Pink Floyd’s undisputed classic The Dark Side Of The Moon doesn’t have many flaws, but celebrity science guy Neil deGrasse Tyson has a bone to pick with the band and their album, handing them the blame for making a large part of the population a bit confused about how the moon actually works.
Leading off from a chat about that whole issue of ‘Flat Earth’ believers with The Hollywood Reporter, the acclaimed astrophysicist went on to describe how Pink Floyd’s seminal LP managed to create a huge amount of extra work for him over the course of his career by creating a worldwide misconception: that the moon has a ‘dark side’.
“I blame Pink Floyd for this,” he begins. There is no dark side! There’s a far side, and there’s a near side, but all sides of the moon receive sunlight.
“So, the fact that Pink Floyd had an album with that title meant I spent decades having to undo people’s [misconceptions]. As an educator, if I had a time machine, I’d go back and change the title of that to ‘The Far Side Of The Moon’, and I would restore thousands of hours of my life.”
He then notes that, while the band did almost correct their mistake at the very end of the title track by saying “there is no dark side of the moon”, they managed to add to the confusion yet again by finishing with “it’s all dark”, making Neil deGrasse Tyson’s life even more difficult.
Of course, he’s nowhere near as annoyed about this as he is when it comes to artists like B.o.B who insist that the Earth is flat. In fact, he even got into a Twitter beef with the slightly confused rapper, who then proceeded to hit him with an actual diss track.
Meanwhile, our local music-minded scientist Dr Karl does most of his educating by hitting munted festival punters with a dose of science knowledge when they least expect it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks Pink Floyd have made us all just a little dumber
