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Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Astrophysicist

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Famous Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

“If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth's surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astrochemically richer answer might be, "I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago.”

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Book:Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
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“With only one proton in its nucleus, hydrogen is the lightest and simplest element, made entirely during the big bang. Out of the ninety-four naturally occurring elements, hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all the atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos, on all scales, right on down to the solar system. Hydrogen in the core of the massive planet Jupiter is under so much pressure that it behaves more like a conductive metal than a gas, creating the strongest magnetic field among the planets.”

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Book:Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
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“The element carbon can be found in more kinds of molecules than the sum of all other kinds of molecules combined. Given the abundance of carbon in the cosmos—forged in the cores of stars, churned up to their surfaces, and released copiously into the galaxy—a better element does not exist on which to base the chemistry and diversity of life. Just edging out carbon in abundance rank, oxygen is common, too, forged and released in the remains of exploded stars. Both oxygen and carbon are major ingredients of life as we know it.”

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Book:Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
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“The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when 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, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.”

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Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“On Friday the 13th of April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth, that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, it's named Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death. If the trajectory of Apophis at close approach passes within a narrow range of altitudes called the 'keyhole,' the precise influence of Earth's gravity on its orbit will guarantee that seven years later in 2036, on its next time around, the asteroid will hit Earth directly, slamming in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. The tsunami it creates will wipe out the entire west coast of North America, bury Hawaii, and devastate all the land masses of the Pacific Rim. If Apophis misses the keyhole in 2029, then, of course, we have nothing to worry about in 2036.”

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Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got called for jury duty. I show up on time, ready to serve. When we get to the voir dire, the lawyer says to me, “I see you’re an astrophysicist. What’s that?” I answer, “Astrophysics is the laws of physics, applied to the universe—the Big Bang, black holes, that sort of thing.” Then he asks, “What do you teach at Princeton?” and I say, “I teach a class on the evaluation of evidence and the relative unreliability of eyewitness testimony.” Five minutes later, I’m on the street. A few years later, jury duty again. The judge states that the defendant is charged with possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine. It was found on his body, he was arrested, and he is now on trial. This time, after the Q&A is over, the judge asks us whether there are any questions we’d like to ask the court, and I say, “Yes, Your Honor. Why did you say he was in possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine? That equals 1.7 grams. The ‘thousand’ cancels with the ‘milli-’ and you get 1.7 grams, which is less than the weight of a dime.” Again I’m out on the street.”

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Book:Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
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“But you can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. This is very different from the way journalists portray us. So many articles begin, “Scientists now have to go back to the drawing board.” It’s as though we’re sitting in our offices, feet up on our desks—masters of the universe—and suddenly say, “Oops, somebody discovered something!” No. We’re always at the drawing board. If you’re not at the drawing board, you’re not making discoveries. You’re not a scientist; you’re something else. The public, on the other hand, seems to demand conclusive explanations as they leap without hesitation from statements of abject ignorance to statements of absolute certainty.”

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Book:Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
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“The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo Sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.”

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Book:Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
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“How do we change the way science is taught? Ask anybody how many teachers truly made a difference in their life, and you never come up with more than the fingers on one hand. You remember their names, you remember what they did, you remember how they moved in front of the classroom. You know why you remember them? Because they were passionate about the subject. You remember them because they lit a flame within you. They got you excited about a subject you didn't previously care about, because they were excited about it themselves. That's what turns people on to careers in science and engineering and mathematics. That's what we need to promote. Put that in every classroom, and it will change the world.”

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Book:Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
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“Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those.”

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Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“Science’s skeptical core makes it a poor competitor for human hearts and minds, which recoil from its ongoing controversies and prefer the security of seemingly eternal truths. If the scientific approach were just one more interpretation of the cosmos, it would never have amounted to much; but science’s big-time success rests on the fact that it works. If you board an aircraft built according to science – with principles that have survived numerous attempts to prove them wrong – you have a far better chance of reaching your destination than you do in an aircraft constructed by the rules of Vedic astrology.”

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Book:Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution
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“At New York City’s Rose Center of Earth and Space, we display a timeline spiral of the Universe that begins at the Big Bang and unfolds 13.8 billion years. Uncurled, it’s the length of a football field. Every step you take spans 50 million years. You get to the end of the ramp, and you ask, where are we? Where is the history of our human species? The entire period of time, from a trillion seconds ago to today, from graffiti-prone cave dwellers until now, occupies only the thickness of a single strand of human hair, which we have mounted at the end of that timeline. You think we live long lives, you think civilizations last a long time, but not from the view of the cosmos itself.”

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Book:Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour
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“The only times science cannot assure objective truths is on the pre-consensus frontier of research. The only era in which science could not assure objective truths was before the seventeenth century, back when our senses—inadequate and biased—were the only tools at our disposal to inform us of the natural world. Objective truths exist independent of that five-sense perception of reality. With proper tools, they can be verified by anybody, at any time, and at any place. Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.”

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Book:Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization
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“There are photons that have been traveling for 30,000 years, and I'm... snatching them from this journey and planting them into my digital detector. And then I started feeling bad for the photon, and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way. But then I said, no, those are probably happier photons than the one that slammed into the mountainside that will go unanalyzed and will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe.”

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Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago.”

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Book:Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
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“But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.”

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Book:Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
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“So while you're getting ripped apart head to toe as you fall into a black hole, you will also extrude through the fabric of space and time, like toothpaste squeezed through a tube. To all the words in the English language that describe ways to die (e.g., homicide, suicide, electrocution, suffocation, starvation) we add the term spaghettification.”

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Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
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