Neil deGrasse Tyson lost last night on Celebrity Jeopardy! Granted, the questions skewed toward pop culture – the Final Jeopardy answer was about the Muppets – but he failed to buzz in on one rare science question (and got good-natured ribbing from his fellow contestants for that). Later, he didn’t seem to know that Mt. Etna is in Sicily. And when shown a picture of President Grant, and told that his first name was the same as the title of a novel by James Joyce, all of which takes place in a single day, he – like the two actors on either side of him – stood clueless. This seemed especially embarrassing, for all of them, as it illuminated an ignorance not just of literature but of history. True, we weren’t all English majors, but we all studied American presidents. And who can forget Ulysses S. Grant?
Two actors and an astrophysicist can.
