It’s not every day you get a highly publicized, totally sincere spat between two celebrities about science. It’s so rare that people actually create parody videos about imagined battles between scientists, just so we can imagine some drama between the press conferences and the journal publications.
Here’s how it all started: on Saturday, a rapper I haven’t heard of named B.o.B (presumably named after those off-brand robot vacuums) started tweeting some ridiculousness about the earth being flat:
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691411463051804676
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691422284205178880
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691415260134158336
And you know that Twitter’s official science pedant Neil de Grasse Tyson had some things to say about this.
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691630923851436033/photo/1
@bobatl Earth's curve indeed blocks 150 (not 170) ft of Manhattan. But most buildings in midtown are waaay taller than that.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691625693717893121
@bobatl Polaris is gone by 1.5 deg S. Latitude. You’ve never been south of Earth’s Equator, or if so, you've never looked up.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016
Though through it all, he still maintained that the guy can think what he wants to think.
@bobatl Flat Earth is a problem only when people in charge think that way. No law stops you from regressively basking in it.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016
And then…it happened. B.o.B released a track called Flatline. (You can read the lyrics over at Genius.com Update: the track appears to have been removed from B.o.B’s Soundcloud, so we’re including a third-party YouTube video instead).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCA8HofWsxc
Its content is to be expected: this is all a big conspiracy, he’s the only one “free thinking,” the Holocaust didn’t happen…typical conspiracy theorist rhetoric. But it also includes an out-of-context recording of Tyson talking about the shape of the earth. And this:
Aye, Neil Tyson need to loosen up his vest
They’ll probably write that man one hell of a check
Aye, I’m over here on this side of town
Come on over, over, over, over here try to clown
Which, in some circles, might be considered a challenge to a rap battle. (It’s possible that B.o.B only understands scientific facts if they have a beat behind them. If so, I invite him to listen to some of our lovely Lab Tracks.)
Of course, Neil de Grasse Tyson is a scientist, not a rapper, and a scientist trying to beat a rapper in a rap battle is like a rapper trying to debate a scientist on science. (You could just yell “conspiracy!” and win, I suppose.) But Tyson does have a rapper nephew, and he came to fight for his uncle’s honor.
In your face, flat earthers. I cannot wait to see where this goes next.
