Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes About Language
-
The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don’t come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He’ll use his word, and if I understand it, I’ll say, “Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?
→ -
We still refer to sunrise, sunset. That only has meaning if you think that Earth is in the center of things, and everything is moving around us. So even though we know intellectually Earth goes around the sun, the language is still pre-Copernican, as we would call it.
→ -
I can tell you that in my modern life I enjoy language. I enjoy words, their meaning, what they sound like to the ear, what they sound like to the listener. I strive to write the perfect sentence in all that I do, and when I write [the] perfect sentence I know it. If I had a second life I'd be a librettist for Broadway musicals.
→ -
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.
→ -
Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.
→
Related Authors
-
Brian Cox Physicist -
Elon Musk Investor -
Michio Kaku Physicist -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
George Takei Actor -
Albert Einstein Theoretical Physicist -
Brian Greene Theoretical Physicist -
Stephen Colbert Satirist -
Ann Druyan Author -
Seth MacFarlane Actor -
Bill Nye Educator -
Charles Darwin Naturalist -
Bill Maher Comedian -
Sam Harris Author -
Stephen Hawking Physicist -
Richard P. Feynman Physicist -
Isaac Newton Physicist -
Carl Sagan Astronomer -
Lawrence M. Krauss Physicist -
