Neil deGrasse Tyson

At his high schools 20-year reunion in 1996, Tyson was voted the graduate with the "coolest job."

First African American director of the American Museum of Natural Historys Hayden Planetarium, in New York City. Tyson is also a researcher, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University, and a general-interest science columnist. Author of books for nonspecialists on space and the universe (listed under Other Works).

Has two children: a son named Travis, and a daughter named Miranda.

Received his Bachelors degree from Harvard, his Masters from the University of Texas, and his PhD from Columbia University.

The more your ideas are untestable, either in principle or in practice,the less useful they are to the advance of science.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and,imagination.

Science is something to be proud of, it allows us to understand the,world in spite of ourselves.

What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind,"through the universe"? That humans are emotionally fragile,perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly,small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day.

I am proud to be part of a species where a subset of its members,willingly put their lives at risk to push the boundaries of our,existence.

One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in,your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

When your reasons for believing something are justified ad hoc, you are,left susceptible to further discoveries undermining the rationale for,that belief.

Whenever people have used religious documents to make accurate,predictions about our base knowledge of the physical world, they have,been famously wrong.

We should not be ashamed of not having answers to all questions yet. . . .

So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe:,knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you,are going.

[Regarding Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) ] - They all,knew the mother-ship was coming, they all knew it was a flying saucer,they all knew it came from another planet through the vacuum of space.

Emotional truths woven by lawyers in the court of law are apparently,more important than the truths of actual events. I have grown to fear,for those whose innocence became trapped within the legal system.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy,of ignorance.

This present-day version of God of the gaps goes by a fresh name:,intelligent design. . . . Instead, why not tally all those things whose,design . . . reflect[s] the absence of intelligence?,[on if religion and science have an inherent conflict between them] -,Most religious people in America, fully embrace science. So the,argument that religion has some issue with science applies to a small,fraction of those who declare that they are religious. They just happen,to be a very vocal fraction so you got the impression that there are,more of them than there actually is.

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up- many people feel small, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.

God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination,I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime,In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.

. . . there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

. . . informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.

Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

If you removed all the arteries, veins, & capillaries from a person’s body, and tied them end-to-end…the person will die.

In our profession, we tend to name things exactly as we see them. Big red stars we call red giants. Small white stars we call white dwarfs. When stars are made of neutrons, we call them neutron stars. Stars that pulse, we call them pulsars. In biology they come up with big Latin words for things. MDs write prescriptions in a cuneiform that patients can’t understand, hand them to the pharmacist, who understands the cuneiform. It’s some long fancy chemical thing, which we ingest. In biochemistry, the most popular molecule has ten syllables—deoxyribonucleic acid! Yet the beginning of all space, time, matter, and energy in the cosmos, we can describe in two simple words, Big Bang. We are a monosyllabic science, because the universe is hard enough. There is no point in making big words to confuse you further. Want more? In the universe, there are places where the gravity is so strong that light doesn’t come out. You fall in, and you don’t come out either: black hole. Once again, with single syllables, we get the whole job done. Sorry, but I had to get all that off my chest.

In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got called for jury duty. I show up on time, ready to serve. When we get to the voir dire, the lawyer says to me, “I see you’re an astrophysicist. What’s that?” I answer, “Astrophysics is the laws of physics, applied to the universe—the Big Bang, black holes, that sort of thing. ” Then he asks, “What do you teach at Princeton?” and I say, “I teach a class on the evaluation of evidence and the relative unreliability of eyewitness testimony. ” Five minutes later, I’m on the street. A few years later, jury duty again. The judge states that the defendant is charged with possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine. It was found on his body, he was arrested, and he is now on trial. This time, after the Q&A is over, the judge asks us whether there are any questions we’d like to ask the court, and I say, “Yes, Your Honor. Why did you say he was in possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine? That equals 1. 7 grams. The ‘thousand’ cancels with the ‘milli-’ and you get 1. 7 grams, which is less than the weight of a dime. ” Again I’m out on the street.

There’s as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe.

When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.

I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.

The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don’t come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He’ll use his word, and if I understand it, I’ll say, “Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?,As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded.

But you can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. This is very different from the way journalists portray us. So many articles begin, “Scientists now have to go back to the drawing board. ” It’s as though we’re sitting in our offices, feet up on our desks—masters of the universe—and suddenly say, “Oops, somebody discovered something!” No. We’re always at the drawing board. If you’re not at the drawing board, you’re not making discoveries. You’re not a scientist; you’re something else. The public, on the other hand, seems to demand conclusive explanations as they leap without hesitation from statements of abject ignorance to statements of absolute certainty.

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes. . . . The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.

The Universe was opaque until 380. 000 years after the Big Bang.

The good thing about the laws of physics is that they require no law enforcement agencies to maintain them,The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1. 3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo Sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1. 3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

. . . people taking the time and energy to ask about what they do not understand - I have renewed hope that society can shed its superstitions and embrace the enlightenment that comes from just a basic understanding of how the universe works.

There are more stolen bikes in my garage than there are stars in the galaxy.

Don’t know if it’s good or bad that a Google search on “Big Bang Theory” lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe,. . . and I submit to you, that science, scientific discovery, especially cosmic discovery, does not become mainstream until the artist embraces the fruits of those discoveries.

You know that passage in the Bible that says, “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”? Always wondered if that was mistranslated. Perhaps it actually says, “And the geek shall inherit the Earth.

Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.

The urge to want some bit of information to be true often clouds our ability to assess why that information may be false.

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

Science literacy is an important part of what it is to be an informed citizen of society.

Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belonging elevates, not denigrates, the ego.

I look forward to the day when the solar system becomes our collective backyard—explored not only with robots, but with the mind, body, and soul of our species.

Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more often than they think rationally. Others never think rationally about anything at all. No judgment implied. Just an observation.

Science literacy is being plugged into the forces that power the universe. There is no excuse for thinking that the Sun, which is a million times the size of Earth, orbits Earth.

If the whole world shared such experiences, we would then have common dreams and everybody could begin thinking about tomorrow. And if everybody thinks about tomorrow, then someday we can visit the sky together.

There’s a fascinating frailty of the human mind that psychologists know all about, called “argument from ignorance. ” This is how it goes. Remember what the “U” stands for in “UFO”? You see lights flashing in the sky. You’ve never seen anything like this before and don’t understand what it is. You say, “It’s a UFO!” The “U” stands for “unidentified. ”But then you say, “I don’t know what it is; it must be aliens from outer space, visiting from another planet. ” The issue here is that if you don’t know what something is, your interpretation of it should stop immediately. You don’t then say it must be X or Y or Z. That’s argument from ignorance. It’s common. I’m not blaming anybody; it may relate to our burning need to manufacture answers because we feel uncomfortable about being steeped in ignorance.

Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

If the universe is anything, it should be fun.

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite ‘telescope envy’ at gatherings of amateur astronomers.

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those.

If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. … If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can’t help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so. And you’ll be working at it almost to the exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your door, saying, “Don’t you need a vacation?!,” and you don’t even know what the word “vacation” means because what you’re doing is what you want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation — that’s the state of mind of somebody who’s doing what others might call visionary and brilliant.

You could also ask who’s in charge. Lots of people think, well, we’re humans; we’re the most intelligent and accomplished species; we’re in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That’s what’s going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.

Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.

I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.

The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

When you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not have been inspired by or attracted to the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.

Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.

We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field. I don’t know about you, but back in 1996 I had trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems were different. There is only one solution: the entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer’s system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.

A bullet fired level from a gun will hit ground at same time as a bullet dropped from the same height. Do the Physics.

In the beginning, there was physics. "Physics" describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena. Hence everything fundamental and familiar to us earthlings begins with, and rests upon, the laws of physics. When we apply these laws to astronomical settings, we deal with physics writ large, which we call astrophysics.

In some ways, we are traveling in time now. We just happened to be prisoners of the present in the eternal transition from the past to the future.

Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.

If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.

Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?,Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.

Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.

There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have a little acronym for them - NEOs: near Earth objects. And our biggest goal is to try to catalogue them, so we know in advance if one is going to put us at risk.

Space enthusiasts are the most susceptible demographic to delusion that I have ever seen.

The partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U. S. space policy are part of a more general trend: the decline of science in the United States. As its interest in science wanes, the country loses ground to the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency.

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.

There are a lot of things you can do in space, and space essentially is unlimited resources. We are climbing over ourselves here looking for the next source of energy. The universe has an unlimited source of energy.

Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move fluently across those boundaries, you realize that science is everywhere; science is not something you can step around or sweep under the rug.

All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.

What people are really after is, what is my stance on religion or spirituality or God? And I would say, if I find a word that came closest, it would be agnostic.

I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.

There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.

One of my great laments is that education today seems to have. . . be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.

Passion is what gets you through the hardest times that might otherwise make strong men weak, or make you give up.

I think the greatest of people in society carved niches that represented the unique expression of their combinations of talents, and if everyone had the luxury of expressing the unique combinations of talents in this world, our society would be transformed overnight.

I think the greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves.

We live in the kind of society where, in almost all cases, hard work is rewarded.