Monday, November 14, 2011

Bad Astronomy day at Rice

Today we hosted Phil Plait for our annual Rorschach Lecture (see here), a series in honor of Bud Rorschach dedicated to public outreach and science policy. He kept us fully entertained with his Death from the Skies! talk, with a particularly amusing litany of (a small subset of) the scientific flaws in "Armageddon". There was a full house in our big lecture hall - there's no question that astro has very broad popular appeal (though it did bring out the "Obama should be impeached immediately because he's not protecting us from possible asteroid impacts!" crowd).

3 comments:

  1. The impeachment crowd was a very surreal addition to what is normally a pretty sedate event. The speaker was more than gracious in his handling of it.

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  2. Anonymous1:25 AM

    It didn't seem like much of a crowd to me, only two audience members who had similar 'questions' to Phil. Although i was rather amused and curious to see how Phil dealt with such people, others in audience did seem to not care for the long-winded incoherent ranting.

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  3. Astronomy is the queen of science.No doubt about that!

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