Actually a friend of mine who is a very high-end experimental-type astrophysicist (and a Steelers fan) made exactly the same mistake as Tyson. He saw it at once when I pointed out his error last week. It's an easy enough mistake to make for a physicist who is used to dealing with absolute pressures not gauge pressures.
Of course he still whined about the Colt's balls being fine.
I suspect that the rain was colder than 50 degrees and that there might also have been some evaporative cooling because of the wind (although the relative humidity was obviously very high).
This thread has really become fun, it will probably be the only time in my life that I get to mix my favorite hobby (being a Patsfan) with my day job, thanks people
SlowGettingUp, both you and Bobsmyuncle made a really excellent point that I would like to address. You both point out essentially that "everyone makes mistakes", and so the mistake by Tyson isn't a big deal. I absolutely agree that everyone makes mistakes, in fact, I am an absolute mistake expert. I think I have raised making goofs to an art form.
When I said I couldn't believe that Tyson made that type of freshman physics mistake, what I really should have said is that I absolutely couldn't believe he would
publish that mistake publicly (on twitter) without checking it out. It is just so contrary to what a scientist would do.
Everyone has heard the saying about being a professor, "publish or perish". Well, that means that professors/scientists are supposed to be doing original research (theoretical, experimental, or a combination thereof) that nobody has ever done before, and then publishing those results in a refereed journal to advance the state of the art in that scientific field. My papers have been a combination of experiment and theory calculations (to explain the experiment), and for the calculations you check and re-check and re-check the calculations. Then you have other people re-check the calculations. Then you check the calculations again. And again. You write up the paper, and send it out to colleagues and ask them to try to shoot holes in it. When you are finally happy that the research can't be shot down, you submit it to a scientific journal. The journal sends it out to 'referees" who are experts in the field, and those experts decide whether or not the research is correct, and whether it is important enough to publish. If they recommend publication, it eventually gets published, and you have a new refereed publication that advances the state of the art in your field, and you celebrate a bit.
What is just about the most professionally embarrassing thing that could possibly happen? If you discover later on (or, much more likely, another expert in the field discovers later on) that there is an error in the publication. Then you have to tell the journal the paper is in error, and have the same journal print a "Erratum" that is essentially a new short paper describing what you did wrong last time and making the correction. Thank God I've never had to do that, but it is just about the most professionally traumatic and embarrassing thing a scientist could experience. Of course, the dumber the error, the more embarrassing the correction.
So: that brings us back to Tyson. As as nationally recognized host of "COSMOS" (and perceived by the public as a leading "scientist"), he publicly publishes something that gains national attention that has a simple freshman physics error. And, clearly he couldn't be bothered for even the most cursory check of that calculation, and once scientists call him on it he has to post a retraction. That is what I can't believe, that he didn't bother checking his calculation before publishing it. He must have a decent size ego, if that happened to me I don't think I would ever get out of bed again.