Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist.

Take America's Global Positioning System, GPS—two dozen satellites in orbit at about 12,500 miles above Earth, more than fifty times higher than ordinary low-Earth-orbit satellites

El físico teórico estadounidense del siglo XX John Archibald Wheeler lo expresó de mejor forma, resumiendo el concepto de Einstein como: "La materia le dice al espacio cómo curvarse; el espacio la dice a la materia cómo moverse".4

Here in our solar system, a hundred-meter-wide asteroid sails into Earth every millennium or so at speeds upward of fifty thousand miles an hour, generating a destructive impact equal to 2,500 atomic bombs.

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

We went to the moon, looking to discover it, and we looked back and we discovered Earth for the first time.

The Sun heats the ground, and the ground heats the air. Visible light hits Earth and heats it. Earth reradiates that same energy as infrared, and it's the infrared that gets trapped by the greenhouse gases.

Ordered it with whipped cream, of course. When it arrived at the table, I saw no trace of the stuff. After I told the waiter that my cocoa had no whipped cream, he asserted I couldn't see it because it sank to the bottom. But whipped cream has low density, and floats on all liquids that humans consume. So I offered the waiter two possible explanations: either somebody forgot to add the whipped cream to my hot cocoa or the universal laws of physics were different in his restaurant.

The Cosmic Perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave. An indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix.

planetary orbit, for example, is described quite simply as the response of a planet to the curvature of space in the vicinity of the Sun.

First, get your facts straight. Then, distort them at your leisure.

At Concordia, a European science station based in Antarctica, about a dozen intrepid people spend months at a time together in perpetual darkness, farther from civilization than the International Space Station is from Earth.

Not until 1987 is homosexuality removed entirely from the formal list of mental "disorders" compiled by the American Psychiatric Association.12 Computers

If we instead back away from all that divides us, you might find common, unifying perspectives on the world. If so, watch where you step.

That's like watching Columbus sail out of the harbor.

Almost all of the big epidemics that we've seen in the last decade-plus have come from fruit bats that normally pollinate the rain forest. And as the rain forest is under stress and the upper canopies are getting overheated, desperate bat populations are moving closer and closer into human areas and passing their viruses to our livestock, and eventually to us.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg, laid by a bird that was not a chicken.

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.

In one single underground deposit alone scientists have found a huge slab of frozen water—ice that's six times the area of New England and more than 100 feet deep.

and he's sticking a you-know-what slowly into my you-know-where

Tutti noi, a un certo punto, abbiamo alzato gli occhi al cielo di notte e ci siamo chiesti: che significa tutto questo? Come funziona? E qual è il mio posto nell'Universo

Blue cheese gets its flavor and color from the penicillin fungus

Siamo polvere di stelle diventata vita [...].

Because I wanted to save women when mean people were trying to harm them.