Nye helped develop the MarsDial - a sundial that was included on the Opportunity and Spirit Mars rovers. His latest program, Peacock’s The End is Nye, focuses on human-made and natural calamities that could destroy civilization and how they can be mitigated.īut even when a camera lens is absent, Nye has remained busy. On the air, Nye presented a season of The Eyes of Nye (a more adult science-based program) on KCTS in 2005, and three seasons of Netflix’s Bill Nye Saves the World from 2016 to 2018. He also publicly debated creationist Ken Ham in 2014, in a widely-publicized discussion of evolution versus creationism. He’s written eight children’s books for elementary and middle school students, as well as three books for general audiences. Though new episodes of the beloved PBS show quit airing in 1999, Nye has kept plenty busy as an ambassador for scientific learning. Audiences loved it - and he even won an Emmy from the Seattle chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. It was on Almost Live that his "science guy” persona first graced the airwaves, with Nye doing classic science demonstrations while dressed in a lab coat and safety glasses. It’s worth noting that he was also a volunteer “science explainer” at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center during this time. Nye became a writer and cast member for the show, where he worked until 1991. He soon befriended comedians Ross Shafer and John Keister, who were both part of a new, half-hour sketch show on KING-TV called Almost Live. After splitting his days and nights between engineering and comedy for several years, Nye finally quit his job at Boeing to pursue comedy full-time in 1986. Nye’s path to being on television actually began with stand-up comedy, which he began doing after winning a Steve Martin look-alike contest in 1978. Read More: 4 Things We Have Thanks to Carl Sagan He also set his sights on the heavens, though unsuccessfully he applied to NASA’s astronaut program four times. There, he invented a hydraulic resonance suppressor tube for the 747’s horizontal stabilizer drive system. He even took an astronomy course taught by Carl Sagan.Īfter college, Nye was hired by Boeing and moved to the Seattle area. Bill Nye's Educationįascinated simply by how things worked, Nye later attended Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1977. His father, Edwin Nye, was an airstrip contractor who spent four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. His mother, Jacqueline Jenkins, was a Navy codebreaker. Nye was born in Washington D.C., in 1955, to parents with incredible World War II military stories. But is Bill Nye a scientist? Or, as his classic PBS show suggests, is he just a “science guy?” Young Bill Nye
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