Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth's entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.

Those stars with more than about ten times the mass of the Sun achieve sufficient pressure and temperature in their cores to manufacture dozens of elements heavier than hydrogen, including those that compose planets and whatever life may thrive upon them.

Listen up, because living off-planet might lie ahead.

In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.

Shortly before, during, and after the strong and electroweak forces parted company, the universe was a seething soup of quarks, leptons, and their antimatter siblings, along with bosons, the particles that enable their interactions.

El problema de no advertir la cultura propia es uno de los grandes placeres de viajar al extranjero: descubrir lo que uno no ha visto en el propio país y advertir lo que los demás no conocen acerca de ellos mismos.

We embark on this quest not from a simple desire, but from a mandate of our species to search for our place in the cosmos. The quest is old, not new. And has garnered the attention of thinkers great and small, across time and across culture. What we have discovered, the poets have known all along.

The ordinary photon is a member of the boson family.

Within the chemically rich liquid oceans, by a mechanism yet to be discovered, organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life.

Si la velocidad orbital de la Tierra fuera mayor que la raíz cuadrada del doble de su velocidad actual, nuestro planeta alcanzaría una «velocidad de escape» y, como cabe suponer, escaparía del sistema solar. Podemos

The word "lepton" derives from the Greek leptos, meaning "light" or "small.

During the quark–lepton era the universe was dense enough for the average separation between unattached quarks to rival the separation between attached quarks.

As the cosmos continues to cool—dropping below a hundred million degrees—protons fuse with protons as well as with neutrons, forming atomic nuclei and hatching a universe in which ninety percent of these nuclei are hydrogen and ten percent are helium, along with trace amounts of deuterium ("heavy" hydrogen), tritium (even heavier hydrogen), and lithium.

Had Earth been much closer to the Sun, the oceans would have evaporated. Had Earth been much farther away, the oceans would have frozen. In either case, life as we know it would not have evolved.

Around the world, varying belief systems lead to political differences that are not always resolved peacefully. The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

Brick walls are opaque to our eyes, but to microwaves those walls are transparent, which is why we can talk on our cell phones while indoors.

These early, single-celled organisms unwittingly transformed Earth's carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into one with sufficient oxygen to allow aerobic organisms to emerge and dominate the oceans and land.

Aluminum occupies nearly ten percent of Earth's crust yet was unknown to the ancients and unfamiliar to our great-grandparents. The element was not isolated and identified until 1827 and did not enter common household use until the late 1960s, when tin cans and tin foil yielded to aluminum cans and, of course, aluminum foil. (I'd bet most old people you know still call the stuff tin foil.)

These same oxygen atoms, normally found in pairs (O2), also combined in threes to form ozone (O3) in the upper atmosphere, which serves as a shield that protects Earth's surface from most of the Sun's molecule-hostile ultraviolet photons.

Einstein himself, acutely aware of the world's newfound capacity for annihilation, said in a 1949 interview in Liberal Judaism, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

No, it's not Pluto. Get over it.

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

The National Air and Space Museum is unlike any other place on this planet. If you're hosting visitors from another country and they want to know what single museum best captures what it is to be American, this is the museum you take them to. Here they can see the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1927 Spirit of St. Louis, the 1926 Goddard rocket, and the Apollo 11 command module—silent beacons of exploration, of a few people willing to risk their lives for the sake of discovery. Without

I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.