Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
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I study the universe. It's the second oldest profession. People have been looking up for a long time.
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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.
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We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.
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If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.
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I have a personal philosophy in life: If somebody else can do something that I'm doing, they should do it. And what I want to do is find things that would represent a unique contribution to the world - the contribution that only I, and my portfolio of talents, can make happen. Those are my priorities in life.
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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.
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People who are scientists today are scientists in spite of the system, typically, not because of it.
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I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we're the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.
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Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.
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The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them.
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Space in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but it's investments in space.
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Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.
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Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate, it's not simply, 'Do you know what DNA is? Or what the Big Bang is?' That's an aspect of science literacy. The biggest part of it is do you know how to think about information that's presented in front of you.
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The Pacific is the best toilet for satellites.
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So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there's a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown, lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot.
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Science is an enterprise that should be cherished as an activity of the free human mind. Because it transforms who we are, how we live, and it gives us an understanding of our place in the universe.
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I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end up going extinct. We'd be the laughingstock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case.
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People credit me for making the universe interesting when in fact the universe is inherently interesting, and I'm merely revealing that fact. I don't think I'm anything special for this to happen.
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Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we've got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it's one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe it's countless other universes.
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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.
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Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.
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Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang.
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In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.
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The methods and tools of science perennially breach barriers, granting me confidence that our epic march of insight into the operations of nature will continue without end.