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Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes about Science - Page 2

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It is astonishing to realize that until Galileo performed his experiments on the acceleration of gravity in the early seventeenth century, nobody questioned Aristotle's falling balls. Nobody said, Show Me!

It is astonishing to realize that until Galileo performed his experiments on the acceleration of gravity in the early seventeenth century, nobody questioned Aristotle's falling balls. Nobody said, Show Me!

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Fall, Science, Balls

My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Philosophy, Science, Technology
"I am Neil deGrasse Tyson -- AMA". www.reddit.com. November 13, 2011.

Not enough of our society is trained how to understand and interpret quantitative information. This activity is a centerpiece of science literacy to which we should all strive-the future health, wealth, and security of our democracy depend on it. Until that is achieved, we are at risk of making under-informed decisions that affect ourselves, our communities, our country, and even the world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Country, Future, Science
"Neil deGrasse Tyson Sounds The Alarm Over Science Illiteracy, And For Good Reason" By David Freeman, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 5, 2015.

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Religious, Science, Knowing
Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.345, W. W. Norton & Company

Last I checked, Bill Gates was worth $50 billion. If the average employed adult, who is walking in a hurry, will pick up a quarter from the sidewalk, but not a dime, then the corresponding amount of money given their relative wealth that Bill Gates would ignore if he saw it lying on the street is $25,000.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Lying, Science, Average
Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.301, W. W. Norton & Company

There is a theorem that colloquially translates, You cannot comb the hair on a bowling ball. ... Clearly, none of these mathematicians had Afros, because to comb an Afro is to pick it straight away from the scalp. If bowling balls had Afros, then yes, they could be combed without violation of mathematical theorems.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, Hair, Balls

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, Ideas, Years
Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.210, W. W. Norton & Company

Deep in the world of atomic nuclei, life is not always tranquil.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, World, Nucleus

Gamma rays are the sort of radiation you should avoid. Want proof? Just remember how the comic strip character "The Hulk" became big, green, and ugly.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Character, Science, Want
Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.105, W. W. Norton & Company

What scientists want next is a thorough comparison of what we and exosolar planets and vagabonds look like. Only in this way will we know whether our home life is normal or whether we live in a dysfunctional solar family.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Home, Science, Way
Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.94, W. W. Norton & Company

Your center of mass is a place you cannot visit but you always carry with you. Like memories, it is part of life's baggage.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Memories, Science, Baggage

Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinate s the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Humble, Science, Past

Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, Blind Spots, Faithful

Publicly and among themselves biologists rightly celebrate the diversity of life on Earth... At the end of the day, however, their confession is heard by no one: they work with a single scientific sample-life on Earth.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, Diversity, The End Of The Day

I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Wall, Science, Numbers
Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.301, W. W. Norton & Company

People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, People, Empowerment

And I don't care what else anyone has ever told you, the Sun is white, not yellow. Human color perception is a complicated business, but if the Sun were yellow, like a yellow lightbulb, then white stuff such as snow would reflect this light and appear yellow-a snow condition confirmed to happen only near fire hydrants.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, Yellow, White
Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.293, W. W. Norton & Company

I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Stars, Science, Missing

The past is another planet.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, Past, Religion
"Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey/ Ninth Episode: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth". Documentary, May 4, 2014.

I [do not know] when the end of science will come. ... What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves. This limit of our mental faculties, and not necessarily of science itself, ensures to me that we have only just begun to figure out the universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, Limits, Ends
Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

And extracting one molecule's signature in spectral analysis from the rest of the signatures is hard work, sort of like picking out the sound of your toddler's voice in a roomful of screaming children during playtime. It's hard, but you can do it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Children, Hard Work, Science

You can make a stack high enough to reach the moon and back, and only then will you have used your 100 billion hamburgers. This is terrifying news to cows.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, Moon, News

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Dream, Science, Venus
Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.216, W. W. Norton & Company

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science, Journey, Years

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Suicide, Fall, Science

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