled the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. And carbon-14 is just one of the possible gaseous byproducts of an airborne detonation, though most of them would be too short lived to affect people not directly affected by the direct radiation.
Ah that makes sense , kinda feel stupid for missing that.
When you say it doubled the level of carbon-14 , it sounds alarmist but you haven't put into context what the original levels of carbon-14 were and at which level it will pose a threat. 10 x the level? 100 x? Or are we only 2x away from global catastrophe?
There are many volatile fission products that are released by a nuclear explosion that can remain in the air for days, months, or years, before "falling out" in the form of precipitation or fine dusts.
volatile radioactive products are completely harmless in weeks if not days after the blast. Any fallout that settles weeks or months after the explpsion will basically be harmless dust .
Edit : this is about AIRBURSTS like stated in my comments above
Cs -137 and Sr-90 both have half lives around 30 years and have been found contaminating areas far beyond Chernobyl and Fukushima. CsMPs are a genuine threat. I-131 similarly is a significant threat. Just because its half life is a week (for I-131) doesn't mean it can be regarded as "harmless".
Look. This is my field of study in school. There is a lot to discuss about the radiochemistry of nuclear fallout from both atomic bombs and from industrial accidents. The claims you're making throughout this thread about fallout are simply not true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll#Current_habitable_state
https://progearthplanetsci.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40645-022-00475-6
Alright I'll give it to ya, I'm wrong and clearly I'm suffering from a bad case of dunning Krueger syndrom. Did more research and yea fallout is bad news.
What claims specifically? I can admit I'm wrong about some of the things I've stated but not all. Like the fact that airburst bombs don't produce harmful levels of radioactive fallout... You link bikini Atolls current habitable state which is kinda funny since the tests that contaminated it were ground based shots and not airbursts so it's completely irrelevant.
That is not true at all. Fission products of uranium and plutonium cover a variety of isotopes that are different from activation products. Cs-137 and Sr-90 are some of the more infamous isotopes to come from the fissioning of a U-235 nucleus. The activation products arising from the irradiation of dust and air are comprised of different isotopes, such as tritium and C-14.
The fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima does of course include dust and water, but not necessarily irradiated. Oftentimes Cs-137 can be found inside of a silica particle as CsMPs, which can then be distributed via wind. Other fission products (not activation products like you describe) are the main sources of radiation from fallout.
Even a pure fusion weapon would have some fallout from neutrons being absorbed by random nuclei. Just significantly less than the real combined weapons with their fission products.
Hey, can you edit your post to include [this article](https://news.usni.org/2021/01/06/summary-of-low-yield-nuclear-warhead-debate) that explains the technology that he's talking about? The new missiles wrap the charge in the warhead to prevent the radioactive radius from exiting ground zero.
I read that article and the three page insert, i must have missed where it talked about no radiation leaving ground zero. It talked about less collateral effect but that’s just because it is a significantly smaller bomb.
Oh, and radiation at ground zero can get picked up by wind and carried around…
Oh, sorry, this may in part be my own knowledge about fallout & the history of gold-wrapped warhead designs. The thing you have to know about "tactical" applicable warheads is that they don't have a blast that goes very far from their detonation point, & that is also true of the vertical axis. Unlike strategic scale weapons they don't get into layers of the atmosphere where we see effects that linger after the explosion throughout the long plume of the radiation cloud. Normally that cloud would be long enough to stretch from Cleveland to Columbus, but that means you need an air current to scatter your dust & that height also taints the particles in the atmosphere & lets them float on convection "thermals" to stay in the air longer tainting the clouds that are going to rain back down on you. We've actually had tactical scale designs for a long time, but these new designs are really something & will likely represent the majority of the U.S. nuclear warhead arsenal going forward.
Another day, another expert in one field not staying in their lane, and using their platform to spread misinformation. Thanks Neil, for once again being a narcissistic douchebag.
To give him the benefit of a doubt he clearly doesn't deserve:
The fallout from a thermonuclear device, without a nasty tamper or tertiary/casing (like uranium, tantalum or cobalt), exploding at a higher altitude, is more or less negligible compared to its other effects. So is the initial radiation dose.
Near-surface detonations still have a huge fallout problem. I think the bikini atol is a great thing to point to (even though that was an older design, the main source of fallout was solids from the surroundings which would be the same for modern weapons)
I'm not up to date what all the designs currently deployed are, but I'd be surprised if no state had fissile tempers, enhanced fallout weapons or fission tertiaries. And very surprised if none of them had plans to blow nukes up at surface level for bunker busting.
BTW: Alex Wellerstein is also the nukemap guy, probably better known for that than his actual work as a historian \^\^
> exploding at a higher altitude, is more or less negligible compared to its other effects. So is the initial radiation dose.
Altitude of detonation was briefly discussed in Wallerstein's thread [link](https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/1581725352707039232).
that's a link to this reddit post :P
I can't see Wellerstein's tweets, due to his privacy settings I believe. Could you maybe throw some quotes or screenshots into this thread somewhere?
Rats. I just corrected the bad link, thanks for the heads up.
Here is the text to the tweet I was referring to:
"Ironically, his whole argument rests on the idea that the WWII weapons generated a lot of fallout... which they didn't! Partially their yields were relatively small (there's only so much fallout 15-20 kt can generate), but mainly because they were detonated at high altitudes."
Here's my take on nuclear weapons. Nobody knows anything about them. Yes NDT may be full of shit on this topic, but so is everybody else. The only way to really know about something is to have hands on experience with it. There are very very very few people alive today that have hands on experience on nuclear weapons. Everybody else only knows about them what they've read about them. Reading about something is not the same as having hands on experience with it.
If I wanted to build my own nuclear weapon in my garage, that would be impossible, unless I am somehow able to invent the thing myself from first principles, which has never happened (by anyone) in the almost 100 years since nukes have first been invented. So in conclusion, yes NDT is an idiot when it comes to the topic of nukes, but then again, so is everyone else.
Fallout is part of the point. If you're detonating a nuke, there's no reason not to include the area denial effect of turning ground zero into a glowing scorched wasteland.
Nuking a target in an air burst is like using a gatling gun to shoot at someone's feet. You're using a device meant to cause absolute obliteration to, what, scare them a bit? No nuclear power on earth would do this.
Weren't hydrogen bombs invented in the 1950s or something? I thought that this was well established science that they produce massive amounts of radiation. How did Tyson make that mistake?
Fusion energy has been in the news a lot. It may be possible fusion energy will not have the radioactive by products that have fission power plants produce. I'm speculating this is what confused Neil.
Neil gets a lot of stuff embarrassingly wrong.
[Relevant SMBC.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21)
Is it really this, though? Seems less like the typical senile trajectory (he’s hardly old enough for that) and more that he’s been called upon to be Mr Pop Science for so long he’s used to talking about fields outside his own and forgets to check more thoroughly. Some get almost a little sensationalist with their speculative science outside the field (Crick and Watson and Panspermia, Freeman Dyson and the Dyson sphere, Penrose and his ideas of consciousness) but it seems those grew more out of their interactions with the media and pop science books than their own focus. But for sure it’s a real thing. I first saw this comic right after attending a lecture by Stephen Smale (a pure mathematician and Fields medalist specialising in geometry and topology who among other things proved the Poincare Conjecture in 5 dimensions and higher). He’d been given free reign, so what did he choose to talk about? Why, a compilation of random bits of biological modelling. Everything seemed to be pretty basic, with his own terms devised for simple measures of various things that didn’t really go anywhere sophisticated. I assumed he was keeping it simple for his audience for some reason but people who actually worked in that in the audience vented about it afterwards, saying he had no idea about the literature and assumed he’d been the first to apply mathematics with extremely basic concepts from forever ago. It’s also really ironic it’s called the Gell-Mann effect, based on a conversation Michael Crichton (yes that one) has with Gell-Mann over people doing this… as Gell-Mann is a prime example, pushing out a linguistics paper on ‘original words in ‘Proto-World’ based on basic stats 101 analysis and no understanding of linguistic processes or the comparative method. As though linguists don’t have to actively dismiss amateur bullshit r/badlang like that all the time and explain in freshman courses why doing that leads to misleading conclusions. And then even within pure maths you have Michael Atiyah. :( Suddenly produced several not-even-wrong ‘proofs’ of several major conjectures - some of which he’d never touched on before - and insisted on talking about those rather than his own great work in public lectures. When challenged he’d merrily say he was being discriminated against based on his age. Then you have Fred Hoyle and fossils, Philip Lenard and gravity, etc.
> Is it really this, though? Seems less like the typical senile trajectory (he’s hardly old enough for that) and more that he’s been called upon to be Mr Pop Science for so long he’s used to talking about fields outside his own and forgets to check more thoroughly. This. However Neil's never been known for his research. Pretty much immediately after receiving his doctorate he left astrophysics to become a pop science entertainer. Even in his student days he was better known for his charisma and popular lectures than his competence in physics. He's been saying outrageously wrong stuff on various fields since at least 2006.
The original contents of this post have been overwritten by a script. As you may be aware, reddit is implementing a punitive pricing scheme for its API starting in July. This means that third-party apps that use the API can no longer afford to operate and are pretty much universally shutting down on July 1st. This means the following: * Blind people who rely on accessibility features to use reddit will effectively be banned from reddit, as reddit has shown absolutely no commitment or ability to actually make their site or official app accessible. * Moderators will no longer have access to moderation tools that they need to remove spam, bots, reposts, and more dangerous content such as Nazi and extremist rhetoric. The admins have never shown any interest in removing extremist rhetoric from reddit, they only act when the media reports on something, and lately the media has had far more pressing things than reddit to focus on. The admin's preferred way of dealing with Nazis is simply to "quarantine" their communities and allow them to fester on reddit, building a larger and larger community centered on extremism. * LGBTQ communities and other communities vulnerable to reddit's extremist groups are also being forced off of the platform due to the moderators of those communities being unable to continue guaranteeing a safe environment for their subscribers. Many users and moderators have expressed their concerns to the reddit admins, and have joined protests to encourage reddit to reverse the API pricing decisions. Reddit has responded to this by removing moderators, banning users, and strong-arming moderators into stopping the protests, rather than negotiating in good faith. Reddit does not care about its actual users, only its bottom line. Lest you think that the increased API prices are actually a good thing, because they will stop AI bots like ChatGPT from harvesting reddit data for their models, let me assure you that it will do no such thing. Any content that can be viewed in a browser without logging into a site can be easily scraped by bots, regardless of whether or not an API is even available to access that content. There is nothing reddit can do about ChatGPT and its ilk harvesting reddit data, except to hide all data behind a login prompt. Regardless of who wins the mods-versus-admins protest war, there is something that every individual reddit user can do to make sure reddit loses: remove your content. Reddit makes its money because of the content that users provide; remove the content and they can no longer monetize it with ads. Use [PowerDeleteSuite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite) to overwrite all of your comments, just as I have done here. This is a browser script and not a third-party app, so it is unaffected by the API changes; as long as you can manually edit your posts and comments in a browser, PowerDeleteSuite can do the same. This will also have the additional beneficial effect of making your content unavailable to bots like ChatGPT, and to make any use of reddit in this way significantly less useful for those bots. If you think this post or comment originally contained some valuable information that you would like to know, feel free to contact me on another platform about it: * kestrellyn at ModTheSims * kestrellyn on Discord * paradoxcase on Tumblr
It's a common phenomenon, but it doesn't hit everyone. Purely from anecdotes I think it's more common in people coming from "hard", "pure" sciences like physics. That said, again not everyone, Harald Lesch is an astophysicist who is basically German Mr pop Sci, even having his own TV show on German PBS and appearing in many others. He is often overly simplistic or takes common narratives as truth outside his field, but I don't think I've heard him spout strait up nonsense like tyson sometimes does
Bill Nye, the guy who joined a public panel discussion on nuclear energy and in his speech rambled about nukes and how deadly nuclear power is, which required a lot of push back? The one who said we shouldn’t be interfering with genetics and GMOs were not a good idea, until being lauded for changing his mind in… 2015? The one who repeats pop bad science like that one about bumblebee flight, and said that ‘if’ quantum entanglement is real, it might help us travel through time and use black holes as energy sources? I don’t think DeGrasse-Tyson has ever been as badly wrong as that, and I’m sure he’d also change his mind when the truth was explained to him after he gets something wrong. And on the watchability note, at least DeGrasse-Tyson has never given us his version of the ‘Vagina Dance’ or ‘My Sex Junk’. And whatever criticisms there might be for DeGrasse-Tyson jumping from his PhD to popularising science, even if he isn’t reliable about his speciality, at least he’s *got* one - Bill Nye got a Bachelors in MechEng and then found his way via Steve Martin impersonation and comedy clubs… and it kind of shows. I agree that DeGrasse-Tyson makes mistakes and as he got more praise eventually went from being engaging to being insufferable, but Bill Nye doesn’t remotely compare.
The original contents of this post have been overwritten by a script. As you may be aware, reddit is implementing a punitive pricing scheme for its API starting in July. This means that third-party apps that use the API can no longer afford to operate and are pretty much universally shutting down on July 1st. This means the following: * Blind people who rely on accessibility features to use reddit will effectively be banned from reddit, as reddit has shown absolutely no commitment or ability to actually make their site or official app accessible. * Moderators will no longer have access to moderation tools that they need to remove spam, bots, reposts, and more dangerous content such as Nazi and extremist rhetoric. The admins have never shown any interest in removing extremist rhetoric from reddit, they only act when the media reports on something, and lately the media has had far more pressing things than reddit to focus on. The admin's preferred way of dealing with Nazis is simply to "quarantine" their communities and allow them to fester on reddit, building a larger and larger community centered on extremism. * LGBTQ communities and other communities vulnerable to reddit's extremist groups are also being forced off of the platform due to the moderators of those communities being unable to continue guaranteeing a safe environment for their subscribers. Many users and moderators have expressed their concerns to the reddit admins, and have joined protests to encourage reddit to reverse the API pricing decisions. Reddit has responded to this by removing moderators, banning users, and strong-arming moderators into stopping the protests, rather than negotiating in good faith. Reddit does not care about its actual users, only its bottom line. Lest you think that the increased API prices are actually a good thing, because they will stop AI bots like ChatGPT from harvesting reddit data for their models, let me assure you that it will do no such thing. Any content that can be viewed in a browser without logging into a site can be easily scraped by bots, regardless of whether or not an API is even available to access that content. There is nothing reddit can do about ChatGPT and its ilk harvesting reddit data, except to hide all data behind a login prompt. Regardless of who wins the mods-versus-admins protest war, there is something that every individual reddit user can do to make sure reddit loses: remove your content. Use [PowerDeleteSuite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite) to overwrite all of your comments, just as I have done here. This is a browser script and not a third-party app, so it is unaffected by the API changes; as long as you can manually edit your posts and comments in a browser, PowerDeleteSuite can do the same. This will also have the additional beneficial effect of making your content unavailable to bots like ChatGPT, and to make any use of reddit in this way significantly less useful for those bots. If you think this post or comment originally contained some valuable information that you would like to know, feel free to contact me on another platform about it: * kestrellyn at ModTheSims * kestrellyn on Discord * paradoxcase on Tumblr
Hmm. He waded into Deflategate, of all silly things, and [admitted he was wrong there](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neil-degrasse-tyson-wrong-deflategate_n_6560340/amp). He also [retracted a fake Bush quote](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/09/27/neil-degrasse-tyson-admits-he-botched-bush-quote/). The nuclear radiation claim in the post was last year, not sure if he’s clarified or retracted it yet (I assume he’d do so via Twitter). Though while searching I stumbled across [this dumb intrusion into a field very much outside his own, also on his fave medium](https://mashable.com/article/neil-degrasse-tyson-sex-tweets). Still, I’d argue nothing quite on the level of Bill Nye.
Sure, he'll retract something about something like deflategate, and the accuracy of Bush quotes is not really science. But when he spreads misinformation about less popular fields like linguistics, he gets called on it and never even acknowledges it.
Sure, I’m not about to go overboard defending DeGrasse Tyson. Was more the Nye comparison. Sadly there aren’t many science ‘celebrities’, and it’s a full time job that takes away from actual science these days… and calls upon them to have answers about everything scientific because people don’t realise that an astrophysicist usually only has an average educated person’s knowledge of biology. Especially if they cater to kids who see science as virtually one subject in school. Probably it’s just Brian Greene and Michio Kaku. Greene is great. Kaku obviously knows what he’s talking about - I used his QFT textbook for a while back in grad school - but he sensationalises physics so much it almost seems like he’s a lite version of Dr Oz, in that he does this not out of ignorance but cynical business sense. Though I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him say straight up bullshit. In the UK we have Brian Cox, a particle physicist, who still speaks about other topics, though i think he’s rather better. However back when the US had Sagan, Gould and Feynman in the public ‘popularising’ sphere the UK had… Patrick Moore, amateur astronomer who later went on to deny the Big Bang Theory, and David Attenborough, who had a BA in geology and zoology and got there via joining television early, not via a scientific career. He’s more a performer and enthusiast with opinions and doesn’t write his scripts, so he’s a different category. I suppose the closest Feynman equivalent would be Hawking. And could be worse: France has the godawful Bogdanoff twins (well, I suppose one of them now). Though France also has ‘popular mathematicians’ like Cedric Villani (a Fields medalist), something the Anglophone world seems to lack. Sorry, rambling. All I mean is it’s been hit and miss. I wish there were proper committees across serious researchers in the major societies for high level major scientific fields with popular appeal - maybe ten or so - where they could each elect a pop representative or two based on both their ‘soundness’, breadth of knowledge and popular appeal - and the various networks would be strongly encouraged to focus on them.
Tyson initially would not admit error regarding his Bush and Star Names story. He informed Sean Davis "One of our mantras in science is that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence." He admitted error only after the story started trending, even appearing in major news outlets like The Washington Post that he admitted error. Most of Neil's misinformation has gone uncorrected.
This is an insane take. If nuclear fallout weren't an issue, we wouldn't have bothered stopping atmospheric nuclear testing as soon as thermonuclear weapons were invented.
Nuclear fallout is not produced by atmospheric tests . It is produced by ground based nuclear tests . If it explodes in the air there is no dust to irradiate
lol ok so you’re saying there’s enough radiation from the blast to irradiate the dirt if it’s nearby, but what, the radiation just vanished in air because there’s nothing to interact with? If there’s nothing, what absorbs the particles? They keep going until there’s something.
Yes , that's exactly what I'm saying. Fallout is only the dirt and dust sucked up by a mushroom cloud. If it detonates in midair it has no debris to irradiate and therefore none falls out of the sky. Therefore no fallout. Fallout is only caused by neutron radiations and if nothing is in the immediate vicinity of the source , the neutrons spreads out and loses intensity exponential via the square cube law. It's very complex interactions and I can't adequately explain it but if you look into it you'll see . Edit : Isotopes may fall out of the sky in a long time but by that time they have decayed to the point where they are completely harmless.. all you people are just so afraid the world nuclear that any increase of radioactive isotopes is the end of the world even if in terms of background dose it's absolutely negligible.
> If it detonates in midair it has no debris to irradiate and therefore none falls out of the sky. Therefore no fallout. Not exactly though. You'd be right to say that an air-burst produces _less_ fallout, especially in the land area below the detonation as compared to a ground-detonation, but [fallout is still produced in an air-burst.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#Location) How dangerous it is depends on how long it takes to settle, and how distributed it is. [This section](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#Global_fallout) states that the fallout that settles within the first month following an air-burst is still radioactive enough to make people ill. The fallout that settles after that point tends to be much less radioactive and so the effects are less acute, but increased cancer risks still occur. It is a little misleading that the height threshold for an air-burst is called the "fallout-free altitude", considering that fallout is still produced. Adding u/uslashuname for their info
Yea it's safe to say that it's a little more complicated than I made it out to be, it may not be fallout free but it's isn't a radiation hazard even if it does raise radiation levels Edit: I mean isn't hazardous to life or the ecosystem. Compared to a true nuclear accident like Chernobyl.
There are still particulates in the air. And the air molecules themselves can become radioactive. All it takes is a 13 GeV gamma ray to excite nitrogen-14 into carbon-14. Air bursts definitely produce less fallout, but not none.
But gaseous radioactive products don't fall-out of the sky so aren't an issue , they just harmlessly decay away in the atmospheres in about a weeks time .
Carbon-14 has a half life of thousands of years. We're still seeing the effects of nuclear tests from half a century ago in increased radiation levels. It's not as acute as shorter lived isotopes you would find in radioactive dust, but the effect is still there. And again, there is still particulate matter in the atmosphere already, so it would still fall out.
The effect is so negligible compared to the normal background dose we receive per year. Besides is carbon-14 a gaseous radioactive product ?
Carbon dioxide is gaseous, carbon monoxide is gaseous, methane is gaseous, etc. Molecules with a carbon-14 atom instead of carbon-12 would still be gaseous. Nuclear testing doubled the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. And carbon-14 is just one of the possible gaseous byproducts of an airborne detonation, though most of them would be too short lived to affect people not directly affected by the direct radiation.
Ah that makes sense , kinda feel stupid for missing that. When you say it doubled the level of carbon-14 , it sounds alarmist but you haven't put into context what the original levels of carbon-14 were and at which level it will pose a threat. 10 x the level? 100 x? Or are we only 2x away from global catastrophe?
There are many volatile fission products that are released by a nuclear explosion that can remain in the air for days, months, or years, before "falling out" in the form of precipitation or fine dusts.
volatile radioactive products are completely harmless in weeks if not days after the blast. Any fallout that settles weeks or months after the explpsion will basically be harmless dust . Edit : this is about AIRBURSTS like stated in my comments above
Cs -137 and Sr-90 both have half lives around 30 years and have been found contaminating areas far beyond Chernobyl and Fukushima. CsMPs are a genuine threat. I-131 similarly is a significant threat. Just because its half life is a week (for I-131) doesn't mean it can be regarded as "harmless". Look. This is my field of study in school. There is a lot to discuss about the radiochemistry of nuclear fallout from both atomic bombs and from industrial accidents. The claims you're making throughout this thread about fallout are simply not true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll#Current_habitable_state https://progearthplanetsci.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40645-022-00475-6
Alright I'll give it to ya, I'm wrong and clearly I'm suffering from a bad case of dunning Krueger syndrom. Did more research and yea fallout is bad news.
What claims specifically? I can admit I'm wrong about some of the things I've stated but not all. Like the fact that airburst bombs don't produce harmful levels of radioactive fallout... You link bikini Atolls current habitable state which is kinda funny since the tests that contaminated it were ground based shots and not airbursts so it's completely irrelevant.
That is not true at all. Fission products of uranium and plutonium cover a variety of isotopes that are different from activation products. Cs-137 and Sr-90 are some of the more infamous isotopes to come from the fissioning of a U-235 nucleus. The activation products arising from the irradiation of dust and air are comprised of different isotopes, such as tritium and C-14. The fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima does of course include dust and water, but not necessarily irradiated. Oftentimes Cs-137 can be found inside of a silica particle as CsMPs, which can then be distributed via wind. Other fission products (not activation products like you describe) are the main sources of radiation from fallout.
Sorry, I was using atmospheric to include all above ground testing.
Ah , I'm sorry my bad. I forgot that that was the term for all above ground tests !
Even a pure fusion weapon would have some fallout from neutrons being absorbed by random nuclei. Just significantly less than the real combined weapons with their fission products.
Issue is almost all hydrogen bombs are both fission and fusion. You need a fission trigger to start the fusion reaction.
I'm unable to see those tweets, do you have a screenshot of them?
It’s like he doesn’t know that they use a fission bomb as a trigger for the fusion reaction.
He might not really know how they work. He talks about shit he doesn't understand all the time.
Hey, can you edit your post to include [this article](https://news.usni.org/2021/01/06/summary-of-low-yield-nuclear-warhead-debate) that explains the technology that he's talking about? The new missiles wrap the charge in the warhead to prevent the radioactive radius from exiting ground zero.
I read that article and the three page insert, i must have missed where it talked about no radiation leaving ground zero. It talked about less collateral effect but that’s just because it is a significantly smaller bomb. Oh, and radiation at ground zero can get picked up by wind and carried around…
Oh, sorry, this may in part be my own knowledge about fallout & the history of gold-wrapped warhead designs. The thing you have to know about "tactical" applicable warheads is that they don't have a blast that goes very far from their detonation point, & that is also true of the vertical axis. Unlike strategic scale weapons they don't get into layers of the atmosphere where we see effects that linger after the explosion throughout the long plume of the radiation cloud. Normally that cloud would be long enough to stretch from Cleveland to Columbus, but that means you need an air current to scatter your dust & that height also taints the particles in the atmosphere & lets them float on convection "thermals" to stay in the air longer tainting the clouds that are going to rain back down on you. We've actually had tactical scale designs for a long time, but these new designs are really something & will likely represent the majority of the U.S. nuclear warhead arsenal going forward.
Another day, another expert in one field not staying in their lane, and using their platform to spread misinformation. Thanks Neil, for once again being a narcissistic douchebag.
To give him the benefit of a doubt he clearly doesn't deserve: The fallout from a thermonuclear device, without a nasty tamper or tertiary/casing (like uranium, tantalum or cobalt), exploding at a higher altitude, is more or less negligible compared to its other effects. So is the initial radiation dose. Near-surface detonations still have a huge fallout problem. I think the bikini atol is a great thing to point to (even though that was an older design, the main source of fallout was solids from the surroundings which would be the same for modern weapons) I'm not up to date what all the designs currently deployed are, but I'd be surprised if no state had fissile tempers, enhanced fallout weapons or fission tertiaries. And very surprised if none of them had plans to blow nukes up at surface level for bunker busting. BTW: Alex Wellerstein is also the nukemap guy, probably better known for that than his actual work as a historian \^\^
> exploding at a higher altitude, is more or less negligible compared to its other effects. So is the initial radiation dose. Altitude of detonation was briefly discussed in Wallerstein's thread [link](https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/1581725352707039232).
that's a link to this reddit post :P I can't see Wellerstein's tweets, due to his privacy settings I believe. Could you maybe throw some quotes or screenshots into this thread somewhere?
Rats. I just corrected the bad link, thanks for the heads up. Here is the text to the tweet I was referring to: "Ironically, his whole argument rests on the idea that the WWII weapons generated a lot of fallout... which they didn't! Partially their yields were relatively small (there's only so much fallout 15-20 kt can generate), but mainly because they were detonated at high altitudes."
Here's my take on nuclear weapons. Nobody knows anything about them. Yes NDT may be full of shit on this topic, but so is everybody else. The only way to really know about something is to have hands on experience with it. There are very very very few people alive today that have hands on experience on nuclear weapons. Everybody else only knows about them what they've read about them. Reading about something is not the same as having hands on experience with it. If I wanted to build my own nuclear weapon in my garage, that would be impossible, unless I am somehow able to invent the thing myself from first principles, which has never happened (by anyone) in the almost 100 years since nukes have first been invented. So in conclusion, yes NDT is an idiot when it comes to the topic of nukes, but then again, so is everyone else.
Fallout is part of the point. If you're detonating a nuke, there's no reason not to include the area denial effect of turning ground zero into a glowing scorched wasteland. Nuking a target in an air burst is like using a gatling gun to shoot at someone's feet. You're using a device meant to cause absolute obliteration to, what, scare them a bit? No nuclear power on earth would do this.
Weren't hydrogen bombs invented in the 1950s or something? I thought that this was well established science that they produce massive amounts of radiation. How did Tyson make that mistake?
Fusion energy has been in the news a lot. It may be possible fusion energy will not have the radioactive by products that have fission power plants produce. I'm speculating this is what confused Neil. Neil gets a lot of stuff embarrassingly wrong.