William Sanford "Bill" Nye, popularly known as Bill Nye the Science Guy, is an American science educator, comedian, television presenter, actor, writer, scientist, and former mechanical engineer, best known in popular media as a science educator.
Schools Attended: Lafayette Elementary School and Sidwell Friends School both in Washington, DC. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
Worked as an engineer at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle, and appeared in at least 3 training films, some of which are still popular among the workers there.
Started his career after he won a Steve Martin lookalike contest.
His father, Edwin D. "Ned" Nye, a quartermaster in the military during World War II, spent nearly four years as a prisoner of war mostly in China in a Japanese P.O.W camp. He later moved to Washington, DC, where he discovered dozens of sundials. He photographed them and wrote an unusual book, "Sundials of Maryland and Virginia." Thus resulted a little family business selling Ned Nyes "Sandial," a sundial suitable for the beaches of the Atlantic seaboard.
Self-proclaimed geek in high school. He wore a tie every day, even when that aspect of the dress code was phased out. He graduated from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC.
He designed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor which is used in Boeing 747s.
His first childhood memory is throwing a rubber band-powered airplane, the Sky Streak, and figuring out how to make it turn left so he could stay in one place and make the plane come back to him.
An honored as Rhodes Class of 56 Visiting Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he received his Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. He studied under Carl Sagan.
Premiered his Science Guy character on the Seattle sketch comedy show "Almost Live!" .
Enjoys 30s/40s-style swing dancing and attended dances at the most recent Camp Hollywood.
Announced he was engaged to be married to Blair Tindall on "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" in December 2005. The "marriage" lasted less than a month before it was either annulled or deemed invalid (sources disagree on the detail). In November 2007, Nye filed for a restraining order against "ex-fiance" Tindall, saying that he wondered if she might have poured solvent on his garden. The restraining order was later dismissed.
Good friends with Kevin Brauch.
Quit working at Boeing in the early 80s to become a stand-up comedian.
Lives in Los Angeles. Neighbors include Ed Begley Jr. and Alex Trebek.
One of his characters on the Seattle-based sketch show, "Almost Live", was a humorless caped superhero, Speed Walker.
One of his "Almost Live" co-stars in Seattle was Bob Nelson, screenwriter of "Nebraska".
His maternal grandmother, Lucy Marie Berta Briot, was French. His other ancestry includes English, Welsh, and Irish.
[advice to young scientists] Try things then clean up after yourself.
Then try some more things and clean that up too.
Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.
History is but the record of the public and official acts of human beings. It is our object, therefore, to humanize our history and deal with people past and present; people who ate and possibly drank; people who were born, flourished and died; not grave tragedians, posing perpetually for their photographs.
People love dogs. This is, I hope, the least surprising sentence you will read in this book. I myself have had long discussions with my dog friends, and by that I mean my friends who are dogs.
Science is the best idea humans have ever had.
We are both great men but I have succeeded better in keeping it a profound secret than he has.
Tax dollars intended for science education must not be used to teach creationism as any sort of real explanation of nature, because any observation or process of inference about our origin and the nature of the universe disproves creationism in every respect.
But investment in space stimulates society, it stimulates it economically, it stimulates it intellectually, and it gives us all passion.
Everyone, red state, blue state, everyone supports space exploration.
Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.
Unlike science, creationism cannot predict anything, and it cannot provide satisfactory answers about the past.
We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.
You can believe what you want religiously. Religion is one thing, but science, provable science, is something else.
Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us. .
