… because Scorpios are skeptical.
Via Rebecca comes the news that my mancrush, David Tennant, isn’t the biggest fan of astrology.
Heh. It’s ironic, given all the mumbo-jumbo Doctor Who espouses sometimes. As I’ve said before, the only people the stars affect directly are astronomers.
Still, I recall being much amused when I found out that David Duchovny is a skeptic about most antiscience topics, while Gillian Anderson has more of the touch of the woo.
Real life is always cooler than fiction.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
 | ||
 | Bad Astronomy was chosen as one of Time.com's Best Blogs of 2009. | |
 | Open Lab 2008 is a collection of the best blog posts of the year, all in one place. Are you a science junkie? Yeah, you want it. |
 |
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
February 20th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
BA said “while Gillian Anderson has more of the touch of the woo.”
That’s funny, most times when I see Gillian Anderson, I go “woo!” too.
:p
February 20th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Of course we are all “affected directly” by one certain star.
You knew some dork had to state the obvious.
February 20th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Do his eyes always point in different directions, or is it just that one photo?
February 20th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
“Do his eyes always point in different directions, or is it just that one photo?”
The guy has got two hearts. I’m sure his physiology also allows his eyes to move independently of each other…
February 20th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
According to the site, the audio of the interview should be available soon:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/chainreaction.shtml
February 20th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Mmmmmm…..
Yeeeeep, I’m affected by the stars. At least Tennant. And Barrowman.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm……
February 20th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Sorry, but when pictures of the Doctor or Captain Jack are involved, that’s just about as intellectual as I can be.
And, yeah, I thought I heard something about a star, a mass of incandescent gas, that here on earth there’d be no life, without the light it gives. We need its light, we need its heat.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Dude, I had never seen that, and didn’t knew it existed - almost no one here even knows it exist, just like me.
I thought no channels in my cable TV aired it, so I had no way to see it other than downloading it. But ubber coincidence happenned when I turned on the TV: People and Arts, a channel I never tune in, but is neighboor to one I often tune - was showing Dr. Who, and started right that minute!
Good stuff. But it was an older episode, from 2005 when Christopher Eccleston was the Doctor. David Tennant is still a complete stranger.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
The original show was skeptical, at least in its best moments… the Doctor would often unmask the scientific explanations behind what others regarded as magic. Granted the explanations were pretty far out, but the attitude was right: pro-science, pro-reason.
This is my beef with the new show — too much fantasy, not enough science fiction.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
To me, it didn’t sound skeptical nor wooed, it was just science fiction that was waaay too wacky to have any real connection with reality.
Just suspend that disbelief and enjoy some fun science fiction nonsense for a change.
February 20th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I’m with Nemo. One of my favorite moments in DW is when the fourth Doctor is chastising his superstitious companion, Leela, by saying “EVERYTHING has a scientific explanation!”
February 20th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
He’s an Aries, actually, born 18 April 1971. He is however, dreamy (especially when he doesn’t affect an accent). I’m a Scorpio, and you’re right in that we don’t believe in astrology. Hey, Phil, what’s your sign?
February 20th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
[…] DoctorWho must be a Scorpio […]
February 20th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I love it when people ask what sign I am. I have developed a foolproof answer:
“I’m a capricorn. Which means that I am way too smart to believe in horsepoop like astrology.”
Those who have enough sense of humor to stick around after hearing that might be worth getting to know.
Loved the article, too. I can’t count the hours I whiled away as a kid, contemplating flying carpets, magic spells, Death Star propulsion systems(how do you move an artificial moon throughout the galaxy at any kind of useful speed?) and many more fanciful issues. In the end, such imaginative, almost woo-ish thoughts have made me more of a critical thinker than I might have been if I had never bothered to imagine the possibilities.
February 20th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I think there’s fictional stuff that is simply cooler if it’s not skeptical. I like horror movies, and The Exorcism is a great freaking movie. It’s total crap if any of it were to be considered possible, and I know more than 90% of viewers do.
But I wouldn’t want these works of fiction to be non-existant because people will look at it the wrong way. Then again, maybe I would. It’s a tough balance.
But it’s not like viewers of Doctor Who have the same brain as viewers of Ophra. Or maybe some do. Heck, such tough decisions!
What am I going to eat now?
February 21st, 2008 at 6:26 am
As I had a crush on Christopher Eccleston, I DON’T believe in reincarnation any more!
February 21st, 2008 at 8:20 am
As Doctor Who is total science fiction anyway, it’s not like it can be taken seriously. After all, this is the series that gave us “reverse the neutron flow”.
Anyway, I think my love for David Tennant has actually managed to grow deeper. Can he be anymore awesome?
February 21st, 2008 at 11:09 am
Sometimes I wonder why sci-fi can sometimes contain such horribly wrong science, given that there’s certainly no shortage of knowledgeable people that would gladly sign an NDA and look over scripts for free to point out glaring problems. I can’t think of an example at the moment, but I know I have seen instances of bad science in sci-fi where the real science was cooler than the stuff they made up. And lack of special effects for the proper physics certainly isn’t a problem these days.
I did see an interview on Doctor Who Confidential that makes me a little more grateful about what kind of stuff gets into episodes. One of the producers was commenting on what I thought was one of the better examples of good physics in DW: Peter Davidson’s Doctor is attempting to get from a ship in space to the TARDIS and gets stuck in the middle (I think because somebody pulled him to a stop with a lanyard and then cut the lanyard). He throws a cricket ball against the ship and then catches it on the rebound to provide enough impulse to move him along before he runs out of air.
The producer says he thought that such a thing was *totally impossible* (although he didn’t elaborate). If these are the guys that are making content decisions, be glad for what you get.
February 21st, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Ah. Well, you’re referring to “Four to Doomsday”. As depicted in the (rather low-budget, even by Who standards) episode, it did indeed violate physics. The scene is frequently debated by fans for its scientific accuracy (or reputed lack thereof). The idea is sound, and it does demonstrate an important principle of physics, but it’s depicted all wrong. The way it’s done, the Doctor should just wind up tumbling end over end, possibly drifting towards the TARDIS a bit. Mind you, the budget had something to do with that. I think that was done on the old shooting schedule, where there was roughly a day to get all of the FX shots in for a given episode. That particular one was especially low-budget for a reason; it was somewhat of a “throwaway” episode, the first Davison serial filmed (though the fourth aired). Budget was being saved for “Castrovalva”, and this one’s purpose was mostly to let Davison settle into the character, aired a little ways into the season so that they could really grab audiences with “Castrovalva” and then stick the “break-in” serial where nobody would mind so much if it sucked.
Doctor Who has always had a generally skeptical attitude, and despite the often bizarre settings, haphazard physics (the Fourth Doctor once repeated the old chestnut about bumblebees not being able to fly), and often insufficient research, there has always been a very strong theme of critical thinking running through it.
Magic always took a particular beating on the series. It was usually revealed to be either trickery or merely a form of technology or alien race using physical properties which people just didn’t know about. Clarke’s Law, though never (to my recollection) directly quoted, underlay many episodes. You do see a lot of stuff like hypnotism presented like a 19th Century imaginative fiction novel or a 1950s B movie, but there is an underlying assumption that it’s not magic but rather something that simply hasn’t been discovered by humans as of the latter part of the 20th Century.
One of my favorite bits about astrology comes from “Masque of Mandragora”, a Fourth Doctor story, quoted (and mangled) from memory (for instance, I can’t remember exactly what it was that Hieronymus asked):
HIERONYMUS: What does it mean when the moon is in the house of the Ram and Jupiter is ascendant?
DOCTOR: This is all a great waste of time.
COUNT FEDERICO: Answer him.
DOCTOR: Well, it depends, doesn’t it?
HIERONYMUS: On what?
DOCTOR: On whether the cock crows three times before daybreak and a hen lays three addled eggs.
HIERONYMUS: What school of philosophy is this?
DOCTOR: I can easily teach him. All it takes is a cunning imagination and a glib tongue.
Other good lines from the series:
“Nothing is inexplicable: only unexplained.”
(Fourth Doctor, but I don’t remember which episode offhand. I like to quote this one, though.)
“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit the views, which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts which needs altering.”
(The Doctor discussing how the evil computer in “Face of Evil” planned to kill him because he could prove that the elaborate fiction it had concocted was all a lie.)
“Allow me to congratulate you, sir. You have the most totally closed mind I have ever encountered.”
(Third Doctor, to someone who absolutely refused to accept evidence)
“We start getting proof and we stop believing.”
“With this proof, we don’t have to believe.”
(Two members of the Sevateem, Leela’s tribe, discovering the truth of their “god” and the Tesh, their sworn enemies and undergoing a religious epiphany.)
“Never guess. Unless you have to. There’s enough uncertainty in the universe as it is.”
(From Logopolis, this one was also sort of a nod to the themes of chaos and entropy running through the episode.)
February 21st, 2008 at 2:29 pm
“As depicted in the (rather low-budget, even by Who standards) episode, it did indeed violate physics. … The way it’s done, the Doctor should just wind up tumbling end over end, possibly drifting towards the TARDIS a bit. Mind you, the budget had something to do with that.”
I knew I should have mentioned the tumbling bit, because it had occurred to me as well, and I chalked it up to limitations of simulating zero-G in front of a green screen.
I remember some of the other things you mentioned; maybe those are part of the reason Tom Baker is still my favorite Doctor.
February 21st, 2008 at 8:25 pm
@Rebochan: I thought it was “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”, a line I heard uttered as late as Doctor #5 (Peter Davison).
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:41 am
Geez! How many mancrushes do you have?
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Fan Factoid:
“Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” was a bit of generic bafflegab developed during the Pertwee era. Legend has it that Pertwee came up with it himself because he had difficulty remembering some of the more bizarre bits of technobabble, and had quite pragmatically realized that it didn’t actually matter what he said as long as it sounded important and was delivered with confidence. He used the line often enough that it stuck, and it is now firmly entrenched in Who lore as the ultimate solution to any technological problem where the actual mechanism for solving the problem doesn’t actually matter to the script.
February 23rd, 2008 at 7:09 am
O.K., now we are going to get really geeky.
Although lot’s of polarities got reversed in the Pertwee era (starting with his second story, ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’), the only time a neutron flow got the treatment was in ‘The Sea Devils’, where it was apparently needed to convert an ordinary radio into a transmitter.
Years later, in interviews, Pertwee would use it as an example of the sort of thing he’d make up if he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to have said. In the days before repeats, DVD’ etc. many fans assumed from his interviews that it must have been said countless times, and it took on the importance Calli Arcale describes above.
One result of this was that Terrence Dicks wrote the line into ‘The Five Doctors’. In addition, it is no coincidence that the Tenth Doctor ‘reversed the polarity’ in ‘The Lazarus Experiment’.