Neil deGrasse Tyson - Science Quotes

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That's the good thing about science: it's true whether or not you believe in it. That's why it works.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth — that we have culture.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Great scientific minds, from Claudius Ptolemy of the second century to Isaac Newton of the seventeenth, invested their formidable intellects in attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings.... Had any of these efforts worked, science and religion today might be one and the same. But they are not.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
I am trying to convince people—not only the public, but lawmakers and people in power—that investing in the frontier of science, however remote it may seem in its relevance to what you're doing today, is a way of stockpiling the seed corns of future harvests of this nation... Advancing a frontier—history has shown—has advanced a culture ever since the industrial revolution got underway.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it. Let there be cosmology.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. We're not afraid to admit what we don't know—there's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ibn al-Haytham was the first person ever to set down the rules of science. -S01E05

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Knowing how things work is important, but I think that's an incomplete view of what science literacy is or, at least, should be. Science literacy is an outlook. It's more of a lens through which you observe what goes on around you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher, to student, to teacher. A community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance... Something fundamamental is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understnd.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
While much good science has come from the Hubble telescope (including the most reliable measure to date for the expansion rate of the universe), you would never know from media accounts that the foundation of our cosmic knowledge continues to flow primarily from the analysis of spectra and not from looking at pretty pictures.

Neil deGrasse Tyson