Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

I don't know how Albert would have felt about this, but an unknown element was discovered in the debris of the first hydrogen bomb test in the Eniwetok atoll in the South Pacific, on November 1, 1952, and was named einsteinium in his honour. I might have named it armageddium instead.

There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

If I live a day and I don't know a little more than I did the day before, I think I wasted that day.

You realize when you know how to think, it empowers you far beyond those who only know what to think.

I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct -- if God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal.

Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else—the ultimate let-there-be-light scenario.

If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don't know.

Or maybe arguing with people you disagree with takes less effort than exploring why they think differently from you.

night and day, a hundred billion neutrinos from the Sun pass through each square inch of your body, every second, without a trace of interaction with your body's atoms.

Without a doubt, Einstein's greatest blunder was having declared that lambda was his greatest blunder.

And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves.

The urge to want some bit of information to be true often clouds our ability to assess why that information may be false.

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.

The most accurate measurements to date reveal dark energy as the most prominent thing in town, currently responsible for 68 percent of all the mass-energy in the universe; dark matter comprises 27 percent, with regular matter comprising a mere 5 percent.

I don't know about you, but the planet Saturn pops into my mind with every bite of a hamburger I take.

I occasionally wonder if the entire Universe is nothing more than a snow-globe on the living room mantle of a space alien.

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted aurora near the poles of both Saturn and Jupiter. And on Earth, the aurora borealis and australis (the northern and southern lights) serve as intermittent reminders of how nice it is to have a protective atmosphere.

We are born of this universe, we live in this universe, and the universe is in us.

Bosons, by the way, are named for the Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose.

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices.

the universe expands forever in every direction for all of time, taking on the shape of a saddle, in which initially parallel lines diverge.

From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that!" —EDGAR MITCHELL, APOLLO 14 ASTRONAUT, 1974

and I submit to you, that science, scientific discovery, especially cosmic discovery, does not become mainstream until the artist embraces the fruits of those discoveries.

Until Sir Isaac Newton wrote down the universal law of gravitation, nobody had any reason to presume that the laws of physics at home were the same as everywhere else in the universe. Earth had earthly things going on and the heavens had heavenly things going on.