Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Famed Black Astrophysicist, Responds To Terrence Howard’s Crazy ‘Math’ Theory

We all know there’s a shortlist of entertainers who simply aren’t all the way there upstairs. A checkered personal past, sketchy interviews or just…an inexplicable weird feeling make us question everything they say that’s not directly from a script or from a sheet of lyrics.

Terrence “Mayne” Howard was of those entertainers for years before he fell in his tinfoil hat bag during a 2015 Rolling Stone interview at the height of his “Empire” fame. In addition to working to explain away all the women he’s allegedly physically assaulted, Howard introduced us to the notion that 1 times 1 equals 2 – something that flies in the face of what we were all taught before we grew pubes – and that we’ve been “lied to” about basic math for years.

That, alone, is all the information you need to know that Howard is a bit touched and that anything he has to say about math should be taken with the finest grain of salt. Yet, here we are again nine years later thanks to his recent appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” during which he was given hours of free rein to convince listeners that his version of “math (which I’ll henceforth call “maffs”) disproves the “conventional” math that undergirds the entirety of human creation.

Now, it’s worth noting that Rogan managed to build the single biggest podcast in the world by hosting conspiracy theorists trading on wholesale idiocy…often in support of white supremacy. He even had Katt Williams, fresh off his “Club Shay Shay” popularity, bless his podcast with the bullshit in late February. The popularity of “The Joe Rogan Experience” should have us collectively weeping for humanity.

At any rate, getting into the specifics of Howard’s claims in search of any true enlightenment would be a waste of three hours you could use to watch “Killers of the Flower Moon.” But we learn that Howard has applied for patents on virtual and augmented reality, though whether he was actually owns them is questionable. He also apparently spends much of his (apparently sizable) free time by creating shapes that offer some purported “portal” into a higher state of conscious maffs.

Never one to miss out on a good mess, TMZ asked Howard about his maffs last week. He used the phrase “Jim Crow law of mathematics” — managing to racialize the one thing that really can’t be racialized.

Fortunately, Howard had the presence of mind to evoke famed Black astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Rogan podcast. Howard admitted that Tyson rebuffed his 36-plus page treatise, which isn’t remotely surprising considering Tyson has carved out a career as the great equalizer of empiricism – unwilling to suffer religious or superstitious bona fides because they make you feel good. Just peep how he comes for the Mercury-in-microbraids contingent during a recent conversation with Amber Rose.

Tyson responded to the viral Howard-Rogan interview with his own 17-minute video in which he explains, as delicately as he can, why he applied some version of a scholarly peer review to determine that Howard’s treatise is an uncontained grease fire. Of course, you don’t need a college degree to put two and two together (haha), but one or several degrees usually accompany something as bold as Howard’s concepts.

And, well…Howard has zero degrees. So, Tyson is better than me for sifting through 36 pages of maffs conceived by the dude who was playing Michael Jackson’s older brother Jackie in an ABC miniseries instead of finishing his undergraduate degree.

What Howard demonstrates in spades is the Dunning-Kruger effect, which essentially is when someone overestimates their own knowledge on a given subject. (see also: Donald Trump in most things). Applying for patents on math that doesn’t check out is like applying for a patent on medical equipment when you’re a manager at Sonic — it demonstrates that Howard has a tenuous relationship with reality, but he’s famous, so his f***ery is allowed a platform.

Allow Howard – and Tyson by proxy – to serve as a reminder that empiricism matters: Being misunderstood doesn’t make you a genius, and being superstitious or religious doesn’t make you correct. Georgia’s Lake Lanier isn’t “haunted” because a handful of its 10 million annual visitors drown every year. Karen in accounts receivable isn’t being an asshole because of the positioning of Mercury in the cosmos — she’s an asshole regardless of what the planets do.

Or, as Tyson puts it in his video, “It’s not about feelings here…it’s about objective reality.”