Wallace Baine, Baine Street: Why the silence on science?

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a rock star.

Or, maybe it's better to compare the country's most famous astrophysicist to a sports star, the kind who'll spend two hours after every game autographing anything thrust in his direction.

If you have anything more than a passing familiarity with the mass media, you will have noticed that, in the past couple of weeks, this cat has been everywhere: CNN, Colbert, NPR, The New Yorker, Reddit, Good Morning Bakersfield.

I called him up last week and asked if he could come over and tell me about dark energy while I was eating breakfast. I woke up to find him cooking scrambled eggs in my kitchen.

Not that Tyson "NdT" to his friends is doing all this media slogging just for giggles. He's the host of the new Fox iteration of the old show "Cosmos," and he's doing his rounds. By taking on "Cosmos" to explain, educate and entertain audiences with astrophysics, Tyson is making explicit what has been implicit for years: That he is the heir to the late Carl Sagan as America's most famous science "popularizer."

Yes, it's an odd term, awkward, a bit condescending. But it's an indication of how rarely scientists and mainstream audiences actually talk to each other that we haven't come up with a better term for what Tyson does.

So, why is Tyson reviving a documentary show from the 1980s? To me, that's not a very interesting question. The better question is: Why aren't there more like him?

We live in a culture that produces battalions of celebrities, platoons of movie stars, brigades of reality-TV narcissists, posturing hip-hoppers, barely dressed divas, snarky comics, political big-mouths and cable talking heads. That's what we do in America create and maintain fame.

Yet, when it comes to science the very stuff of human intellectual development and exploration Tyson stands pretty much alone on the mountain of celebrity.

How many famous scientists can you name other than Tyson and Sagan?

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Wallace Baine, Baine Street: Why the silence on science?