Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it.<p>Let there be cosmology.

I could just tell you it's all bunk; but then you wouldn't be empowered to understand why. Other than to quote, "Oh, Doctor Tyson said..." And I never want you to quote me citing my authority as a scientist for your knowing something. If that's what you have to resort to I have failed as an educator. As an educator, it's my duty to empower you to think. So that you can go forth and think accurate thoughts about how the world is put together. Inoculating you against the [people] out there who will exploit your ignorance on anything they possibly can.

You matter.

Unless you multiply yourself by the speed of light squared.

Then you Energy.

Within one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) than all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world.

The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience.<p>I think many people have that enthusiasm, but they are prevented from being teachers because they didn't go through the teacher mill. Now you have teachers who have been through the teacher mill, yet they have no capacity to inspire anyone at all. It's the inspired student that continues to learn on their own. That's what separates the real achievers in the world from those who pedal along, finishing assignments.

What keeps me awake at night: wondering whether human species is just too stupid to figure out the Universe. I just wonder. I lose sleep over that. Because we define ourselves as intelligent— because we made up the test to say that. And we sit alone at the top of the intelligence chart because we invented the exam, and all the other species of life on Earth are not. So who's to say that the first species (us) to be intelligent (us) has just enough intelligence to actually decode everything that's decodable in the Cosmos? [...] Think of the next closest thing to us, the bonobo chimp— 98½% identical DNA, yet you cannot teach them trigonometry, they have no concept of it. So if that's only 1½% difference in our DNA— and so imagine 1½% beyond us, rather than below us, in intelligence. [...] Their toddlers would be talking about things that would completely confound us.

There are people who say "I'll never need this math, these trig identities from 10th grade or 11th grade," or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch: whether or not you ever again use the math that you learned in school, the act of having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist before and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver.

Gibbous Moon, on this eve, on this night
Crosses high in the sky, in full sight.

Behold, there’s a star off to its side.
Oops, that’s not a star that you just eyed

That’s Jupiter. So bold, and so true.
Wave hello! ‘Cause you’re in its sky too.

Cosmologists have plenty of ego. How could you not when your job is to deduce what brought the universe into existence?

Halley shattered their monopoly, beating them at their own game. A game that no scientist had ever played before: Prophecy. -S01E03

No matter who you are, engaging in the quest to discover where and how things began tends to induce emotional fervor—as if knowing the beginning bestows upon you some form of fellowship with, or perhaps governance over, all that comes later. 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.

Personally, I am quite comfortable with chemicals, anywhere in the universe. My favorite stars, as well as my best friends, are all made of them.

Sometimes I wonder if, at bird gatherings, they insult the stupid ones among them by calling them "human brains"?

In our own solar system, for example, everything that is not the Sun adds up to less than one fifth of one percent of the Sun’s mass.

It has been said that every great emerging scientific truth goes to three phases: First people say: "It can't be true". Second they say: "It conflicts with the bible." Third they say: "It's true all along."