Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist.

We do not simply live in the universe. The universe lives within us.

One could make a compelling argument that we know more about the universe than the marine biologist knows about the bottom of the ocean or the geologist knows about the center of Earth. Far from an existence as powerless stargazers, modern astrophysicists are armed to the teeth with the tools and techniques of spectroscopy, enabling us all to stay firmly planted on Earth, yet finally touch the stars (without burning our fingers) and claim to know them as never before.

This general flattening of objects that rotate is why Earth's pole-to-pole diameter is smaller than its diameter at the equator. Not by much: three-tenths of one percent—about twenty-six miles.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!" One thing quarks do have going for them: all their names are simple—something chemists, biologists, and especially geologists seem incapable of achieving when naming their own stuff.

Since four coordinates are needed, we know that we live in a four-dimensional universe

If you don't have a dream, you can't have a dream come true

I claim no special knowledge of when the end of science will come, or where the end might be found, or whether an end exists at all. 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.

So lambda's sole job was to oppose gravity within Einstein's model, keeping the universe in balance, resisting the natural tendency for gravity to pull the whole universe into one giant mass.

The exact orbit of Earth is controlled by the Sun's mass and the mass of all remaining planets. An object's mass and its distance is all we need to know to completely determine the effects of its gravity on Earth.

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.

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. Conditions

It is often true that groundbreaking discoveries are made from poor data at the leading edge

There are people, who walk around every day, asserting that we are alone in this cosmos. They simply have no concept of large numbers, no concept of the size of the cosmos.

Look unto the stars to teach us How the master's thoughts can reach us Each one follows Newton's math Silently along its path.

It's like asking what is south of the South Pole

A millionth of a second has passed since the beginning. This tepid universe was no longer hot enough or dense enough to cook quarks, and so they all grabbed dance partners, creating a permanent new family of heavy particles called hadrons (from the Greek hadros, meaning "thick").

The stars of the Milky Way galaxy trace a big, flat circle. With a diameter-to-thickness ratio of one hundred to one, our galaxy is flatter than the flattest flapjacks ever made. In fact, its proportions are better represented by a crepé or a tortilla.

The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brain spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.

By now, one second of time has passed. The universe has grown to a few light-years across,†† about the distance from the Sun to its closest neighboring stars.

These elements would be stunningly useless were they to remain where they formed. But high-mass stars fortuitously explode, scattering their chemically enriched guts throughout the galaxy. After nine billion years of such enrichment, 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.

Decade by decade: estimates of Pluto's size got smaller and smaller.

Earth has also tidally locked the Moon, leaving it with identical periods of rotation on its axis and revolution around Earth. Wherever and whenever this happens, the locked moon shows only one face to its host planet.

We simply organized the information differently—that's all we did. And the New York Times was making a federal case out of it.