StarTalk Radio - A Conversation with Alan Rickman (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

In Part 1, Neil deGrasse Tyson chats with Alan Rickman about the craft of acting, the problems with the education system, and how he chooses and prepares for roles. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City. And I also serve as director of the Hayden Planetarium. Come check us out sometime. I got with me in studio the one, the only, the inimitable Chuck Nice. Chuck. Welcome back, man.

Hey, Neil. Love having you. I love being here, man. And you get into all kinds of stuff. First, you're tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic. Chuck Nice Comic. Other Chuck Nices were taken, I'm told. Yeah, well, screw the rest of those Chuck Nices.

All right, sir. You were just slow, I should admit it. Put the comic on there. Also, I was checking your bio in progress. You're doing a show where you're just invading people's homes, which sounds creepy. Yes. Imagine that. A black man home invasion show yeah it's called home strange home man it's a strange home me going around to some of the

weirdest and uh most unique homes in america and calling them out and call them out yeah and and what network uh hgtv home and Home and Garden Television. That is my sister's favorite network. I love her. Every speed dial button goes to that network. My kind of woman. I'm not going to tell her. She's going to find you by accident. Fantastic.

And she's there. I got with me also my friend and colleague, Charles Liu. Great to see you. Professor Liu. Excellent. Thank you so much for having me. Excellent. Astrophysicist at the City University of New York on Staten Island.

Yeah. And I've got you here because we're featuring my interview clips with Alan Rickman. Yes! Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman. By Grand Thar's hammer, you shall be avenged. And I didn't know this in advance. That was it?

Yes, you did. Good or bad? You'll find out. Good reference, bad impersonation. Maybe that's what it is. So Alan Rickman, you may know him from his role in Harry Potter. He was sneak, creepy, defined the word creepy. He's it.

In Harry Potter, of course, he was in Die Hard, one of the greatest villain roles ever. Yes. He was in Galaxy Quest, as campy a movie as there ever was, in Dogma, many other films. And he was also in Bottle Shock. Yeah, yeah, wine film, a big fan of that. And, you know, for folks who are sort of A-list guests like that, I always like knowing what role science might have played in their lives. It's not always good. So I just like knowing, just so I know what I'm dealing with, you know with in the interview. Let's find out what Alan Rickman tells us about his life experience learning science.

So Alan, I have to ask, because you've been in some intriguing science fiction films like Galaxy Quest. I always wonder, do people who end up in those roles do they have some science background that leads them to it how is science flavored in your life in your years in school put it this way when i did uh my very last physics exam i got four percent uh that would be four marks out of a hundred not 96 because you lost four points. I got four marks. In your physics. And I think they used to give you one mark for getting your name right on the top of the paper.

And the teacher wrote a hysterical paper, and he didn't mean that it was funny. What's the corresponding year in school in America that that would be? Is that how old? It would be when I was about 15 or 16, something like that. Yeah. And it's before you choose which subjects you're going to do what we call A-level when you're 17 and 18, and then you go to university. So physics or science was never, ever going to be part of my life. So that when you said, maybe I should be an actor. Well, at least I had an option. Makes me wonder, like, had you done well in physics, we would have never had you as an

actor. I don't know what these four, how these forces operate. But no, actually there was somebody in my year who, because it was a, it was a, it was a good school in that sense. They didn't kind of try to trap you or type you. And somebody in my year. Which is a kind of try to trap you or type you. And somebody in my year did. Which is a very UK thing to do, right? Yeah.

Well, I don't know about UK. It's world over. Get a label on people as quickly as they can. This guy in my year did for his three A-level subjects, i.e. leading up to university, he did physics, maths, and art. And he wound up being an art teacher. And I'm sure all the better for having had science in his life wow so yeah if we got four percent on his physics i'm not going to

ask you what percent you got on your physics chuck i'm turning to you on this one i uh that's funny he says that because i remember now we had physics in uh the ninth grade the school that i went to was a private school it was it was a prep school okay and it was uh academically advanced i was not academically advanced all right and so i failed physics and now it comes out all right but what did that's when you said i think i'll be a comedian. And put fun on a physics radio show. But I loved science and I really felt like, man, I can't believe I failed this class and I blamed the teacher. But I had the right thing to do. I'm so in favor.

I blamed the teacher. So you're an educator, as am I, of course. But you think a lot about this. So I'm intrigued that he could fail a class but still embrace the meaning of science. Because when Alan Rickman said he got 4%, he wasn't bad-mouthing science. That's right. He just got 4%. That's right. That's all he was saying.

One thing that he said that was so telling, he said that most places in the world, you get tracked into places. Oh, you must be the science guy. Oh, you must be the art guy. Yeah. But the bottom line is, especially in this modern world you can love anything and be anything at the same time the information without the metrics of an exam to tell you whether you should do either the information that used to have to be forced into you as training for something is no longer that constrained in the classroom you can can get it anywhere, like all over

the world, online. Oh, so we live in a time where the teacher is not the sole source of your enlightenment. So the teacher's role becomes whether or not you learn how to think about things in a positive light, whether you understand things in a way that makes sense for you in your life. If the teacher fails to do that, it is the teacher's fault. It is not the student's fault. So I tell all my students, I might teach astronomy, you know, I say, look, if you don't like math and science by the end of this class, don't blame math and science, blame me. Right. And I'm totally comfortable with that. I'm really glad to hear it. What did it for me though was... So you were burning effigy recently. That's fine. Did you do well in any science class?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I did well in most of them. I just really, I don't know what it was. I don't think we had a communication thing. But then another, my chemistry teacher gave me a book called Introduction to Astronomy. Your chemistry teacher? My chemistry teacher gave me this. Good for your chemistry teacher.

Because the chemistry teacher said, there's no way you can be doing this well in chemistry and failing physics and when i started this book was really fast such a teacher figured something else must be operating right now yeah and i found the book so fascinating that it inspired me to continue going that That's great. And you became a comedian. Exactly. But astronomy is often a gateway. Science. When we come back, we've got more of my interview with Alan Rickman, the actor extraordinaire. And I've got in studio Chuck Nice, Charles Lute. We'll be back in a minute. We're back. StarTalk Radio. By the way, you can find us three ways. First, just simply on the web at StarTalkRadio.net.

We have an archive of all of our old shows. Check it out. But there you can also download us as a podcast, as you can on iTunes. We're also in video form on the Nerdist network of YouTube. So find us there. And not only that, we're on broadcast radio. And so, Chuck, with a lot of roots in broadcast radio, it's so great to have you participate in this adventure. Yes.

Yeah, I feel the same way. And my roots are deep in broadcast radio. Yeah. Yeah. So thanks for that. And Chuck, you were a radio broadcaster in college. Yes, I was. Excellent.

So let's put on our radio voices. Here we go. All right. Well, I did punk rock once in a while. So it was like, how you doing? It's a little hospital. Punk rock. So in this edition of StarTalk, we've got my interview clips with Alan Rickman,

who's actor extraordinaire. I mean, when he speaks, you can only just be silent and listen to the words as they come out of his mouth. First, he's got the British accent, which means he has access to vocabulary that Americans can only dream of. And just the roles he's played have been so compelling and so absorbing. And in this next clip, it came off of our discussion of his exposure to science and what about science might intrigue him. He didn't do well on that physics class. He got 4% out of 100. I thought it was 4% off. It're 4% in. So yes, that's bad. That'd

be an F minus. Minus, minus, minus. Does that influence what roles you might play? Is it good or is it bad? Is he still curious? Turns out he's quite interested in human physiology. Who isn't? But to know that an actor is brings an extra dimension to it. Let's find out what he tells us about that. About watching somebody play the piano, I don't know how that's physically possible. How do people retain that information? How do they then not look at what their hands are doing? And how is that message going from the brain to 10 fingers and dividing that information up. And also operations now where the edges get blurred, whereby people can operate with a tiny camera inside people's bodies. And apparently the way they train themselves to do that

is by getting really good at computer games. Yeah, I mean, that's a fascinating frontier. So I'm curious then, I mean, you're intelligent, you're a deep thinker, we've spoken earlier, you even think philosophically about the world. It seems to me that that could and would play some role in what drives the roles you select in your acting career. I mean, why wouldn't they? If someone had an idea, they say, we're going to cast doctors.

If someone had an idea, they say, we're going to cast doctors. Consider, was it in the 1960s, that movie, that Ozygasmov story, Fantastic Voyage, where the vessel, the Proteus, I think it was called, shrunk. There's some important diplomat that has a brain tumor, and he might die, but they found a laser that could fix it, but they have to shrink down the laser and get inside and do it. So they take this vessel, put people in it, shrink it down to the size that can fit in a syringe, and then you go inside the body. And then the whole movie is what is inside the body and what they see, and the red blood cells, and the ventricles of the heart, and the veins, and the arteries. And they get to the brain, and they pull out their laser, which was a big thing back in the 60s and and I'm just curious those those sound like intriguing roles and if you if you feel that just means I have to do a lot of background work to catch up I like I like ambiguity in roles because that's interesting because it means there's no rules and it means you can pull people into a private storytelling space

and they're not being manipulated by outside forces. Their imaginations are allowed to work along with mine. But at the same time, I did actually do a film playing a heart surgeon. And I was on really big catch up there because I was now forced to try to understand how the heart even works. And then to mime doing a heart operation because it was about Alfred Blaylock who did the first blue baby operation. Okay. Yeah, so when you're an actor, you don't know what you're going to be called to do and there he is first he's intrigued by the moto neuro kineticism of a piano player who is it you play the piano i do play the course you do did you play piano too uh no longer no longer i did

i took lessons for a little while but i sucked sucked. Okay. Now, my daughter is way better than I am. Okay. But the reality is that, indeed, when the human body programs itself, the reason we practice is that we're able to train our bodies to do things beyond our ability to think consciously. It's the same for playing piano as it is for, say, a football player. If somebody's coming in and trying to sack you as a quarterback. You run the other way. Yeah.

What kind of training does that take? But you literally don't have enough time to think to move. Your body has to know to move before you even think, oh, somebody's going to come hit me. So you're training yourself all those years. You think, oh, I can play quarterback or, oh, I can sack the quarterback. The reality is your body has to react faster than you can think and command your body to react in order to be successful. So you're training? Yes. So you're trained?

So yeah. I feel the same way at the Source Awards. It's like if you hear pop, pop, you don't even think, you just run. So you've done this, This has happened so often. Your moto-neuro-kinetic response. You would think that it would occur to me just not to go to the Source Awards. Hundreds of hours, thousands of hours of that kind of practice. But what is very cool is that the human brain, even with a few hours, can make it so that other humans looking at that person suspect that there's the appearance of ability, even though the true ability is not yet revealed.

Oh, so the actor doesn't have to then be the 20,000-hour expert. Precisely. They can just look like it. Be the 20-hour expert, right. And again, that takes... But they have to know how to mimic. Exactly. And that itself has its own brain, not neurocognitive things.

So different people are good at different things. It could be, for example, that the maestro piano player particularly can arrange his or her fingers to become very good at playing the piano, whereas the actor or the comedian has the moto-neuro ability to find a way to reach those specific aspects that appear to be excellent to others and be able to communicate. You know, when I was hosting Nova Science Now on PBS, we did a segment on your brain learning while you're asleep of something you had done the day before. Right. Okay, so you do a task that you've never done before. And it's hard at first, and you get a little better at it.

And you keep getting better, but there's a point where you're just not getting better. You fatigue, I guess, is how we would normally describe it. You go to sleep, wake up the next morning, kick in. You start at a higher level than you left off the day before. Because your brain has added the information into that system. And it's not just knowledge. It was adding kinetic memory of what you were doing. And so when they say sleep on it that actually

has meaning okay and I was able to confirm that I did this with multiple I did with a video game that required kineticism I did it with a typing sequence I did it with a memory sequence the next day I was better and so the brain is working so is your brain like making new neural pathways so that you're better at that? That's what they used to say, Charles. But it's just, I mean, we're not growing new neurons, right?

It's just the rearrangement of the chemical pieces that we picked up. It all kind of settles in during that time when you're not doing anything else. So it's all just sacks of chemistry is what you're telling us. Oh, chemistry, alchemy, magic. Magic. Who knows what it is? when you're not doing anything else. So we'll just sacks of chemistry is what you're telling us. Oh, chemistry, alchemy, magic, you know. Magic, magic.

Who knows what it is? But as well you know, Neil, all scientists throughout history who have reached intractable things have at first ascribed them to perhaps magic or divinity, but knowing that that's just a gap until we fill it with more knowledge of it. What's interesting is it works that way historically.

And there's the famous edict or adage from Arthur C. Clark, where any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Right. Yeah. And so, so, so take an iPhone back to colonial America,

take it back 10 years ago. You'd still be, you'd still be burned at the stake. That's true. Right, right. So for an actor to learn to be another whole person, I'm intrigued to, and heartened, well, of course, because we see it and it's real. Actors who are good pick it up. They capture the essence of it to the point where you, the viewer, even if you're an expert in what they're acting, you think that they are what that is.

You want them to be that. That's true. On the other hand... I watched The Big Bang Theory, and I'm certain those actors are experts in all the fields that they talk about. On the other hand, doesn't it rankle you when, I don't know, maybe Chuck, you know this, when you're watching somebody pretending to play the piano on the movie, and hands are over here and you know that the sound is coming from over there.

They're going, oh, forget it, man. I'm switching the channel. I'm not taking you to the next. Or the next taping of Big Bang Theory. Yeah, and some actors, they'll actually want to learn the piano so that, you know, like they want to be that real. Or they'll gain the weight or lose the weight. You're right. Denzel Washington played a trumpet player in Mo' Better Blues

and literally learned the fingering. Not to play the trumpet, but the fingers. So you checked the cheek to see if it was... More of our interview with Alan Rickman when we come back on StarTalk. Today we are featuring my interview with Alan Rickman. Listen to that guy all day. No, that is not a good imitation of Alan Rickman. I don't know. He sounds a little smug when he talks.

Yeah, but then you want that, you know? I mean, poof, poof. But his last line in the last movie, you have your mother's eyes, such pathos. You just want to shed a tear for the dude. Yeah, I wanted to shed a tear for that impression. That's why you're the comedian and I'm the astronomy professor. No, I wanted to shed a tear for that impression. That's why you're the comedian and I'm the astronomy professor.

No, I'm glad you did it because mine sucked, but that one... Okay, he's done a lot of movies. The movie I'm thinking of right this minute is he was one of the lead characters in the movie Bottle Shock, which chronicles an episode in the history of American ornology.

Ah! That's one of those OE words. Yes, ornology. Well, Neil, I hope it's okay that I reveal to the world how much of an enophile you are. This man, folks, is one of the maybe two or three most knowledgeable people about wine in the whole world. No, that he knows. In the whole world, but I know. That I know. You'll have to let me finish my world. No, that he knows. In the whole world that I know. You'll have to let me finish my sentence. Well, thank you for those kudos. But I'm just saying, so I had to go see that movie.

And I found out neither of you saw that movie, so I had to do all the talking. I didn't see Sideways either. Yeah, so Sideways is another good one. So I'm just impressed that there's a wine movie out there. And it chronicled this chapter in the history of American winemaking where California is trying to make a name for itself. It's got the grapes of the classic wine-growing regions of France from Bordeaux. Especially Bordeaux in this particular case. And so, they grow their Cabernet Sauvignon grape and so the most expensive wines ever at auction from France are this grape.

You put the plantings here in America and they're trying to compete and there's a contest in 1976 our bicentennial year it was all up with America and the French said let's have a contest you guys are so uppity let's bring some of your wines against some of our wines and some people were a little skeptical that maybe the French were trying to embarrass us on our because by the way the only way you can conduct that experiment is if you taste the wine blind right right you can't know in advance because then you don't trust the judges especially the French why don't we have a contest where you bring your still? Right. So you got to work that and play it right. And so Alan Rickman plays,

was he one of the judges? I forgot the exact role, but he was there as part of this contest that would be conducted. And so let's check out this clip and we'll talk more about wine when we get back. All right, so you study your roles as any good actor does, which tells me then in Bottle Shock you had to do a lot of wine tasting. That's not so difficult. Had to do your homework for Bottle Shock.

No, well, the real problem with that was we were shooting it all in Sonoma. And so when we came to the scene where it's about a blind wine testing between French, a true story, between French and American wines. Where you taste the wine and you're not told in advance anything about it. And this was set up in Paris 30 odd years ago by the character I was playing to publicize his wine academy. ago by the character I was playing to publicize his wine academy and this all happened and his judges were very eminent French all French chefs and wine experts and snobs basically they knew what they were talking about horror of horrors the American wines one that's extraordinary story but of course the

departure from anything to do with reality is when we shot that scene of the actual wine tasting, it was in about 90 degrees of heat outdoors in Sonoma, where, of course, you couldn't possibly have done that because it would have ruined all the wine.

Right, right, right. But it was visually stunning. It looked good. Yeah, so there he was. So he was the sort of the British merchant who organized this tasting in France. And yeah, America won. In fact, I have tasted the wine that won that contest. It was a 1973 Stag's Leap. Stag's Leap? Cask 23. Wow! Staggley? Cask 23. Wow.

There's Cask 23. Was it actually that good? Staggley, 1973. Now, back then, and still, California wines tend to mature sooner than French wines. So, when the French lost this contest, they would then say, oh, well, the American, because it's 1976 was the contest, it's American wines. The other French wines were in the early 70s, right? So they would say, oh, ours has not shown well yet. Come back in two years.

We will see who wins then. Big. By then it was too late. Genie was out of the bottle. Time magazine was present at the tasting and they ended up writing about it. No other American press was interested in covering it. You know there is a California wine called Rocket Science. Yes in fact I had some of that yesterday. As good as tag sleep? They're coming along. But actually I'm a sucker for a wine label that has cosmic themes. Yeah.

And there's a lot of them. In fact, I think cosmically themed wine labels are like second behind like nature stuff, like flowers and cute animals. Just check it out. There's some with moons and planets and stars. Oh my. Yeah. It's the lucky charms of wine. The yellow brick road, that's the next one.

Yeah, so I'm quite sure that cosmicmic Themes have infused the winemaking. People might have done well in their Astro 101 and showed up on their labels. When we come back, more of my interview with Alan Rick. Alan Rick. Alan Rick. Thank you. We'll see you in a while. Who else more?

Yeah, that one. We're back with StarTalk Radio featuring my interviews with Alan Rickman. Both of you guys cannot imitate the man. I'm sorry. Okay, you're right. It doesn't stop us from trying. It doesn't stop you from trying. And we just came off of that segment with a bottle shock. We're at American Wine,

won this prestigious French competition, set up to showcase how far California had come. And, you know, the science of wine is fascinating. In University of California, Davis, there's an entire school there that specializes in the science of wine.

Yeah. And so, what I like is that the Americans were saying, whatever you guys do in France, because you want to raise it to an art.

In California, they're saying, we're going to bring it down to a science. We will kick your ass with science! We'll blind them with science.

Blind! Drop some science on them, son! we're going to bring it down to a science. We will kick your ass with science! We will blind them with science. What? Blind? Drop some science on them, son! Snap! So, Alan Rickman didn't only do Bottle Shock. He also did one of the campiest, funniest movies ever, Galaxy Quest. Dr. Lazarus. Now, I don't know how many people out there saw the film.

I don't think it was, like, a number one in the charts. But definitely, it's certainly, people out there saw the film. I don't think it was like a number one in the charts, but definitely, it's certainly like a rentable film. And it was about a TV characters from a science fiction show that actual aliens came who had to protect their civilization or something, want them to help them. Because they thought it was real because they got the television signals that went out into space.

We have seen your historical... It was every Trekkies fantasy come true. Every Star Trek fan. Every Star Trek fan. Because you wanted it to be real, and the aliens thought it was real. So Alan Rickman played Dr. Lazarus, right? Is that in the Galaxy Quest?

By Grabfar's hammer, you shall be avenged. Let's go straight to that clip. I just asked him, how does this fit into your acting repertoire? Let's find out what he said. Well, I mean, of course, in Galaxy Quest, I'm trying to think if I've done any others, but that was very particularly about a bunch of actors.

Oh, that's what it was. Okay. Who were all trapped in a really bad TV show. So that's really all I had to know. You were portraying an actor on that. That just didn't occur to me. Possibly a bad actor. Right. Who had, you know, aims of having been in Shakespeare and found himself in a sci-fi show which then

finished 12 years ago and now these actors just go to conventions. Right. Right. And the real aliens showed up. Real aliens showed up unnoticed in the crowd of people wearing my costume. The premise is just so crazy. I mean it's a fun crazy premise and I'm glad you did it because it was, it's there. So this is in his portfolio of acting roles. You know, I just remember,

I know, forgive me, I had to reference my notes. The aliens in the movie called the Thermians and the poital creatures, right? Yeah,

and humanoid form. But they had humanoid form when they were interacting with us. But when you saw them in their true form, they had a humanoid form when they were interacting with us. But when you saw them in their true form, disgusting. So they did it for our benefit so that we wouldn't completely freak out. So Alan made an interesting point that there are actors there who may have trained in Shakespeare and find themselves on a hit TV show

that has nothing to do with Shakespeare. Rickman played that part to perfection, in a sense, because... He looked a little grumpy in that role. Yes, he was supposedly Sir Alexander Dane, a distinguished Shakespearean actor who winds up on TV and now looks like a moron.

In one scene in the movie, he had to go stand in front of a Walmart-like box store with his friends and say, by grab-thar's-hammer, what a savings. Yeah. Oh, at the store. Yeah, and so the whole point of it is that you can take a role

and play with it as much as you want, or you can disdain it and say, that's not part of you, right? In modern Star Trek lore, people are still going around doing exactly the same thing in my one cameo on the Big Bang Theory yeah I chatted with the Raj character right and because he's the astrophysicist on the show and I said oh so what is your background like he's classically trained in in England and he studied studied Shakespeare and then I thought to myself did he ever imagine that he would be best known for

a geeky science kid in a TV sitcom? And so, I guess surely it all folds in, but maybe you've got to go where you've got to roll with it. Yeah, you do. And you hate every minute of it. Until you get a check.

Funny how that just makes everything okay. I'm just really selling my soul here. This is awful. There is no artistic integrity to any of this. How much is this? My God! I'm stealing money!

More in my interview with Alan Rickman. When we come back to StarTalk we're back at StarTalk Radio featuring my interviews with Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman. Oh, it's just awful.

That's why he's Alan Rickman and we're not. So I got Chuck Nice here. Chuck, you're tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic. That's right. And you're tweeting too? I am. I am. Chuck Lou. C-H-U-C-K-L-I-U. Chuck Liu. So education things and cosmic things. Pretty much. We'll have to find you there.

We talked about some of the roles Alan Rickman has played. So his role in the bottle shock, he had to know something about wine, so he had to do some wine homework about that. In fact, that film featured chemical changes in wine because as they portrayed it, although I don't think it actually happened this way in real life, but it added to the drama. The wine, when it was shipped overseas, went through a chemical change for having been sort of jostled because you have to move the wine to where the tasters are. And wine doesn't like being moved any more than you like being moved bottled up and so so the wine has to recover from this and so there's a little bit of chemistry in the

film as well and if you don't know the chemistry you have no feeling for you can't embrace it and you're an actor trying to say convincing chemistry words it doesn't play and and Alan Rickman seems to pull this off each time we talked about what is to learn science and what might prevent you from learning science. So I've got a question. You scored so poorly on your physics exam. I don't know if that scarred you.

Often in America, when people say they get scarred, it's not from an exam score, it's from a really bad teacher. But in either case, they're turned off from science for life. You've had several occasions for science to work its way back in your life, not only in some film roles, but in your role as a heart surgeon. And there's a little bit of chemistry and bottle shock. You're thinking about what goes on inside the wine. So I'm curious, did those forces help you regain an appreciation for science or the role of science just intellectually or even in society? Absolutely, yeah. And you're right. I wish,

I don't want to criticize the teachers I had, but... Go for it. Clearly, there are other ways to teach it. And maybe you have to figure out what kind of child you have to find out how to get this information inside their heads or bodies. The key for individualized teaching, of course, that comes down to. Yeah. And maybe, you know, I've stood on a platform and I've been zapped by computers from every direction so that they can reform me in a computer. You were talking earlier about, you know, we won't need to act anymore. But they did get enough information from me

to then put me into the background of a shot without me having to show up. Oh, my God. So that can be done. So why can't you take a child, put it in a machine and zap it from every angle and figure out which would be the best way to teach it about a subject that it finds difficult. That's the modern actor's version of what we all said in the 70s and 80s. If we could put a man on the moon, we can fill in the rest of the sentence.

Why is this person dyslexic? What's going on? If we can digitize an actor and put him in a scene, why can't we train people to understand the world? Yeah. I love it. I like that. Because I find it fascinating.

There's just something in my brain that refuses to accept the information. It doesn't know what to do with it. It just goes... as soon as you start talking. But okay, but that's one thing to turn yourself off, but it doesn't mean, I don't think you're saying that you don't still stand in awe or appreciation of science. Completely fascinating.

Right. Yeah, yeah. So I like the fact that he still is impressed with what science can do. And yet, because so many people in america they they hate science forever right and then they become anti-science we try to prevent that in the classroom but if we can do around there's some really interesting projects we talked about computer mapping and trying to get people to learn science differently is right on in fact in the university of central florida there is a project called the meteoror Project. Meteor as in meteors that come into space? Yeah, but it's an attempt to teach people about gravity science using computer simulations.

You put electrodes and sensors on a kid, bring him into a room, and he or she pretends to be an asteroid trying to go through and set into orbit, for example, around the planet. So actually they're using their body as a kinesthetic method to learn science. So this is all from cinema. I mean, from movie magic. Right, movie magic type stuff.

And there are scores, and they're trying to find different ways to get people to not just learn on paper how to write this stuff. Okay, but I'm thinking of the video game Asteroids where you shoot them out of the sky. Sure. So who's shooting the asteroid kids as they're going around? That's what I want. That might be in phase two.

That's the National Science Foundation that they're going to fund. But this is legitimate science education research as well as just having a good time. Isn't that what's important? Don't we all learn best when we're having a good time while we're doing it? Yeah. It doesn't have to be something that's easy, right? It's hard to make a jump shot. You know, it's hard to do a mute grab on your board but people will work on it for hour after

hour day after day because they're having a good time because they're having a good time and when he described his role as a surgeon mm-hmm that was a he was operating on a on a child that had the condition was a cold blue baby baby condition. And so he had to think about how the heart worked and all that. Well, we've got to wrap up this hour. But great having you guys here. My gosh.

Such a pleasure. This was a good time. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. You can find us on the web, startalkradio.net. Where else would that be, of course? And we're brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation to do a shout out for the NSF keeping science flowing through the river

channels of our nation and by extension the world and by our radio signal the universe as always keep looking up Neil deGrasse Tyson signing off.