1,151 Quotes by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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.

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

First of all, as you know, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don’t. But actually, there are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who aren’t.

Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps-which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people’s knowledge.

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there’s any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.

As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn’t really overturn a science paradigm.

Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species?

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.

The supermoon is a 16-inch pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza. It’s a slightly bigger moon; I ain’t using the adjective ‘supermoon.’