(SP) – Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson has strong words for anyone who thinks that basketball stars such as LeBron James and Michael Jordan are able to fly when dunking a basketball: they can’t.
“I hear it all the time on the sports highlights shows about this guy or that guy is defying gravity,” the scientist said today while appearing on TMZ Sports. “It it makes me want to scream at my television. No one, no matter how great of an athlete they are, can defy the laws of gravity. We are all bound by the same scientific laws, and strength and power can only allow someone to get at most a couple feet higher off the surface of the earth than you or I can, which is an insignificant amount when you consider the vast size of the cosmos.”
While some would argue that people don’t believe Jordan and James and other NBA high fliers can literally fly, America’s self-proclaimed science expert believes it “very much matters that scientific impossibilities are not bandied about in the culture.”
“You see the negative impact the idea of flying basketball players has already,” says Tyson. “You have a player in Kyrie Irving who believes our planet is flat now. Basketball did this to him. And I think it all started with the movie Space Jam. It told a generation of children that people can fly, that basketball-playing aliens exist and that there is magical juice that can make cartoon figures into incredible athletes. It was all a lie.”
DeGrasse Tyson then excused himself from the interview to go to the bathroom and breathe in deeply the smells of his own waste.
