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
When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.
I'm optimistic. I see no longer people accepting fuzzy thinking in the world. The change is not that people aren't still saying under-informed things. The change is that if you're in power and you say something under-informed, there are people out there with a voice who will take you to task for having done so
The day that you stop looking - because you're content God did it - I don't need you in the lab. You're useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.
There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace - a physicist is a trained problem solver.
If you're scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you, and that understanding empowers you.
You say you're worried about kids? I'm not worried about kids, I'm worried about grown ups... Children are not the problem here... We spend the first year of their lives teaching them how to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.
Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us.
That the north star is the brightest in the night sky. I'd guess about 9 out of 10 people think this. But it does not require a grant from the National Science Foundation to learn the answer. The North Star is not even in the top 40 in the night sky. It's the 49th brightest star. Rather dull and boring by most measures.
We are star dust in the highest exalted way, called by the universe, reaching out to the universe
Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination
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.
There is a growing awareness that we're losing our technological competitive edge. I think there's an awareness that we're losing our leadership, and that maybe our self image over the past several decades has been a little bit delusional.
No one is dumb who is curious.
Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there.