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Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

This book provides a succinct and accessible introduction to the fundamental principles of astrophysics, covering topics such as the structure of the universe, black holes, and the nature of dark matter. more

Author

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, science communicator, and television personality. Born on October 5, 1958, he is renowned for his deep understanding of the cosmos and his ability to popularize scientific knowledge. Tyson grew up in New York City and earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from Columbia University. He served as the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and has been a member of various scientific committees. more

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“The holes in front of us were fossilized tracks, huge ones. Dinosaur tracks, no doubt. As we looked closer, we could see that there were both handprints and footprints, and some of them had finger and toe marks. They had the telltale shape of tracks left by sauropods. We had found a 170-million-year-old dinosaur dance floor, records left by colossal sauropods that were about fifty feet long and weighed as much as three elephants.”

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“Knowledge behind Paywall (Open Access Sonnet) Knowledge aloof from people, locked shut behind paywall, bears no significance in society, holds no worth whatsoever. That's why huge chunks of my works, are accessible freely to the world. In fact, if I had no bills to pay, would've given away my last miracle word! Record of light is not proof of light, Light must be proven by existence alone. Over a third of my sonnets are available free, including some of my most potent ones. Light accessible only to select elites, is not light, but filth uncivilized. Paywall is a violation of knowledge, it vilifies the sanctity of human light.”

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“Why is it that the difference between humans and animals is so insisted on? If this were a simple division as between different subjects then why is there so much impassioned writing about it? Why need humans insist on their wearisome catalogue of language, writing, works of the imagination, conceptual analysis and so forth, as differing them from other animals? Why do people angrily dispute any suggestion that, for example, ants build cities or that chimpanzees love their young, rather than that they follow instincts which do not include human feelings? Why the grudging admission by scientists, only within this century, that animals feel pain? Why do our modern languages slip so easily into animalistic words like bestial or feral to indicate a moral distinction between us and them? Why are internalised thoughts so embedded that set animal and spiritual at different ends of a spectrum? The answer is easily given. It is because of the still inescapably present inheritance of religious thought. ~ Peter Ellis”

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“Stephen, how do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail? We haven’t at our disposal the infinite factors that the Machine has at its! Perhaps, to give you a not unfamiliar example, our entire technical civilization has created more unhappiness and misery than it has removed. Perhaps an agrarian or pastoral civilization, with less culture and less people would be better. If so, the Machines must move in that direction, preferably without telling us, since in our ignorant prejudices we only know that what we are used to, is good — and we would then fight change. Or perhaps a complete urbanization, or a completely caste-ridden society, or complete anarchy, is the answer. We don’t know. Only the Machines know, and they are going there and taking us with them.”

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“But take a moment to consider the miracle... Light is just electromagnetic radiation. Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules. It's not obvious that we should be able to detect any of those things, let alone convert them into electrical signals or derive from those signals the spectacle of a sunrise, or the sound of a voice, or the scent of baking bread. The senses trans- form the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences-things we can react to and act upon. They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information. They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany.”

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“Even before vibrations are detected by its lyriform organs, the web determines which vibrations will arrive at the leg. The spider will eat whatever it's aware of, and it sets the bounds of its awareness--the extent of its Umwelt--by spinning different kinds of webs. The web, then, is not just an extension of a spider's senses but an extension of its cognition. In a very real way, the spider thinks with its web. Tuning the silk is like tuning its own mind.”

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“...when [a black widow spider] is hungry, it can also draw its legs into a "crouch"--a sensory power pose that retunes its joints to higher frequencies...this stance might shift the spider's Umwelt toward the movements of smaller prey. It might also help it to ignore the low frequencies of wind. It's like a postural squint, which allows the spider to focus its attention. The analogy isn't exact, though, since squinting helps us to focus on particular parts of space. Here, the black widow's posture focuses on different parts of information space. It's as if a human could emphasize the red parts of our vision by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog.”

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“The reasons for this paring back of synapses is a mystery, but synaptic pruning is thought to sharpen and reinforce the "correct" synapses, while removing the weak and unnecessary ones. "It reinforces an old intuition," a psychiatrist in Boston told me. "The secret of learning is the systematic elimination of excess. We grow, mostly, by dying.”

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“This story illustrates powerfully how Darwin's theory, together with how it is often promoted to the public, can bias investigators and lead them along blind alleys. The "science" that supposedly has "proved" evolution is not capable of doing any such thing because it deals with past events. This means that it is more equivalent to forensic science, where clues are gathered which have to be very carefully weighed by experts in a court of law. The jury must then decide what the truth of the matter is from the balance of probabilities. Looking back, it is apparent that there was never powerful evidence for a stooping brutish, ape-like Neanderthal man, but that some evidence was withheld from the "jury" of public opinion.”

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