Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson seems to enjoy trolling Star Wars fans. Just last month, he declared that there was “no question” that he’d rather fly on Star Trek’s USS Enterprise than on Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon and on Monday he posted a series of thoughts about the newest Star Wars movie on Twitter that served as fact checks to the movie’s scientific errors and inaccuracies. Let’s go through the highlights.
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Here he is critiquing the design of adorable droid BB-8, whom he explained was not properly designed for traversing across rough desert landscapes:
In @StarWars #TheForceAwakens, BB-8, a smooth rolling metal spherical ball, would have skidded uncontrollably on sand.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 21, 2015
Here he is noting that ships in outer space shouldn’t actually be making any audible noises the way they do when they’re inside a planet’s atmosphere:
In @StarWars #TheForceAwakens the TIE fighters made exactly the same sound in the vacuum of space as in planetary atmospheres
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 21, 2015
And here is he ripping The Force Awakens for bungling the proper use of scientific terminology:
Unashamed of inanity, #TheForceAwakens repeats the Millennium Falcon boast of completing the Kessel Run in "under 12 parsecs"
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 21, 2015
( A Parsec is an obscure unit of distance in Astrophysics, equal to 3.26 Light Years. Neither has anything to do with time. )
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 21, 2015
He didn’t just save his ire for scientific inaccuracies in The Force Awakens, however, as he also had some unkind things to say about the Imperial Storm Troopers:
In @StarWars #TheForceAwakens, the Storm Troopers still run as though they’re carrying a full load of poop in their diapers.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 21, 2015
He even makes fun of Star Wars for still using Roman numerals instead of Arabic numbers to label its sequels:
With next year’s @SuperBowl 50 the NFL abandons Roman Numerals, leaving @StarWars as the last bastion of this counting system
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 21, 2015
At any rate, it’s safe to say Tyson won’t be getting a Christmas cards of any sort from J.J. Abrams this year, although he deserves an A+ for trolling people while at the same time supplying factually accurate knowledge.
