Neil deGrasse Tyson may be the most recognizable astronomer on Earth these days, in part due to his frequent appearances on The Colbert Report. Earlier this year In 2010, Colbert sat down with Neil at the Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey and chatted with him about life, the Universe, and everything. Colbert did this out of his TV character — well, mostly — and even though it’s over an hour, it’s well worth your time. The original video is on the Hayden Planetarium site, but it’s also all over the place, including YouTube. I’ve embedded it here for your enjoyment, too.

Neil and I agree on a wide variety of topics, and he’s doing a great job inspiring people to look beyond their own immediate surroundings.

Oh, it’s so hard to maintain my long-standing feud with Stephen Colbert when he does stuff like this.

I suppose I could take him to task for saying Obama is canceling the manned space program — sigh — but even with that this is still a terrific clip. And I’m over my Colbert obsession anyway. I have new sights to set… Craigy? Craig? Oh, Craiiiigggg…?

My friend and Hive Overmind co-blogger Sean Carroll is a theoretical cosmologist, which means he thinks about why the Universe is the way it is, and applies what we know about physics and mathematics to try to understand it. His particular interest is the flow of time, and why it goes from the past to the future. That may seem like a weird thing, but in fact we don’t understand why we remember the past and not the future. Space goes in all directions, but time is a one-way street. Why?

This question is so interesting, in fact, that it caught the attention of noted scientist and thinker Stephen Colbert, who discussed it (and Sean’s new book, From Eternity to Here) on his TV show last week. I highly recommend taking a look at the clip Sean has on his blog; he’s a great example of not only someone trying to pry open the secrets of everything, but also of someone who enjoys doing it, and does a great job explaining it under what must be the high-pressure gaze of Colbert. My congrats to Sean for joining the long list of my friends who have been on that TV show, and of course I’m not jealous at all. Really. Not even a little tiny bit. Seriously.

As promised, Brian Cox was on The Colbert Report last night, and hit it out of the park. The whole show was better than average (which is saying a lot) but Brian truly rocked!

If you missed it (and live in the States) the whole episode is online (Brian’s segment is about 13:50 into the episode). Comedy Central won’t allow embedding the whole show (sigh), and Brian’s segment isn’t separated out on the CC site, but right before he was on Colbert ragged on physics and the LHC:

In the full segment, they talk about Brian’s book Why E=mc², which was excellent. I’ll try to write a review of it as soon as I can. In the meantime, I do have to praise Colbert for his insight; as Brian points out he was correct in his ideas! I was cheering along with the segment. It still cracks me up that the smartest and most insightful commentary on TV is not from any of the "real" news stations, but from satirical shows like Colbert and The Daily Show. They have better science coverage than CNN, MSNBC and anyone else combined.