Top 896 Quotes & Sayings by Neil deGrasse Tyson - Page 12

We need to look at NASA, not as a handout, but as an investment.

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

What's up with chicks and science?

It's my duty to enlighten people.

If cosmological theory were dominated by women, who are no strangers to cycles, how can we know for sure that we wouldn't then be told that the oscillating universe is the more aesthetically fulfilling alternative?

Science reveals that all life on Earth is one.

The greatest explorer of recent decades is not even human.

Odd how often blood is shed to obtain freedom from those in power. Oppressors must be the most insecure people in the world.

I don't want to die ... I don't want to die poor. Two great motivators in the history of human cultures.

The iron from that meteorite and the iron from your blood have common origin in the core of a star.

In the movie, the stars above the ship bear no correspondence to any constellations in a real sky. Worse yet, while the heroine bobs... we are treated to her view of this Hollywood sky-one where the stars on the right half of the scene trace the mirror image of the stars in the left half. How lazy can you get?

As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded.

Long ago Mars was an oasis of running water.Today the Martiansurfaceis a sterile,barren desert. Here on Earth, who knows what climactic knobs we unwittingly turn,which might one day render Earth as dry and lifeless as Mars. (From the cover of Old Poison by Joan Francis)

For your own safety, do not ever tell an astrophysicist, I hope all your stars are twinkling.

What do you call those knobby things on doors that help you open them?

If it's a new planet, sign me up. I'm tired of driving around the block, boldly going where hundreds have gone before in orbit around earth-give me a place to go and I'll go.

We need more science in the world. Train me.

They all knew the mothership was coming, they all knew it was a flying saucer, they all knew it came from another planet through the vacuum of space. And so what do they do, to the left of that monument? They set up runway lights. And I'm thinking, if you could travel through the vacuum of space, you don't need runway lights. Runway lights are if you're using air for lift. Aliens would not need air for lift.

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

As the plow pushes through a parking lot of light fluffy snow, the snow clumps together in bigger and bigger chunks. Out in space, pressure hitting a gas cloud has a similar effect, except, instead of snowballs, you get stars!

Evidence my 14yr old daughter is geek-literate: In lieu of OK, one might type K while texting. She instead typed "Potassium".

I have found that when calculating what no one has calculated before, like my observing sessions on the mountain, my mental acuity peaks. Ironically, these are the times that I would flunk the reality check normally reserved for mental patients and dazed boxers: What is your name? What day is it? Who is the president of the United States?... I do not know, and I do not care. I am at peace with my equations as I connect to the cosmic engines that drive our universe.

I want and need the artist to take me to new places, and the new place that Van Gogh took me not the sky as it is but the sky as he felt it. And the more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

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're no scientists picketing outside of churches.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist's domain-is infinitely more daunting.

Science is not a subject you took in school. It's life. We are wrapped by it, in it, with it.

For the film to 'earn' the right to be criticized on a scientific level is a high compliment indeed.

Astronomers do not commonly use Venereal, in favor of the less contagious-sounding Venutian. Blame the medical community, who snatched the word long before astronomers had any good use for it. I suppose you can't blame the doctors. Venus is the goddess of beauty and love, so she ought to be the goddess of its medical consequences.

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

The tenacity of life is mind-boggling. We keep finding it where no one thought it could be.

Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

People like death and mayhem.

Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences.

On some issues, I'm a staunch Conservative — like curtailing greenhouse gas emissions so that we can Conserve the environment.

The remarkable feature of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

Santa knows Physics: Of all colors, Red Light penetrates fog best. That's why Benny the Blue-nosed reindeer never got the gig.

Stars die and reborn […] They get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All was cooked in the fiery hearts of long vanished stars. … The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

It's progress I think, that science has joined philosophy, metaphysics & religion as subjects drunk people argue about in bars.

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.

Before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there's equal opportunity.

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.

The most successful scientists in the history of the world are those who posed the right questions

What are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?

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.

It seems that we're better at finding someone to blame for our problems than we are at finding creative solutions to fix them.

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.

Feeling a little small? Well, in the context of the cosmos, we are small.

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.

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.

If I'm looking fit and I'm not, then I'm cheating.

You can get an Egg McMuffin all day; you just can't get the hamburger all day.

When I wrestled, I would set aside the time to wrestle, so that in my mind it didn't interfere with my study time. If I'd say, "I'm going to study this many hours, then I'm going to go work out and wrestle," then when that time comes, you don't feel like you should be doing something else. That helped me psychologically. But otherwise? When I'm wrestling, I'm not studying the universe. And when I'm studying the universe, I'm not wrestling.

You could be a poet, an artist, a comedian - if you're in the culture of innovation then you embrace those who do and you're going to protect the science curriculum in the classroom because you understand the meaning and the value of it. And science discoveries don't scare you. You say, "Give me more science", not less. "Give me more technology", not less.

I'm not hard to find. I'm all over the Internet.

People are really excited about robotic exploration. I understand the feeling there because, in fact, robots can do things humans can't. They can survive harsh conditions, they can explore places we would never go, plus you never actually have to bring them back.

Going into orbit around Earth - where the space station is today, and where the space shuttles and John Glenn and all those folks go-that's three-eighths of an inch above a schoolroom globe, just FYI. That's not very far from Earth. Yes, you are off Earth, but you're not really going anywhere yet. The moon was the only real destination.

Spin-off technologies are changing the culture. Even if you don't become an engineer you could be a poet, a journalist, a lawyer, but you will be thinking innovation and your actions within society, who you vote for, what you value, all become a participant in an innovation economy.

It turns out that the history of astrophysics is where we perfected time keeping.

Astronauts are the only kind of celebrity I know who can have a line of people waiting for their autograph, even if the line of people does not know in advance the astronaut's name.