Dr. Science Mixes Physics, Humor to Concoct Show : Entertainment: He helped build the jet stream, he tells National Public Radio listeners. And Velcro holds us all together.

He helped build the jet stream. He explains that Velcro is what holds your skeleton together. And he might convince you that your vacuum cleaner would be silent if it weren’t for all that noisy dirt it’s sucking up.

So who couldn’t like Dr. Science?

“I think it’s people who don’t have a sense of humor,” he said. “I offend their sense of propriety.”

Dr. Science, played by Dan Coffey, has been offering scrambled science since 1982. The daily, 90-second Dr. Science show currently runs on 80 public radio stations and Coffey is a frequent guest on National Public Radio’s “Science Friday” talk show.

“Some people think he’s denigrating science or putting it down,” said Jim Trefil, a physics professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

“They should lighten up a little. Dr. Science isn’t into science; he’s into humor.”

Trefil is often paired, via satellite, with Dr. Science on “Science Friday.” Trefil gives the real science, while Coffey explains, for example, that rainbows had psychedelic colors in the ‘60s but now come in subdued corporate shades.

“We get a lot of mail about Dr. Science and if you must know the truth, some of it comes from people who write 16-page diatribes that we have a responsibility to be more serious,” said NPR producer Karen Hopkin, a former biochemist.

But she said most people in science can take a joke.

“He makes everything sound so serious. He has that deep, authoritative, I’m-going-to-tell-you-the-ultimate-truth voice. What comes out is sheer lunacy,” she said.

Coffey said it’s not unusual for a public radio station to ax Dr. Science.

“Usually why I get kicked off, they’re not used to having programming that’s controversial. If five people call the radio station and say, ‘I hate that,’ they’ll take it off the air. Public radio, they’re thin-skinned,” Coffey said.

He said he makes about $300 a month from the show. His real job is selling TV advertising in Iowa.

Some people have complained that that Dr. Science is dangerous to education, but his manager, Steve Baker, just laughs.

“He sounds like an authority, but the kids spot him as phony right away.”

Coffey and Merle Kessler, who plays his announcer, took their Dr. Science show to television in 1987-88 when Fox agreed to 13 half-hour episodes on Saturday mornings.

“We got great reviews but we got clobbered by the Muppet Babies and the Care Bears. The Care Bears, they’re ruthless,” Baker said.

Now Coffey says his humor won’t work on commercial stations: “It’s too dingy, too absurd for Joe and Jane Lunchbucket.”

Absurd to the point of claiming that researchers have a prototype vehicle that can travel faster than light, although it’s “the equivalent of driving down the freeway backwards with your headlights not only out, but actually chasing you down the road. This is why so many scientists today no longer own a driver’s license.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The World According to Dr. Science

A sampling of the wisdom of Dr. Science:

* “I helped build the jet stream. Back in the 1960s, the jet stream was a way to get airplanes from one place to another without using engines. We’ve still got a jet stream, but nobody uses it.”

* “There are ways of answering questions even when you have no data at your disposal. It involves the use of disposable data.”

* “Vacuum cleaners are in themselves silent. What makes the noise you find offensive are the actual particles of dirt and pollution in the space being cleaned. If your living room were clean when you vacuumed, then your vacuum cleaner would make no noise at all. The flaw in all of this, of course, is that if your living room were clean, you wouldn’t be vacuuming. Since there are no perfectly clean rooms, scientists had to prove this hypothesis by vacuuming in outer space, itself a perfect vacuum. Space is also incredibly clean. Astronauts reported that even the most powerful, poorly maintained vacuum cleaners made absolutely no noise in space. Millions of your tax dollars went toward proving this.”

* “It’s Velcro that holds the skeleton together. When the body decomposes, only Velcro is left. Indeed, this is the naturally occurring source of Velcro. It’s a grisly job, scraping it off the bones.”

* To the question of why light moves at only 186,000 miles per second: “Scientists are working on this. There is already a prototype vehicle that travels at 200,000 miles per second. This is the equivalent of driving down the freeway backwards with your headlights not only out, but actually chasing you down the road. This is why so many scientists today no longer own a driver’s license.”

* On whether cobwebs should be cleaned: “You could, but your entire house would fall down within minutes. They’re actually held together by cobwebs. Once you begin to unravel them, like a sweater with a loose piece of thread, it will just completely go. So leave them alone and spray them with lacquer to ensure their safety.”

Source: Associated Press