Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

Indeed, upon learning of a 1931 book entitled One Hundred Authors Against Einstein,†† he responded that if he were wrong, then only one would have been enough.

America will aim no higher than the creation and aggressive marketing of minor consumer products that replace similar, and perfectly satisfactory, consumer products. "America may be losing a competitive edge in many enterprises, from cars to space," riffed National Public Radio host Scott Simon in the summer of 2010, "but as long as we can devise a five-bladed, mineral-oil-saturated razor, we face the future well-shaved.

If aliens ever give us a call, the Chinese will be the first to know.

The actual recipe for the asteroid belt? Take a mere 2.5 percent of the Moon's mass (itself, just 1/81 the mass of Earth), crush it into thousands of assorted pieces, but make sure that three-quarters of the mass is contained in just four asteroids. Then spread them all across a 100-million-mile-wide belt that tracks along a 1.5-billion-mile path around the Sun.

If a particle can fall into a black hole, it can come out of a white hole.

Seems the World goes batshit crazy, every few decades. Just long enough to forget the last time the World went batshit crazy.

In particular, a quantity known as the fine-structure constant, which controls the basic fingerprinting for every element, must have remained unchanged for billions of years. Of

Stephen Hawking the reputation of being the smartest person alive. Most of us agree.

On canvas with paint In the Artist's school It's red that is hot And blue that is cool. But in science we show As the heat gets higher That a star will glow red Like the coals of a fire. Raise the heat some more And what is in sight? It's no longer red It has turned bright white. Yet the hottest of all, Merlin says unto you, Is neither white nor red When the star has turned blue.

Earth's oceans will boil away about a billion years

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

Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us?

The Speed of Light: It's Not Just a Good Idea It's the Law. Unlike

And without violating momentum laws, you cannot spontaneously levitate and hover above the ground, whether or not you are seated in the lotus position.† Knowledge

At one time or another every one of us has looked up at the night sky and wondered: What does it all mean? How does it all work? And, what is my place in the universe?

What our phrenological exam says is that we understand how the universe behaved, but that most of the universe is made of stuff about which we are clueless. Our profound areas of ignorance notwithstanding, today, as never before, cosmology has an anchor, because the CMB reveals the portal through which we all walked. It's a point where interesting physics happened, and where we learned about the universe before and after its light was set free.

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 in the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system

What if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify - a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into existence from nothing? Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a super-intelligent alien species?

We are all the sum of that which has happened in our lives. If you are successful, it would be wrong to think that you'd be more successful if something had been easier.

Distant galaxies now visible in the night sky will ultimately disappear beyond an unreachable horizon, receding from us faster than the speed of light.

No experiment ever conducted has ever revealed an object of any form reaching the speed of light.

Within the chemically rich liquid oceans, by a mechanism yet to be discovered, organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life. Dominant in this primordial soup were simple anaerobic bacteria—life that thrives in oxygen-empty environments but excretes chemically potent oxygen as one of its by-products.

School is not only a place to learn, but a place to learn how to learn.

So what is the stuff? Nobody knows. 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.