Bill Nye ’77: Bringing sunlight to campus and hope to television

Bill Nye ’77 has seen the end of the world.

In the first half of each episode of “The End is Nye,” his new streaming series on Peacock, life on Earth — and Nye along with it — is destroyed in a dramatic, yet all-too-plausible fashion. In the second half, television’s beloved “Science Guy” lays strategies for averting such disasters and restoring a more harmonious relationship between humans and our planet.

Ultimately, the show’s premise is a hopeful one. He makes the case that the new technologies and young minds coming out of institutions like Cornell can indeed save the world. And he doesn’t merely tout them on TV. When Nye, who majored in mechanical engineering, returns to campus (which is not infrequently), he can most likely be found enthusiastically engaging with students — including those supported by scholarships he funds — and faculty about their work to solve a range of pressing problems.

“That’s what changed my life, my undergraduate degree in engineering,” Nye said during a visit in March 2022.

Bill Nye meets with professor and student — Senior lecturer Joe Skovira and Cornell Maker Club co-president Smith Charles '23 with Bill Nye‘77in the Phillips Hall Maker Space.

While in Ithaca, he was able to inspect the work done by students to refurbish the Bill Nye Solar Noon Clock, a large timepiece prominently displayed on top of Rhodes Hall. Even on Ithaca’s cloudiest days, the clock, which Nye designed and donated in 2011, marks the Sun’s highest daily position by emitting a beam of actual sunlight.

In April 2019, the software controlling the clock’s solar noon indicator failed, and repairs — like many things — were delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, a team of engineering students got the clock working again, designing a replacement control system, developing new software, and adding redundancies for stability and backup.

Nye intends for his clock to continue educating and sparking wonder in the Cornell community. “I hope it gives you pause for thought about your place in space,” he told a crowd of students who surrounded him as he watched the new Solar Noon Indicator in action from Hoy Field.

Bill Nye with students — Bill Nye ’77 met with students to learn about the Forklift Learning Studio.

A few months later, returning to campus as a featured speaker at Reunion, Nye stopped by the Sibley School’s new Forklift Learning Studio as it was being assembled. The innovative new space is centered around forklifts donated by Toyota Material Handling, which it uses as interactive tools for studying thermofluids, modeling structural mechanics, and experimenting with control dynamics.

When he stopped by, he later observed, all of the engineers engaged in dismantling the forklifts “with hydraulic oil up to their elbows” were women. While Cornell Engineering’s undergraduate population has been at gender parity since 2018, this was something Nye said “would never have happened” when he was a student.

And it’s that kind of progress that fuels his optimism that the end of the world is not as nigh after all.