Mark Boslough is a physicist and skeptic. He is a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, an adjunct professor at University of New Mexico, and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.[1]
An expert on planetary impacts and global catastrophes, Boslough’s work on airbursts challenged the conventional view of asteroid collision risk and is now widely accepted by the scientific community.[2] He has made frequent appearances on television science documentaries,[3] including the award winning programs “Tutunkhamun's Fireball” (BBC)[4] (recipient of Discover Magazine's Top 100 Science Stories of 2006 [5]) and “Last Extinction“ (Nova) [6] (recipient of AAAS Kavli award for best science documentary of 2009 [7]). Most of the documentaries are focused on his impact and airburst modeling.[8]
Boslough is a vocal critic of pseudoscience and anti-science and has written about climate change denial in the Skeptical Inquirer in reference to “Climategate” conspiracy theories.[9] He is also active in uncovering scientific misconduct. [10][11]
An advocate of using humor to defend science,[12] his most famous essay was published as an April Fool’s Day joke in the April, 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter to poke fun at New Mexico's legislature for attempting to require schools to teach creationism. He wrote that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. The article was posted on a newsgroup and passed around to people via email, causing an outrage. When people started calling the Alabama legislature to protest, the joke was revealed.[13] National Geographic News highlighted Boslough's story when it compiled a list of "some of the more memorable hoaxes in recent history."[14] It was elevated by the Museum of Hoaxes to number seven on its "Top 100 April Fools Hoaxes of All Time" list.[15] It eventually took on a new existence as an urban legend and has had to be debunked by Snopes.[16]
He also famously demonstrated that emailed lists of “Darwin Awards” include fake stories. After receiving an annual list of unfortunate deaths at the end of 1998, he fabricated his own over-the-top fictional Darwin Award recipient, appended it, and forwarded the list to his friends. That story also went viral, was printed as an actual event by the Denver Post, leading to another debunking by Snopes[17].
Boslough grew up in Broomfield, Colorado. He has a B.S. in Physics from Colorado State University, and an MS and PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech, where his research focused on geophysics.