Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes About Science
-
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.
→ -
To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
A television advertisement must illustrate the scientific method to substantiate any claim.... That is why stains are lifted, ring-around-the-collar is removed, paper towels become soaked, excess stomach acid is absorbed, and headaches go away-all during the commercial.
→ -
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.
→ -
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!
→ -
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.
→ -
The day we stop exploring is the day we commit ourselves to live in a stagnant world, devoid of curiosity, empty of dreams.
→ -
Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.
→ -
The telescope... is a conduit to the cosmos.
→ -
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.
→ -
One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
The past is another planet.
→ -
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.
→ -
Whenever people have used religious documents to make accurate predictions about our base knowledge of the physical world, they have been famously wrong.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
For your own safety, do not ever tell an astrophysicist, I hope all your stars are twinkling.
→ -
People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment.
→ -
On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air. (Yes, I did the math.)
→ -
Great scientific minds, from Claudius Ptolemy of the second century to Isaac Newton of the seventeenth, invested their formidable intellects in attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings.... Had any of these efforts worked, science and religion today might be one and the same. But they are not.
→
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 -
