Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

Even the successful 1985 Bret Easton Ellis book (and 1987 film) Less Than Zero, which tracks the falling from grace of wealthy Los Angeles teens, could not be imagined with the logically equivalent title: Negative.

When something glows from being heated, it emits light in all parts of the spectrum, but will always peak somewhere.

These largely empty volumes of space—the far-rural regions of each galaxy—contain too little visible matter to explain the anomalously high orbital speeds of the tracers.

Earth's Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.

And what happens when you stop innovating? Everyone else catches up, your jobs go overseas, and then you cry foul: Ooohh, they're paying them less over there, and the playing field is not level. Well, stop whining and start innovating.

A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment—not because people have lost interest, but because people cannot imagine a world without them.

You could, in principle, perform this stunt if you managed to let forth a powerful and sustained exhaust of flatulence.

How about methane? It too is chemically unstable, and yes, some of it is anthropogenic, but as we've seen, methane has nonliving agents as well.

Sir William Herschel was the first person to discover a planet beyond those easily visible to the naked eye, and he was ready to name it after the King—always a safe bet when you are his subject. Had Sir William succeeded, the planet list would read: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George.

the matter we have come to love in the universe - the stuff of stars, planets and life - is only a light frosting on the cosmic cake, modest buoys afloat in a vast cosmic ocean of something that looks like nothing.

The German physicist Max Planck, after whom these unimaginably small quantities are named, introduced the idea of quantized energy in 1900 and is generally credited as the father of quantum mechanics.

First of all, as you know, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don't. But actually, there are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who aren't.

I came to resent labels of all kinds. What are they, if not intellectually lazy ways of asserting you know everything about a person you've never met?

Differences in opinion enrich the diversity of a nation, and ought to be cherished and respected in any free society, provided everyone remains free to disagree with one another and, most importantly, everyone remains open to rational arguments that could change your mind.

In a trillion or so years, anyone alive in our own galaxy may know nothing of other galaxies. Our observable universe will merely comprise a system of nearby, long-lived stars within the Milky Way. And beyond this starry night will lie an endless void—darkness in the face of the deep.

Ordinary matter is what we are all made of. It has gravity and interacts with light. Dark matter is a mysterious substance that has gravity but does not interact with light in any known way. Dark energy is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that acts in the opposite direction of gravity, forcing the universe to expand faster than it otherwise would.

serving as the ultimate source of matter to create galaxies, stars, planets, and petunias.

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

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and

Asteroids are craggy chunks of rock. Comets are balls of dirt, ice, and frozen gases. And meteors are, quite simply, whatever falls through and burns up in Earth's atmosphere from outer space. Asteroids

This leads me to ask how it came to be that Pluto is Mickey's dog, but Mickey is not Pluto's mouse. Something is awry in the taxonomic class of mammals in the Disney universe. I

In an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster), in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way), in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

With only one proton in its nucleus, hydrogen is the lightest and simplest element, made entirely during the big bang. Out of the ninety-four naturally occurring elements, hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all the atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos, on all scales, right on down to the solar system.

Uranus was almost named George.