Neil degrasse tyson quotes

You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.

I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religions document.

The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.

If the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.

Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.

After your first job, is anyone asking you what your GPA was? No, they don't care. They ask you: Are you a good leader? Do people follow you? Do you have integrity? Are you innovative? Do you solve problems? Somebody's got to do that homework and redesign the educational system so that it can actually train people to be successful in life.

That is a cosmic perspective, that's correct. And in tandem with that, you will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective such as the entire community of astrophysicists leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective, there's this little speck called Earth and you say you're going to do what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what?

One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview—not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The really striking thing is that it would not take much effort to establish validity in most of these cases… but people prefer reassurance to research.

They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

I am proud to be part of a species where a subset of its members willingly put their lives at risk to push the boundaries of our existence.

It makes good sense to revere the sun and the stars ... because we are their children

All the great advances in cinema came about from technology. The 3-D camera was not invented by a movie director. The new industries are driven by the innovations in science and technology.

Any time scientists disagree, it's because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I'm right, or you're right, or we're both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion.

You don't take a dead cat to the vet. I mean you might, but why?

When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.

In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.

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.

To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of bullshit.

Science is not there for you to cherry pick ... You can decide whether or not to believe in it but that doesn’t change the reality of an emergent scientific truth.

Eventually, the Sun will swell to occupy the entire sky as its expansion subsumes the orbit of earth. Earth's surface temperature will rise until it matches the 3,000-degree rarified outer layers of the expanded Sun.... But not to worry. We will surely go extinct for some other reason long before this scenario unfolds.

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, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.

My goal is not to shove information into your head. It's to find ways to reignite the curiosity that we all had as children for the natural world. You don't have to tell a child to explore the backyard.

In life and in the universe it's always best to keep looking up.

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

If you need to invoke your academic pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument.

... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.

The most successful people recognize that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

I've accomplished enough in life so that I do not fear death.

Apart from the obvious advantages of having ice to melt, filter, then drink, you can also break apart the water's hydrogen from its oxygen. Use the hydrogen and some of the oxygen as active ingredients in rocket fuel and keep the rest of the oxygen for breathing. And in your spare time between space missions, you can always go ice skating on the frozen lake created with the extracted water.

Jesus Christ rose up from the tomb. Well, he's the son of God, and now he's like God's spirit at this point. Why would a spirit need to move a rock? Why not just pass through the rock? But also, why wait for the guards to go to sleep?

NASA was invented as a response to Cold War steps. There are those who presumed that we went to the moon because we're explorers. We went to the moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. And so when it became clear that they (Soviet Union) were not going to the moon, we're done with the moon.

When you advance a frontier, you're doing something that no one has done before. Every time that happens, you have to innovate. You have to think in new ways that hadn't been thought before. You have to invent a new piece of hardware, a new concept, a new law of physics, a new material, a new construction material to enable you to accomplish what it is that you chose to reach for by dreaming about tomorrow.

It's better to understand something than to memorize something.

My only hope is that every other alien civilization isn't doing exactly what we are doing because then everybody would be listening, nobody would be receiving, and we would collectively conclude that there is no other intelligent life in the universe.

Part of me thinks that I've been called by the universe, to get all sort of spiritual about it. Like, I've had no actual say in the matter. The universe found me.

People think about life from day-to-day rather than thinking about life as something that invents a new kind of tomorrow.

I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.

There's an old saying in the space community: 'If God wanted us to be a spacefaring species, he would have given us a moon'.

There's a saying in the scientific community, that every great truth goes through three phases. First, people deny it. Second, they say that it conflicts with the Bible. Third, they say that they've known it all along.

The day that you stop looking - because you're content God did it - I don't need you in the lab. You're useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.

It's odd that the word 'atheist' even exist. I don't play golf, is there a word for non-golf players ?

The news media reported the $250 million as an unthinkably huge waste of money and proclaimed that something was wrong with NASA. The result was an investigation and a congressional hearing. Not to defend failure, but $250 million is not much more than the cost to produce Kevin Costner's film flop Waterworld.

Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything.

If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.

We didn't go to the moon to explore or because it was in our DNA or because we're Americans. We went because we were at war and we felt a threat.

The Big Bang Theory: When geeky scientists can be main characters in a hit prime time series, you know there's hope for the world.

We are only intelligent by our own measures

Curiously, light-loving green plants reject the Sun's green light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look green.

I don't have an issue with what you do in the church but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me I got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. That's when we're going to fight... There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher 'that might not necessarily be true.' That's never happened. There are no scientists picketing out front of churches. There's been this coexistence forever, so to have religious communities knocking down the science door, there's something wrong there.

We hunger for significance, for signs that our personal existence is of special meaning to the universe. To that end, we’re all too eager to deceive ourselves and others, to discern a sacred image in a grilled cheese sandwich or find a divine warning in a comet

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people's politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.

In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.

Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.

What would aliens say when told earthlings shift clocks twice a year to fool themselves into thinking there's more sunlight?

Photons are accurately and legitimately described as waves and particles at the same time. They are genuine wavicles.

No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.

I simply go with what works. And what works is the healthy skepticism embodied in the scientific method. Believe me, if the Bible had ever been shown to be a rich source of scientific answers and enlightenment, we would be mining it daily for cosmic discovery.

When I shop for fruit & melons I like to hold a grape next to a cantaloupe & think of Earth next to Jupiter. Then I eat Earth.

Part of knowing how to think is knowing how the laws of nature shape the world around us. Without that knowledge, without that capacity to think, you can easily become a victim of people who seek to take advantage of you.

He invited people to sign a petition that demanded either strict control of, or a total ban on, dihydrogen monoxide.... Yes, 86 percent of the passersby voted to ban water (H2O) from the environment. Maybe that's what really happened to all the water on Mars.

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

I love the future we might invent for ourselves that I have not yet dreamt of.

Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg, laid by a bird that was not a chicken.

FM signals and those of broadcast television...travel out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing).

I love being wrong because that means in that instant, I learned something new that day.

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 recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.

There are as many atoms in each molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. This is true for dogs, and bears, and every living thing. We are, each of us, a little universe.

Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher. A community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

WhenIWasYourAge: It took a week to learn whether your photos came out okay.

I don't even think much about politicians. I think about the people in the audience who applaud the politicians. They are your fellow countrymen and they're the ones you live with - that should be who we target for education and enlightenment.

Essentially every scientist, when posed with the question, "If you want to get science knowledge from Mars, do you want to send a geologist or do you want to send a robot?" Well, the real answer is, you can send 100 robots for the price of sending one geologist, so let's send 100 robots to 100 different locations, and then we would all benefit. So that's the answer you would get. And I agree with that answer.

I'm often asked whether I believe in Global Warming. I now just reply with the question: "Do you believe in Gravity?"

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect.

If you find life on Europa [Jupiter's moon], like, what would you call it? Would it be, like, Europeans?

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.

Here's something that intrigues me: If you have faith, you believe regardless of the evidence, yet if there's ever evidence to support faith, everyone goes to it and points to it.

As religion is now practiced and science is now practiced, there is no intersection between the two. That is for certain. And it’s not for want of trying. Over the centuries, many people—theologians as well scientists - have tried to explore points of intersection. And anytime anyone has declared that harmony has risen up, it is the consequence of religion acquiescing to scientific discovery. In every single case.

God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

I would expunge the word "aptitude" from our vocabulary, because if you're interested in something, that's all that matters. You'll spend more time doing it, that than anything else, and possibly more time doing it than anybody else. And that's all that matters, because in the end, if you love what you do, you'll be your best at it compared to anything else you might have chosen as a career.

The school system is constructed to praise you if you get high grades. And if you get straight A's, you're the one that everyone puts forward, and they prognosticate that the straight-A person is the one most likely to succeed, because that's the way the school system is constructed and conceived.

All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet.

The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science. They outnumber kids 5 to 1, they wield power, they write legislation. When you have scientifically illiterate adults, you have undermined the very fabric of what makes a nation wealthy and strong.

The idea that God resides in the unknown is what philosophers call the God of the gaps. And we have this thing called science, which marches on and makes discoveries in those gaps, ultimately closing gaps.

It’s short-sighted to think ads won’t one day end up wherever humans are - even the moon.

I wonder if, in fact, we have been observed by aliens and upon close examination of human conduct and human behavior they have concluded that there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.

Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.

For centuries, epilepsy was the exact expectation of someone being possessed by the Devil. There was no better explanation, and it allows you to admit the existence of the Devil. If there's a Devil, that mean's there's a God.

If you're scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you, and that understanding empowers you.

Don't get in the way of children who find it natural and obvious to explore the world around them - even if it means they make a mess of your kitchen or living room. It's all about your perspective on these things. Let them play. When you do, the kids do not have to be reintroduced to ways of questioning nature, and the task of promoting science would be a trivial exercise.

In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you're surrounded by carnivores, one of the best strategies is to fade into the background and disappear.

I grew up in New York City where there is no night sky. Nobody has a relationship with the sky, because, particularly in the day, there was air pollution and light pollution, and you look up, and your sight line terminates on buildings. You know the sun and maybe the moon, and that's about it. So what happens is that I am exposed to the night sky as you would see it from a mountaintop, and I'm just struck by it. Suppose I grew up on a farm where I had that sky every night of my life - then you're not going to be struck by it. It's just the wallpaper of your nighttime dome.

But one of the coolest things about meteorites is that most were formed four-and-a-half-billion years ago, during the birth of our solar system, when, for reasons not yet known, a cloud of gas and dust was transformed into a sun with circling planets.

Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?

Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.

Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults.

Need a distraction today? Not only does 12 + 1 = 11 + 2, but the letters "twelve plus one" rearrange to give you "eleven plus two."

Some claim evolution is just a theory. As if it were merely an opinion. The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science. In my view, it’s also a soaring spiritual experience.

No matter what eyewitness testimony is in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science.

You should chose your heroes a-la carte. Picking and choosing from one and then another, thereby assembling a kind of composite hero. That way when you discover something reprehensible about any one of them it matters nothing to you because that's not the part of them that piqued your interest.

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Not only are we in the universe, the universe is in us. I don't know of any deeper spiritual feeling than what that brings upon me.

We went to the moon and discovered Earth.

You have the illusion of free will, but, in fact, that illusion comes about because you don't know the future. Because you are a prisoner of the present, forever locked in transition, between the past and the future.

If factual information upsets you, then you are creating a world that is not embracing objective truths, and that's not how you advance a democracy.

Note, however, that you cannot simply add temperatures the way you can add volumes or weights. Two people in bed, each with body temperatures of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, do not normally create a 197.2 degree under-the-cover oven.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

WhenIWasYourAge: People were never "living with their disease." We cured them. Or they died from it.

We went to the moon using just Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Newtonian dynamics we call it. So then we find out, "Well, this works because there's certain regimes we've never tested it in." Had we done so, we would show that it didn't work: For example, at very high speeds, very high gravity, Newton's laws fail. They just fail. You need Einstein's laws of motion and gravity. Those would be his special theory of relativity and general theory of relativity. Now you invoke those and it works.

Research in education has shown that we remember field trips long into adulthood. I remember visiting the post office in second grade and looking at the sorting machine. I have vivid memories of that, when I don't even remember the name of the teacher who took me.

Some morning while your eating breakfast and you need something new to think about, though, you might want to ponder the fact that you see your kids across the table not as they are but as they once were, about three nanoseconds ago.

As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm.

The worst thing that ever happened to America was the 19th Amendment.

Trillions of years into the future, when all stars are gone...all parts of the cosmos will cool to the same temperature as the ever-cooling background. At that time, space travel will no longer provide refuge because even Hell will have frozen over. We may then declare that the universe has died-not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

I think everyone should have a personal mission to leave the Earth a better place for them having lived in it and let Earth then take it from there.

I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.

I'd like to live in a world where people embrace objective truths rather than be offended by them.

The whole society has to recognize the importance of the value in embracing what science is going into the 21st Century. Otherwise, we might as well start packing and moving back into the cave right now, because that's where we'll end up.

Italy valued cathedrals while Spain valued explorers. So worldwide, five times as many people speak Spanish than Italian.

A common way to compute density is, of course, to take the ratio of an object's mass to its volume. But other types of densities exist, such as the resistance of somebody's brain to the imparting of common sense.

Many people are unhappy because there was some point in their past where there was some glory day, and as they get older they're not creating more glory days. They reflect on a time that they will never reach again, and it brings some level of dissatisfaction into their lives. I have circumvented that by simply making incumbent upon myself to always be productive in ways that are consistent with my physical body, my mental state of knowledge, but more important, my presumed growth in wisdom that would come with age.

The molecules that comprise our body are traceable to the crucibles of the centers of stars.These atoms and molecules are in us because, in fact, the universe is in us. And, we are not only figuratively, but literally, stardust.