Star Power

The Flaw in 'Titanic'

On a shelf in Tyson's office there's a framed copy of a New Yorker cartoon showing four scientists working in a lab. Three are white, one is black. The thought bubbles of the whites show questions like, "I wonder what he thinks of Farrakhan?" and "I wonder what he thinks about O.J.?" The thought bubble of the black scientist contains a complicated mathematical formula.

"There's much less of this in the last 10 years, but I used to be the token commenter on all that is black in the world," Tyson says. " 'What do you think of the Rodney King riots?' Well, actually I was thinking about the universe."

In 1988, Tyson was interviewed by a Fox news team after reports about menacing-sounding blobs headed from the sun toward Earth. Tyson watched his performance that night and was struck by a singular thought. "I may have been the very first black person -- certainly the first black person I ever noticed -- to appear on TV as an expert on something that had nothing to do with being black. This was 1988. That's tragic. I shouldn't be the first anything. I should be the hundredth. Or the thousandth.

"But there's been an evolutionary change, I'm happy to report. There are visible blacks in professions that have nothing to do with being black now. And the more there are, the less able you are to construct a stereotype."

Dismantling stereotypes is a side benefit of Tyson's principal calling, which he describes as feeding the national appetite for information about the universe. That and, when the occasion arises, encouraging a little more scientific rigor from Hollywood producers. Tyson remembers watching "Titanic" and noticing that the stars over Kate Winslet's head as she floated in the ocean were a fictional hodgepodge of constellations -- and that the right half of the sky simply mirrored the left half.

"That's just lazy," Tyson grumbles. "We know the longitude, the latitude, the time that the Titanic sank. A $50 software program would show you exactly what the night would have looked like."

When Tyson later met director James Cameron at a NASA conference, he picked this nit. Tyson still remembers Cameron's reply: "Last time I checked, 'Titanic' sold $1.3 billion worth of tickets, worldwide. Imagine how many more tickets we would have sold if we'd gotten the sky right."

Touché, Tyson thought. But when the 10th-anniversary edition of the movie was being readied for release on DVD, a post-production staffer with Cameron's company called Tyson for some advice.

Rent "Titanic" now and take note of the sky. Nice show, to paraphrase a 9-year-old, and it is the real universe.