Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tysonis an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and science communicator. Since 1996, he has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth5 October 1958
CountryUnited States of America
The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.
'As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I'd prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar.
I never volunteer to talk about god or religion, but people feel compelled to talk about it.
Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
I knew Pluto was popular among elementary schoolkids, but I had no idea they would mobilize into a 'Save Pluto' campaign. I now have a drawer full of hate letters from hundreds of elementary schoolchildren (with supportive cover letters from their science teachers) pleading with me to reverse my stance on Pluto. The file includes a photograph of the entire third grade of a school posing on their front steps and holding up a banner proclaiming, 'Dr. Tyson - Pluto is a Planet!'
I don't want to die ... I don't want to die poor. Two great motivators in the history of human cultures.
It would be great if we were on multiple planets, but I think that's unrealistic. Hawking says we have to be on multiple planets so an asteroid could come and you'd still have some humans left. It's a nice idea. It satisfies the multiple-eggs-in-multiple-baskets concept.
Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.
With automatic spell checkers running unleashed over what we compose, our era is that of correctly spelled typos.
Curiously, light-loving green plants reject the Sun's green light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look green.
Next time you're stunned by a large moon on the horizon, bend over and view it between your legs. The effect goes away entirely.
As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.
Some air you inhale was exhaled by Cleopatra.
One of the things that fascinates me most is when people are so charmed by the universe that it becomes part of their artistic output.