The Washington Post recently profiled astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, someone whom I’d previously encountered only on The Daily Show. I guess that speaks to my cultural illiteracy, since Time magazine picked him this year as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Tyson has become a media personality by stepping into the science popularizer role that used to be filled by Carl Sagan.

Near the end of the piece, staff writer David Segal reported on Tyson’s encounter with director James Cameron:

Tyson remembers watching Titanic and noticing that the stars over Kate Winslet’s head as she floated in the ocean were a fictional hodgepodge of constellations—and that the right half of the sky simply mirrored the left half.

“That’s just lazy,” Tyson grumbles. “We know the longitude, the latitude, the time that the Titanic sank. A $50 software program would show you exactly what the night would have looked like.”

When Tyson later met director James Cameron at a NASA conference, he picked this nit. Tyson still remembers Cameron’s reply: “Last time I checked, Titanic sold $1.3 billion worth of tickets, worldwide. Imagine how many more tickets we would have sold if we’d gotten the sky right.”

Touché, Tyson thought.

“What an ass,” Edelman thought. (more…)