Bill Nye

Overview

Born
November 27, 1955 · Washington, District of Columbia, USA
Birth name
William Sanford Nye
Nicknames
- Bill Nye the Science Guy
- The Science Guy
Height
6′ 0½″ (1.84 m)

Mini Bio

Family

Spouses

Trademarks

Always appears with bow-tie and lab coat

Trivia

Quit working at Boeing in the early '80s to become a stand-up comedian.
Worked as an engineer at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle, and appeared in at least 3 training films, some of which are still popular among the workers there.
An honored as Rhodes Class of '56 Visiting Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he received his Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. He studied under Carl Sagan.
Started his career after he won a Steve Martin lookalike contest.
He is the son of Jacqueline Blanche (Jenkins) and Edwin Darby "Ned" Nye, a quartermaster in the military during World War II. His father spent nearly four years as a prisoner of war mostly in China in a Japanese P.O.W camp. He later moved to Washington, D.C., where he discovered dozens of sundials. He photographed them and wrote an unusual book, "Sundials of Maryland and Virginia." Thus resulted a little family business selling Ned Nye's "Sandial®," a sundial suitable for the beaches of the Atlantic seaboard.

Quotes

[advice to young scientists] Try things then clean up after yourself. Then try some more things and clean that up too.
Our country is the only country in the world that has some people that don't believe in evolution. America is still the leader in scientific advancement, and yet we have adults who want to ignore the evidence of millions and millions of years to believe something much more complicated and complex with zero proof. It's important that our children are raised to be educated, well-rounded tax paying citizens that understand the importance of technology and science. If you're an adult and you choose not to believe in science, fine, but please don't prevent your children from learning about it and letting them draw their own conclusions. I think in 30-40 years this won't even be an issue, but right now it's a major concern for a country that has a significant amount of adults raising children to ignore the facts and the evidence surrounding them about our universe, our creation and our well-being.
Science rules!
[on how he makes the average person understand science] You have to have learning objectives - things you want to get across. You want to make a point: Humans and dinosaurs did not live concurrently. If you get the adjacent carbon dating of volcanic soil, hat's cool. But what I want you to get is that ancient dinosaurs and humans did not live at the same time. The rest is gravy.
[on climate change, 2019] I didn't mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were twelve. But you're adults now, and this is an actual crisis.