Knowing how things work is important, but I think that's an incomplete view of what science literacy is or, at least, should be. Science literacy is … - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Respect to all graduates this spring. Reminder that a Commencement is a beginning not an end. If your school did right by you, a lifetime of continued learning awaits, lest you ossify in place, forever clutching to how things were on graduation day, while the World passes you by.

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.

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.