Bill Nye Shows How Face Masks Actually Protect You–and Why You Should Wear Them

Like many Amer­i­cans of my gen­er­a­tion, I grew up hav­ing things explained to me by Bill Nye. Flight, mag­nets, sim­ple machines, vol­ca­noes: there seemed to be noth­ing he and his team of young lieu­tenants could­n’t break down in a clear, humor­ous, and whol­ly non-bor­ing man­ner. He did­n’t ask us to come to him, but met us where we already were: watch­ing tele­vi­sion. The zenith of the pop­u­lar­i­ty of his PBS series Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy passed a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ago, and the world has changed a bit since then. But even in the 2020s, when the spread­ing of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge is no less impor­tant than it was in the 90s, Nye knows where to air his mes­sage if he wants the kids to hear it: Tik­Tok.

Huge­ly pop­u­lar among peo­ple not yet born dur­ing Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy’s orig­i­nal run, Tik­Tok is a video-based social media plat­form that accom­mo­dates videos of up to 60 sec­onds — rough­ly half the length of the “Con­sid­er the Fol­low­ing” seg­ments embed­ded with­in the episodes of Nye’s orig­i­nal show.

This week Nye has revived the for­mat on Tik­tok in order to lay out the sci­en­tif­ic prin­ci­ples behind some­thing that had recent­ly become a part of all of our lives: face masks. True to form, he explains not just with words but with objects, in this case a series of res­pi­ra­to­ry sys­tem-pro­tect­ing anti-par­ti­cle devices from a hum­ble scarf to a home­made cloth face mask (employ­ing that stal­wart sci­ence-project com­po­nent, a pipe clean­er) to the med­ical indus­try-stan­dard N95.

“The rea­son we want you to wear a mask is to pro­tect you,” says Nye. “But the main rea­son we want you to wear a mask is to pro­tect me from you, and the par­ti­cles from your res­pi­ra­to­ry sys­tem from get­ting into my res­pi­ra­to­ry sys­tem!” As sim­ple a point as this may sound, it has tend­ed to get lost amid the fear and con­fu­sion of the ongo­ing coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic: the con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion ini­tial­ly pub­lished about the advis­abil­i­ty of face masks for the gen­er­al pub­lic, but also the ensu­ing con­tro­ver­sy over the imple­men­ta­tion and enforce­ment of mask-relat­ed rules. But as Nye reminds us, this is “a mat­ter lit­er­al­ly of life and death — and when I use the word lit­er­al­ly, I mean lit­er­al­ly.” As we shore up our knowl­edge of masks, we Mil­len­ni­als, who through­out our lives have learned so much from Nye, would do well to inter­nal­ize that point of usage while we’re at it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Sci­ence Face Masks: Con­quer the Pan­dem­ic with Sci­ence, Cour­tesy of Maria Popova’s Brain­Pick­ings

Japan­ese Design­er Cre­ates Free Tem­plate for an Anti-Virus Face Shield: Down­load, and Then Use a Print­er, Paper & Scis­sors

Bill Nye, The Sci­ence Guy, Says Cre­ation­ism is Bad for Kids and America’s Future

Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy Takes the Air Out of Deflate­gate

Free M.I.T. Course Teach­es You How to Become Bill Nye & Make Great Sci­ence Videos for YouTube

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.