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About Neil Degrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Tyson studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University.
Born: 5 October 1958 (age 64 years), Manhattan, New York, United States
100 Top Quotes by Neil Degrasse Tyson in English
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.”
- “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
- “There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.”
- “Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.”
- “We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically.”
- “If you’re not curious, then you’re not paying attention.”
- “We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.”
- “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.”
- “For me, one of the major reasons to move beyond just the planting of trees was that I have tendency to look at the causes of a problem. We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the problems once and for all.”
- “The universe is both the ultimate frontier and the highest of high grounds. There’s no place higher to go than the universe itself and still be talking about the nature of the universe.”
- “In science, when human behavior enters the equation, things go nonlinear. That’s why physics is easy and sociology is hard.”
- “The greatest problem in the world today is not poverty or disease but the lack of love and charity and the feeling of being unwanted.”
- “I am one of the few African Americans who uses his full name everywhere he goes because I want people to know I’m not a rapper. It’s a statement of intellectual curiosity.”
- “The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.”
- “The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.”
- “The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.”
- “In a free country, people have the right to believe whatever they want to believe; but we have no obligation to respect absurdities.”
- “I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime.”
- “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
- “We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.”
- “To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of bullshit.”
- “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
- “Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.”
- “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
- “The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.”
- “It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.”
- “The universe is both the ultimate frontier and the highest of high grounds. There’s no place higher to go than the universe itself and still be talking about the nature of the universe.”
- “We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically.”
- “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
- “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.”
- “In science, when human behavior enters the equation, things go nonlinear. That’s why physics is easy and sociology is hard.”
- “The universe is both the ultimate frontier and the highest of high grounds. There’s no place higher to go than the universe itself and still be talking about the nature of the universe.”
- “In a free country, people have the right to believe whatever they want to believe; but we have no obligation to respect absurdities.”
- “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.”
- “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
- “When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.”
- “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.”
- “In the information age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information: extract for knowledge.”
- “For me, one of the major reasons to move beyond just the planting of trees was that I have tendency to look at the causes of a problem. We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the symptoms.”
- “Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'”
- “I don’t want to believe. I want to know.”
- “I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.”
- “In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you’re done with them, outwit their friends.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow’s problems flow.”
- “There are no speed limits on the road to excellence.”
- “The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.”
- “We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.”
- “In a free country, people have the right to believe whatever they want to believe; but we have no obligation to respect absurdities.”
- “The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.”
- “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
- “When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.”
- “People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.”
- “As a species, we might survive more than a few centuries, but we won’t survive a million years, or even 100,000 years.”
- “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
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- “In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe has no mind. It’s a pointless spectacle of stone and gas and stars and galaxies, a vast empyrean that grows and changes and has no care for your existence or your welfare. You have no importance beyond what you give yourself.”
- “To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of shit.”
- “The universe is in us.”
- “Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.”
- “The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.”
- “When I’m asked about the relevance to Black people of what I do, I take that as an affront. It presupposes that Black people have never been involved in exploring the heavens, or researching medicine, or inventing geometry, or creating art. This is not only untrue, it is a form of racist oppression.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “I am one of the few African Americans in the astrophysics community, and that can be a lonely place.”
- “Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who only know what to think.”
- “The rise of civilization and the evolution of human intelligence are irreversibly linked to the domestication of fire.”
- “There’s as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe.”
- “For me, the universe had a beginning, and it will have an end. It has a beginning in space and time, and it has an end in space and time. And the momentous question that astronomers, and everyone else, asks is: What happened before the beginning?”
- “We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.”
- “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “The most profound discoveries are those that make you feel stupid for not having seen them yourself.”
- “I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody’s easiest subject… and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.”
- “In America, where we are all free to hold any belief we want, we should also be free to not have our government say we endorse someone else’s religious beliefs if we are not part of that faith.”
- “For most of history, we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”
- “The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there’s any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.”
- “The universe is a pretty big place. It’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So, if it’s just us… seems like an awful waste of space.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “The more we learn about the universe, the more we realize how insignificant we are.”
- “If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it’s not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true.”
- “Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.”
- “Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
- “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
- “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
- “The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there’s any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.”
- “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
- “I am not a nihilist. I am not an absurdist. I believe that only clueless people are nihilists and absurdist. My worldview is the enriching one of the universe as revealed by science, and the sense of emerging awe, mystery, and empowerment that accompanies it.”
- “The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.”
- “As a species, we have always been discoverers and adventurers, and space and the deep ocean are some of the last frontiers we have left to explore. They’re places where we can push our limits, and learn more about ourselves and the universe we live in.”
FAQs:
Who is Neil deGrasse Tyson?
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator who is widely recognized as one of the most prominent scientists in the world.
When was Neil deGrasse Tyson born?
Neil deGrasse Tyson was born on October 5, 1958.
What are some of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s most notable accomplishments?
Neil deGrasse Tyson has made many notable accomplishments throughout his career, including serving as the director of the Hayden Planetarium, hosting several TV shows about science and astronomy, and writing numerous books on science and astrophysics.
What is Neil deGrasse Tyson’s educational background?
Neil deGrasse Tyson earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Harvard University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Columbia University in 1991.
What is Neil deGrasse Tyson’s scientific focus?
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s scientific focus is on the study of the universe and the physical processes that govern it, including black holes, dark matter, and the formation of galaxies.
What is Neil deGrasse Tyson’s approach to science communication?
Neil deGrasse Tyson is known for his engaging and accessible approach to science communication. He often uses humor and storytelling to explain complex scientific concepts to a wide audience.
What are some of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s most famous quotes?
Some of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s most famous quotes include “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it,” “We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically,” and “In science, we should be open to new ideas and be willing to change our understanding based on new evidence.”
Is Neil deGrasse Tyson involved in any social activism?
Yes, Neil deGrasse Tyson is involved in social activism and often speaks out about issues such as climate change, science education, and the role of science in society.
What are some of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s most popular books?
Some of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s most popular books include The Pluto Files, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, and Death by Black Hole.
When did Neil deGrasse Tyson become famous?
Neil deGrasse Tyson became famous in the early 2000s as a science communicator and TV host, particularly for his appearances on the TV series NOVA scienceNOW and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.
