Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

If that's how you want invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance that is getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on.

adding travel time lost during the pit stop between photon absorption and re-emission, the total trip lasts about a million years. If a photon had a clear path from the Sun's center to its surface, its journey would instead last all of 2.3 seconds.

There's a variation of the ever popular multiverse idea in which the multiple universes that comprise it are not separate universes entirely, but isolated, non-interacting pockets of space within one continuous fabric of space time - like multiple ships at sea, far enough away from one another so that their circular horizons do not intersect. As far as any one ship is concerned (without further data), it's the only ship on the ocean, yet they all share the same body of water.

Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species?

I long for a civilization to develop a level of science literacy, so that we can become better shepherds of our future on this planet.

Spheres are indeed fertile theoretical tools that help us gain insight into all manner of astrophysical problems. But one should not be a sphere-zealot. I am reminded of the half-serious joke about how to increase milk production on a farm: An expert in animal husbandry might say, Consider the role of the cow's diet... An engineer might say, Consider the design of the milking machines... But it's the astrophysicist who says, Consider a spherical cow...

The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.

Even if you're bad at math, you're probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours.

Human nature scares the hell out of me.

Astronomy, because of that peculiar history, has a fascinating legacy of early contributions by women.

We've come a long way since Herschel's experiments with rays that were "unfit for vision," empowering us to explore the universe for what it is, rather than for what it seems to be. Herschel would be proud. We achieved true cosmic vision only after seeing the unseeable: a dazzlingly rich collection of objects and phenomena across space and across time that we may now dream of in our philosophy.

We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say that the universe has empowered us, here in our small corner of the cosmos, to figure itself out. And we have only just begun.

some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How

That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.

If everything is so bright, there will be no place for light.

What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning. The universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

What Rømer discovered was that when Earth was closest to Jupiter, Io disappeared about 11 minutes earlier than expected, and when Earth was farthest from Jupiter, Io disappeared about 11 minutes later. Rømer reasoned that Io's orbital behavior was not likely to be influenced by the position of Earth relative to Jupiter, and so surely the speed of light was to blame for any unexpected variations.

The LED revolution in advanced lighting technology creates pure visible light without wasting wattage on invisible parts of the spectrum. That's how you can get crazy-sounding sentences like: "7 Watts LED replaces 60 Watts Incandescent" on the packaging.

Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.

My confidence that there is a loving God who cares at all for your health or your longevity, based on what I see in the physical universe, is so low that it's not something that I would spend any time investing in, to try to explore any further about whether or not it's true. I'll let other people do that exploring. Read in the New Yorker, sometime in March, 2015

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

Had Earth been much closer to the Sun, the oceans would have evaporated. Had Earth been much farther away, the oceans would have frozen.

This was not, of course, the first time that significant monies were spent on military programs. Kennedy knew, if only implicitly, that while bravery may win battles, science and technology provide security. Science and technology win wars.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.