If you recently watched Alfonso Cuaron’s marvelous outer-space odyssey Gravity, you probably walked out of the theater with your mind just a little bit blown. Or, if you’re renowned astrophysicist and science distributor Neil deGrasse Tyson, you came out and decided to kill everyone’s buzz by nitpicking the film.
Heads up, some of these tweets contain spoilers.
Tyson’s observations—mostly framed as cheeky/smarmy “mysteries”—ran a full gamut, from being prickly but informative:
Mysteries of #Gravity: How Hubble (350mi up) ISS (230mi up) & a Chinese Space Station are all in sight lines of one another.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: When Clooney releases Bullock's tether, he drifts away. In zero-G a single tug brings them together.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Nearly all satellites orbit Earth west to east yet all satellite debris portrayed orbited east to west
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
…to just sort of annoyingly nitpicky:
Mysteries of #Gravity: Astronaut Clooney informs medical doctor Bullock what happens medically during oxygen deprivation.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 7, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Why Bullock's hair, in otherwise convincing zero-G scenes, did not float freely on her head.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
…to non-annoying and fully interesting:
The film #Gravity should be renamed "Angular Momentum"
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
FYI: Angular Momentum — The tendency, once set rotating, to keep rotating, unless another force acts to slow or stop it.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 7, 2013
Earth's gravity extends to infinity. To experience "zero-G" simply requires you move through space without rockets firing.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 7, 2013
Earth's gravity extends to infinity. To experience "zero-G" simply requires you move through space without rockets firing.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 7, 2013
Fall towards Earth. Fall towards the Moon. Fall towards Mars. Fall towards anywhere at all, you'll be weightless in zero-G
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 7, 2013
An Orbit is a continual state of free fall, but while moving so fast sideways that the surface curves away at the same rate.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 7, 2013
Cool Experiment: Poke a hole anywhere in a paper cup of water. Drop cup. Water, while weightless in free fall, stops spewing.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 7, 2013
Thought Experiment: Stand on a scale in an elevator. Cut the cable. You, the scale, and the elevator fall — scale reads zero
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 7, 2013
…to, on a couple of occasions, just flat-out annoying:
Mysteries of #Gravity: Why we enjoy a SciFi film set in make-believe space more than we enjoy actual people set in real space
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Why anyone is impressed with a zero-G film 45 years after being impressed with "2001:A Space Odyssey"
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Sheesh, you’d think a scientist would get the concept of a false equivalency!
In the end, Tyson reassured the world that he enjoyed the movie, too:
My Tweets hardly ever convey opinion. Mostly perspectives on the world. But if you must know, I enjoyed #Gravity very much.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 7, 2013
As much as I’d like to bag on Tyson for killing everyone’s buzz, for the most part I enjoyed his Twitter fact-checking tirade. I’d imagine watching Gravity as Neil deGrasse Tyson is a bit like watching The Wizard as a hardcore gamer—you see every little thing they got wrong, and can’t help but want to tell people.
I tend to be with The Village Voice‘s Stephanie Zacharek, who writes, “Incidentally, the first person who tries to tell me Gravity is “unrealistic” or “implausible” is going to get a mock-Vulcan salute and a kick in the pants.” But okay, okay. Astrophysicists get a pass.
