Neil Degrasse Tyson Astrophysics Quotes & Sayings

The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don't come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He'll use his word, and if I understand it, I'll say, Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Dark energy is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that acts in the opposite direction of gravity, forcing the universe to expand faster than it otherwise would. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We in astrophysics we think of the universe all the time. So to us, Earth is just another planet. From a distance, it's a speck. And I'm convinced that if everyone had a cosmic perspective you wouldn't have legions of armies waging war on other people because someone would say, "Stop, look at the universe." — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The leptons most familiar to the non-physicist are the electron and perhaps the neutrino; and the most familiar quarks are . . . well, there are no familiar quarks. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I try to show the public that chemistry, biology, physics, astrophysics is life. It is not some separate subject that you have to be pulled into a corner to be taught about. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move fluently across those boundaries, you realize that science is everywhere; science is not something you can step around or sweep under the rug. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And with every step, every window that modern astrophysics has opened to our mind, the person who wants to feel like they're the center of everything ends up shrinking. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinate s the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The one we call Earth formed in a kind of Goldilocks zone around the Sun, where oceans remain largely in liquid form. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Mount Everest is about as tall as a mountain on Earth can grow before the lower rock layers succumb to their own plasticity under the mountain's weight. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Dark matter is a mysterious substance that has gravity but does not interact with light in any known way. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In astrophysics, we care about how matter, motion and energy manifest in objects and phenomenon in the universe. Stars are born. They live out their lives. They die. Some of the ones that die explode. Our sun will not be one of those, but it will die. And it'll take Earth with us. So we make sure we have other destinations in mind when that happens. And I've got it on my calendar. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The ordinary photon is a member of the boson family. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

For reasons I have yet to understand, many people don't like chemicals, which might explain the perennial movement to rid foods of them. Personally, I am quite comfortable with chemicals, anywhere in the universe. My favorite stars, as well as my best friends, are all made of them. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In the beginning, there was physics. "Physics" describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena. Hence everything fundamental and familiar to us earthlings begins with, and rests upon, the laws of physics. When we apply these laws to astronomical settings, we deal with physics writ large, which we call astrophysics. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

There's no doubt about it: more varieties of carbon-based molecules exist than all other kinds of molecules combined. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The word "lepton" derives from the Greek leptos, meaning "light" or "small. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth's surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astrochemically richer answer might be, I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Anyone who has wrestled knows that it's the hardest thing in the world to do. Anyone who says something else is the hardest thing has never wrestled. That's what I have found ... You don't wrestle because it's easy, you wrestle because it's hard. I don't do astrophysics because it's easy, I do it because it's hard. And I juxtapose the two in my mind, body, and soul all the time. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In whatever you choose to do, do it because it's hard, not because it's easy. Math and physics and astrophysics are hard. For every hard thing you accomplish, fewer other people are out there doing the same thing as you. That's what doing something hard means. And in the limit of this, everyone beats a path to your door because you're the only one around who understands the impossible concept or who solves the unsolvable problem. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The universe has never made one of anything, so why would there even be one of itself? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Like the microscopic strands of DNA that predetermine the identity of a macroscopic species and the unique propertires of its members, the modern look and feel of the cosmos was writ in the fabric of its earliest moments, and carried relentlessly through time and space. We feel it when we look up. We feel it when we look down. We feel it when we look within. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson