"Hey Bill Nye, Are We the Universe?" #tuesdayswithbill | Big Think

"Hey Bill Nye, Are We the Universe?"

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For this week’s #tuesdayswithbill, The Science Guy takes us on a journey through the skeptic’s brain to answer a question about spiritual existence. Are we spiritually or electronically connected to each other and everything else? Bill doesn’t believe so because what we’re talking about is something impalpable. There’s no way to test for things like spirits and chakras. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but it does mean we should have to reason to believe they exist.

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BILL NYE:

Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life.

In Seattle Nye began to combine his love of science with his flair for comedy, when he won the Steve Martin look-alike contest and developed dual careers as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. Nye then quit his day engineering day job and made the transition to a night job as a comedy writer and performer on Seattle’s home-grown ensemble comedy show “Almost Live.” This is where “Bill Nye the Science Guy®” was born. The show appeared before Saturday Night Live and later on Comedy Central, originating at KING-TV, Seattle’s NBC affiliate.

While working on the Science Guy show, Nye won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing, and producing. The show won 18 Emmys in five years. In between creating the shows, he wrote five children’s books about science, including his latest title, “Bill Nye’s Great Big Book of Tiny Germs.”

Nye is the host of three currently-running television series. “The 100 Greatest Discoveries” airs on the Science Channel. “The Eyes of Nye” airs on PBS stations across the country.

Bill’s latest project is hosting a show on Planet Green called “Stuff Happens.” It’s about environmentally responsible choices that consumers can make as they go about their day and their shopping. Also, you’ll see Nye in his good-natured rivalry with his neighbor Ed Begley. They compete to see who can save the most energy and produce the smallest carbon footprint. Nye has 4,000 watts of solar power and a solar-boosted hot water system. There’s also the low water use garden and underground watering system. It’s fun for him; he’s an engineer with an energy conservation hobby.

Nye is currently the Executive Director of The Planetary Society, the world’s largest space interest organization.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Cory: Hi Bill. Cory here from Vermont, the beautiful state of Vermont. I'm a huge fan, by the way. Thank you for everything that you do. So my one question to you is I've been reading a lot of things about spirituality and electric impulses, you know, really I guess stemming through our entire anatomy and kind of the concept that our universe is us and we are our universe. A little out there, I get it. I know. My question is to you, what do you think about that? Thank you.

Bill Nye: Cory, this is a great question. We, in the skeptical community, are very skeptical that there's any life force running through us other than chemical energy that makes us go. Now, I'll give you an example. Yoga. People do a lot of yoga and the big thing in yoga is to stay flexible, to stretch, to make sure your bones and muscles stay limber through your whole life and it's very effective and people get a lot out of it. But along that line, there are claims that you have these sources of energy in your body that, my understanding, are called chakras, but no one has been ever able to observe a chakra. I mean, they're an idea and you might experience it in your mind, but there's nobody who's been able to cut open a human or a mouse and X-ray a human, tap on a human, listen to a human with a stethoscope, or take human blood samples, and detect a chakra. It just hasn't happened.

With that said, people get a lot of comfort out of communities to know that other people are thinking the same way you're thinking. There's a team, essentially the human team, we'd all work together if push came to shove. But I am very skeptical that there's this life force that runs through us all. People have gone looking for it from a scientific standpoint for centuries. Now remember, there's a couple ideas in science that are very important and they're described nowadays in what's called critical thinking; your ability to...

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