Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

The universe today is 13.8 billion years old. By 22 billion years, the Sun will have finished its main-sequence lifetime and will have become a white dwarf. The Andromeda galaxy will have crashed into the Milky Way.

What happened before all this? What happened before the beginning? Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. In response, some religious people assert, with a tinge of righteousness, that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime mover. In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God.

For ordinary household gravity, Newton's law works just fine. It got us to the Moon and returned us safely to Earth in 1969. For black holes and the large-scale structure of the universe, we need general relativity.

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe. What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning.

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place.

Here's the story of how Pluto lost its planetary status and was demoted to an ice ball in the outer solar system. It's also about my role in this at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.

where there is mass there is gravity. And where there is gravity there is curved space, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity. And where space is curved it can mimic the curvature of an ordinary glass lens and alter the pathways of light that pass through.

From galaxy to galaxy and from cluster to cluster, the discrepancy between the mass tallied from visible objects and the objects' mass estimated from total gravity ranges from a factor of a few up to (in some cases) a factor of many hundreds. Across the universe, the discrepancy averages to a factor of six: cosmic dark matter has about six times the total gravity of all the visible matter.

Science is not just about seeing, it's about measuring, preferably with something that's not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain.

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.

These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes.

The closest anybody has come is to presume dark energy is a quantum effect—where the vacuum of space, instead of being empty, actually seethes with particles and their antimatter counterparts. They pop in and out of existence in pairs, and don't last long enough to be measured.

In short, were it not for our ability to analyze spectra, we would know next to nothing about what goes on in the universe.

On the equator, where centrifugal forces are greatest, a 150-pound person will be a slender 149 pounds 14 ounces.

The Universe was opaque until 380.000 years after the Big Bang.

Filling out the entire electromagnetic spectrum, in order of low-energy and low-frequency to high-energy and high-frequency, we have: radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ROYGBIV, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays.

people taking the time and energy to ask about what they do not understand - I have renewed hope that society can shed its superstitions and embrace the enlightenment that comes from just a basic understanding of how the universe works.

We are seeing these nearby stars, not as they are at the present moment, but as they were 4 years ago

German physicist Heinrich Hertz had shown that the only real difference among the various kinds of light is the frequency of the waves in each band.

According to Christian teachings of the day, God controlled the heavens, rendering them unknowable to our feeble mortal minds. When Newton breached this philosophical barrier by rendering all motion comprehensible and predictable, some theologians criticized him for leaving nothing for the Creator to do.

A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth's past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth's flora and fauna–including all the famous outsized dinosaurs.

When I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, 'cause they're small and the Universe is big, but I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.

By convention, moons are named for Greek personalities in the life of the Greek counterpart to the Roman god after whom the planet itself was named.