Uhm, for those of you who may not know the Academy forum

is a program that is organized and funded by PAMKA. Uh, it is to bring

to campus outstanding speakers who will engage our students and our faculty

and our families and it is also our pleasure to be able to open it up to

the larger community. So we welcome you all. We're really delighted that you've

braved the elements to join us tonight

Before we get going, uh, with our program tonight there are just a couple people that i want to
thank

for making it possible for us. Uh, first Amy South. Amy, where are you?

Amy's around somewhere. Amy is our community vice president

There she is, in the back

she is uh, ultimately, responsible for, uh, the entire event tonight

Next is Lucy [Botsick??]. Lucy is in the doorway up there. Lucy has

executed every single detail for tonight.

We have Trish Perlmutter

Trish has sheparded this program from the very beginning

And last but not least,

Judy Polonofsky and Debbie Kozak who make absolutely everything

happen for us here at MKA So thank you very much

So now, without further ado it's my pleasure to introduce

the headmaster of the Montclair Kimberly Academy, Tom Nammack

Good evening, and welcome. I'm delighted to welcome you to the Monclair Kimberly Academy

And I want to also thank again our parents' association.

They have made this evening possible for us

while the program

is free of charge

it's not clear expectations

for how we will conduct ourselves as an audience

I have a couple things I'd like to ask of you

Please, there's to be no

electronic recording
audio or video

please don't hold your phones up to take pictures

mostly because it distracts the people behind you

and we'd really like to focus on our very special guests this evening

it's my privilege to introduce our guests

i think they're well known to all of you

but I do want to say a couple things about them

Doctor Tyson

has been a frequent guest on the Colbert report

but, uh, or "Report" I guess is the proper

pronunciation

We're delighted that he's here

and we are also delighted and, uh

um... very grateful

that mr stephen colbert has agreed to interview him

for our benefit

Stephen Colbert

comedian, author

and host of the Colbert Report

is both one of the funniest

and possibly the bravest comedians of our time

I want you to consider his performance

at the national press club dinner in 2007

as he, uh, as he stood just a few feet from the President of the United States

known the rest of us as the most powerful man in the world

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson

astrophysicist, Director of the Hayden Planetarium

author of nine books, teacher, lecturer

host of Nova's four-part series "Origins"

and member of two presidential commissions

on United States aerospace industry

and the future of our country's space exploration

Dr. Tyson has a gift for working successfully

within the realms of research,

education, and policy formation

i owe you all an explanation about our theater tonight

what you see on stage

is the beginning of a set

for a seventh-grade production of "Romeo and Juliet"

this year's selection

for what is as i said an annual performance

and I think it's fitting that Dr tyson is going to warmup the stage

for the two most famous star-crossed lovers in all of American literature

it occurred to me that there are few things

that stephen colbert

and Neil Tyson have in common

and I wanted to comment on them

both of them

share

an over-arching purpose

to make sense of the world

They also share a common strategy

They often look to the stars

human or heavenly

for evidence of how things work

though Stephen Colbert is far tougher

on the objects caught in his gaze

Whereas Dr. Tyson is only known

to have obliterated Pluto.

they share methods in their respective fields, whether it is the search

for evidence that makes sense of the world and the universe

or the creative construction of questions and tests

by which the truth and significance of who

or what is before them are evaluated

Perhaps then,

they both have something in common with william shakespeare

the desire to provide their audience with a lens

to see the world

from the previously unconsidered

point of view

and not just as others would have us see it

So while the stars may be dazzling

training and instinct appear to have taught each of them

to look away from celestial bodies

i'm really sorry i had to get that bad cliche in there somewhere

and to consider the effects

that those celestial bodies have on everything

and everyone around them

In addition to the challenge of questions

that each of them

make us confront, their work

has given the world a little more of that very rare

and gem-like substance

known as the truth

Or in Stephen Colbert's case: "truthiness"

and we are very grateful. ladies and gentlemen

Mr. Stephen Colbert

and Doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo"

Uh, I don't know

Neil, thanks so much for coming Yeah ... thank you.

Mr/Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson is

he's been on my show six times

and often when I come out

to brief the audience before I do my show

they ask me "who's your favorite guest of all time?"

and I say, not just for volume, but it's Neil DeGrasse Tyson

but because not only uh... do I love what neil knows

but uh, I love

that he loves what he doesn't know

always interested in the next thing to learn (Oh yeah) and always rolled to whatever

idiocy my character wants to throw on him

I think the only time i ever surprised you as you told me a

a little while ago

uh was i asked you should uh... should scientists go to Argentina or hike

the Appalachian trail

If they want people to talk about them

it's the universe talking there the universe [??]

Yeah that ... I missed that one Yeah you missed that news story

To go on his show

it's like the hardest interview ever

I have to, like, I'm laden with current events just

to mix with my science cause I don't know where he's gonna come at me

and I gotta be, like, ready with seven tennis rackets

to hit it back

And on set with that one news story remember with that guy, was it south carolina guy

who remembers

He goes to Argentina and becomes well-known for having done so and you ask me straight-out

should scientists

visit Argentina more often to become better known

and it just went.. I just

you aced me on that one (You're welcome)

Now, Neil, we've got a lot of talk about tonight (yeah) a lot of

subjects science is a big thing but i want to start off with

this is not a bribe (that's alright)

I want to start off with .. with these chairs I feel myself sliding

No, no

This stage is not level

oh welcome to the barn raising

Didn't realize we were speaking before the Omish tonight

That's gonna

make it tought to talk about science and technology

All right, Neil

i want to start uh...

i want to start, in a broad way

are you Tweeting now, or are you actually trying to interview me?

no, i'm just looking at ...

i'm just looking at photos of myself

get a little work done I need a little freshen up

let me ask you a very basic question: science

from

"scientia", Latin, meaning knowledge

I didn't take Latin but I'll take your word for it

is it better

to know

or not to know

i think

well my blunt answer is it's better to know (alright) but i think

that is debatable though

well I said "my" answer. Someone else might have a different answer

for instance, Oedipus might have a different answer

Yeah, I mean I think

is .. is knowledge always a good thing?

I have to say yes

why?
because it empowers you

to react

and possibly even to do something about it

if something about it needs to be done

ok, but who we are

is what we know, right?

Part of who we are is what we know

and our identity

is often based on how we see the world

yes, and uh... personality for sure

and if we learn something

that does not jive with how we think about the world

won't we have to reexamine who we are? Yeah, it could mess you up

Once again I'll go back to Oedipus

He plucked his eyes out rather than know any more

Yeah, well, you know people back then you know, they did stuff like that

Yeah, people back then

not people today

so i think

there are people who would not know

who would rather ... remember the old days

I don't know if it still happens where a doctor would find out you had cancer, they wouldn't tell you

They wouldn't tell you (give it to me straight doc) Yeah and

why would even have to say

give it to me straight unless there was a day when they didn't give it to you straight?

If I have five years left I wanna know I have five years left

Cause I wanna, like

do something different in those five years if (Neil?) yeah?

I have some terrible news

so there are some people who don't

there are some people who don't value science

and if they don't value science

are they valuing ignorance? Yes, and.. but I will not pass judgment on them

what I will say is

if they have are at maximal comfort in their ignorance.. fine

except that they will not be the participants on the frontier of

of cosmic discovery

they will be disenfranchised

Hello .. hello

I'm sorry I've got a phone call... hello?

I'm sorry I have to take .. I have to take this.. Hello?

My mic.. my mic isn't working?

Hello?

that's better Now who's in control?

So they won't be in control of the next.. they won't be participants in the next cosmic discovery

No they won't they won't

not only will they not

be on that frontier making any discoveries

they're not in a position to enhance their life for having access to those

discoveries themselves

Can knowledge

ever be a bad thing?

i don't think so

what about actions that

knowledge takes us to? You think that Oppenheimer

when the bomb went off and he said

"I am become death, destroyer of worlds"

do you think he perhaps questioned for a moment

whether the knowledge they achieved that led to the creation

of the bomb perhaps should have been left undiscovered?

Do you know what he said in response to those kinds of questions?

Yes?
he said

because people said "Have you ursurped the power of God?"

and he said

If God didn't want this power to be there he shouldn't have put it in the atom in the first place

kind of an interesting point, I think

What he was saying that the world is accessible to us

so would you say

"Don't smelt the ore and make iron

and make a sword out of it because you could cut yourself"?

back then that's what you would .. that's the counterpart

statement

from the Iron Age.

And if you were around back then you'd be sitting in this chair saying

"Don't make the sword,

because you will unleash evil on the world"

OK, I'll step back from don't make the sword how about

"don't lick flag pole in February"

Yeah, that

You will learn something

you will learn something but at a price, Neil

that'd be data.. it's a data cost

That is a data cost for that, isn't it? Yeah

Also: Adam and Eve...

They ate of the tree of knowledge (of knowledge)

of good and evil (Yeah) and they paid a price (yeah)

so god does put things into atoms he doesn't want us to know about

Yeah, I ..

However, I think

Yes?

I don't want to blame the knowledge

I want to blame
the behavior of people in the presence of the knowledge so maybe

we need better knowledge management

do you think that scientists .. you can applaud him.. he's the hero

Well how about this: do you think that scientists should be allowed to do with anything

they can

I heard a big "No" over here

someone just said "no"

you know, uh, people made fun of him for doing this but

uh... during one of President Bush's

State of the Union speeches .. Bush 1 or 2?

Bush 2

Uhm, he said

uh... we have to .. he spoke about ... he warned against man-animal hybrids

And a lot of people like me

made fun of that

by showing pictures of like senator alligator man going

"Boooo boooo"

"Yay man-animal hybrids"

but if scientists could make man-animal hybrids, wouldn't they?

there are scientists who want to make man-animal hybrids

should we make man-animal hybrids I ask you senator tyson

Or should there be any limits like that? i think there's some creepy things about

that and i've met some scientists who

who would think that would be an intriguing to do

yes okay

So i think

we as a society

as a .. as a

democracy

what we should do is

come to some
understanding of what the prevailing social mores are

and know science should not cross those barriers and not and by the way

scientists are often ones

to try to prevent that

Einstein among them for example he didn't want to make the bomb

after he first told Roosevelt he should make the bomb, he changed his mind

because his conscience, his moral conscious descended upon him

scientists are not without moral code here

so as a culture and as a society we decide what

should be the prevailing cultural mores and i think we should all be

beholden to those. What do you think of the portrayal of scientists

uh... in movies?

because often often

for instance the scientists who make, uh

the terminator

they're the bad guys

scientist leads to the terminator or they create the super bug that wipes out

the world

or or they enrage the monster at the bottom of the sea

When you part the curtains and

at the bottom of all that

there's a politician funding that research

Is this working again? It is? No..

He says yes, you say no

we're getting we're getting bad data

we're good .. That was good That's good? oooh yeah

So scientists don't

lead marching armies

scientists don't invade other nations

scientists

yes we have scientists who invented

the bomb

yes but somebody had to pay for the bomb and that was taxpayers

that was war bonds

there was a political action that called for it

so everyone blames the scientist. We are collectively part of the society

that is passing.. that is

that is

that is

using are not using

to it's benefit or to it's detriment

the discoveries made by science

and at the end of the day

a discovery

itself is not moral, it's our application of it

the takes that .. that has to pass that test

would you agree that there's a .. there's a distrust of science on a certain level

in our country

I mean unless it's, you know

can they grow my hair back? Yeah right

science.. or do other things to your anatomy yes, exactly .. exactly

science.. I've gotten those emails

science

science is sometimes distrusted because it is it is more complex than the average

person can understand. I think that is the core of it

the distrust is not because of what it can do but because of what it

because people don't understand how it does what it can do. And that .. that

absence of understanding or misunderstanding

of the power of science

is what makes people afraid of it

and so

i remember back when they first split the atom you know "shouldn't split the atom" or
or shouldn't .. you hear this at every discovery that happens in science

there's a mystery to it

for example irradiated foods in France they call it "frakenfood", alright

which is kind of a cute word when you think about but it makes food last longer and your

healthier for it, you don't get sick from it

and so.. from it turning bad, in fact

Nasa does it all the time.

Nasa can make a slab of meat you wouldn't necessarily

put this in your refrigerator but Nasa can make a slab of meat that will last thirty years

I tasted it and? delicious?

you know there's some rest.. it reminded some restaurants food reminds me of what

that tasted like but i'm just saying that

just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's bad for you

go figure out how it works.

That's why we need a scientifically literate electorate so that when we go to the polls

you can make an informed judgement

and you can draw your own conclusions, rather than turning to a particular TV station

to have your conclusions handed to you.

Now you know Arthur C. Clarke .. Comedy Central excepted (exactly)

Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum about sufficiently advanced technology.

Yes, it is .. Arthur C. Clarke had several, uhm

uh, laws of

culture and the world one of which was

any sufficiently advanced technology

is indistinguishable from magic.

So..

if something gets too complex for the average person to understand

it's magic .. and you have powers that i don't trust

because I don't know what you're going to do with it next

whereas if you understood how it worked

you'd say "Hey, give me one of those" I mean, that's how that would work
That's how.. that's how that plays out

do you think that's where the debate over

i think that's where the debate over uh...

evolution and creation science comes

is that the

complexity of evolution

is so grand

that it is hard to conceive

of how the incremental changes come and once something becomes so complex

that I can't understand it

there's nothing between that

and God saying "Let it be"

Well one of the beauties of evolution is that

that complexity does not come about from complex ideas

the ideas are actually quite simple

and you can show on a computer how those simple forces

can generate complexity given enough time and enough variation in environment

which is just what the history of the Earth supplies

so so science literacy is an important part of what it is to be an informed

citizen of society

let's get away from our understanding of science, or lack thereof

and get to science itself ok ok I'm with you

here's a transition from talking about

us mixing science and religion

and getting back to science

"God is truth", people think

ok, some believe God is truth

Truth is beauty

is there anything in science

to you that is beautiful or rather what is the most beautiful thing

that you know of in science

E=mc squared

Really? Oh it's awesome, it is

so that equation doesn't just have a great publicist, it's actually..

because everybody knows it, everybody knows it but also, everybody knows Coke, you know

it's like the Coca-cola of science

You learn E=mc^2 before you even know what any of those symbols mean

you hear it in elementary school

oh, it's a gorgeous thing

it's .. what is beautiful about E=mc^2 first of all

tell everybody what all the pieces mean

Well "E" stands for "energy"

"m" is "mass"

"c"-squared is just the speed of light squared, that's just

ignore that for the moment. The thrust of that equation is that

energy and mass

are equivalent to each other

which means you can transmute one into the other

and back

would make's it extraordinary is that that hardly ever happens in our everyday lives

yet it's going on all the time in the rest of the universe

and so.. so

so we're in this little pocket where "E=mc^2"

never happens (is not visible) it's not visible it's not happening in our lives

no, no

but if it did the world would be really different

light coming from that bulb would all of a sudden pop into

a particle, and the particle would come by and it would pop back into light again

Would it hurt?

It can, yeah It can? Yeah it would sterlize you, yeah

The kinds of particles that would do that

they would sterilize you, yeah that'd be bad

I've had my kids

It goes on in the center of the sun it went on at the Big Bang

it goes on throughout the universe

wherever it's hot and heavy

But what is beautiful about it to you? It's simple

It's simple, yet it accounts

for hugely complex things and for me

that is where the beauty lies in the truth

Now if i had to give you a complex

theory to understand a complex phenomenon

You know, send me home

because what's the point?

Now there's no tablet in the sky that said

it had to be simple to end up being complex

it's just a remarkable fact about the universe

so why not celebrate it?

The fact that pi ...

pi ...

that ... pi right?

Let's say the numbers together

3 point 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 ..

we got a few geeks over here looks like we got a geek thing going on over there

not bad, not bad

The fact that you take a circle of any size

a circle the size of the universe itself

and divide it by its own radius

and you get that number

that's beautiful

i have to pause, and I get misty

Thinking of [???]

I'm sorry that's just ..

another one

.. another one that the atoms and molecules in your body

are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of stars

that manufactured these elements

over its lifespan

went unstable

on death

exploding its enriched guts across the galaxy

scattering it into gas clouds that would ultimately collapse

and make a star

and have the right ingredients to make planets

and people

which means, we are part of this universe

as i've said many times and this goes back not only are we in the universe

the universe is in us

that is a profound concept

and it was ... i think it's the greatest gift that astrophysics gave culture

in the twentieth century

it was a research paper in 1957 and i say that because one of the

authors just died like two days ago

Geoff Burbidge.. Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle

one of the most famous research papers that no one ever heard of

you know why? i think

because it had 4 authors, not just one and it took a decade to figure out

and it wasn't just somebody burning the midnight oil so it doesn't

lend itself to poetry or screenplays because it's a collaboration so nobody wrote

about it

but we knew that we are star stuff

we knew that we are stardust at the middle of the twentieth century

that connects us to be universe like no other fact

that's beautiful
sounds like you have written poetry about it

Well, once it gets in you have you know

the only way it comes out is poetically .. no

You write poety, you write sonnets

I don't know if they're sonnets but occassionally a word rhymes in it

and I don't know what to call it

but sometimes if if you feel deeply

about something

i think the greatest poetry

not that I'm.. I'm an astrophysicist alright, that's my disclaimer

but some of the greatest poetry

is revealing to the reader

the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted

that i think is the job of the poet

and so

the simplicity of the universe which started this

part of our conversation

i think

if it doesn't drive you to poetry it drives you to

bask in

the majesty of the cosmos

so what drew you.. you said that ..

the beauty of astrophysics or the gift that astrophysics gave us in the twentieth century

what drew you

to astrophysics? Take us

to Neil deGrasse Tyson

before

he's an astrophysicist take us to who you are now

I'm living in the Bronx

which in the vernacular would be "da Bronx"

and I'm in a building ... not a lot of stars

no There's like a dozen or so in the night sky

so you do not have a relationship

with the night sky

as a city dweller

and

my parents .. I have a brother and a sister ... they would take us

to.. each weekend we'd go to visit museums and other sort-of cultural things in the city

and one of those weekends we went to the Hayden plantetarium

the local plantetarium the one right there in Manhattan

and I.. you sit in the chair, the lights dim, the stars come out

and I said "well that's a nice hoax"

you know

That can't be real, that's

i'll enjoy it while there, but they think there's that many stars up there

what kinda.. they're pulling my leg

and a couple years later i go out to pennsylvania

in another trip we took

and I look up at the night sky and what

persists to this day

and what is an embarrassingly

urban thought

i look up at the night sky from the finest mountaintops in the world

and i look up and I say

"it reminds me of the Hayden plantetarium" I mean,

it's embarassing

I beg forgiveness wow

So strong was that imprint

that i'm certain

that i had no choice in the matter that in fact

the universe called me

and i wondered that if I'd grown up on a farm

and the universe and the sky was just always there

i wonder if that would just have become wallpaper to me

and I wouldn't have then been struck by it as I was at age nine

i'd never known anything of it

and then it just slaps you in the face

and from then on I was hooked

it took two years for me to figure out you can do that as a career

but starting at age eleven you ask me

you know that annoying question that adults ask kids

"what do you want to be when you grow up?"

I heard a comedian say "You know why they ask?"

"because they're looking for ideas!"

Paula Poundstone said that

So, if you had asked me from age eleven

What do you want to be when you grow up

i would have told you a flat-out: astrophysics

astrophysicist

and my whole life aligned to that got a telescope, got a camera, photographed it

all my science fair projects .. one was getting the spectrum of the sun and analyzing

features in the spectra

I ...

built the spectroscope

so i was like Nerd Kid. card-carrying

But I was bigger than other kids so

I was insulated from a lot of what might otherwise happen to nerd kids

You wrestled, too. I was captain of my high-school wrestling team

I've seen you in that wrestling outfit

You can rock a singlet. well done. now..

"Singlet" is what you call the one-piece ...

they know

So, you became.. you wanted to become an astrophysicist

that leads me to another question which is

you know "Is it better to not know? it's better to know"

uhm

Can it be beautful? yes, it can be beautiful.

Is science

a thing

or is it a way to look at the world

Is it a verb, or is it a noun?

It is .. both.

the world is not just "is it this or that?"

"Is it a planet or not a planet?" It's sometimes

you must choose!

It's fuzzier than that

sometimes.. so if i know .. if I have a lot of facts in my head if i can absorb

a lot of facts, am I a scientist? Facts? no

No, you're a ... fact memorizer

In fact... I'll accept that as a compliment

our academic system rewards people who know a lot of stuff

and generally we call those people smart

but at the end of day

who do you want: the person who can figure stuff out that they've never seen before,

or the person who can rattle off a bunch of facts?

at the end of the day, I want the person that can figure stuff out.

and science say, if you were trapped on an island exactly

exactly

well you know the professor on gilligan's island

It's a not a matter of how many facts he can recite

like there's a coconut, and there's a thing and you have a ham radio

OK, you just (seawater) you're stirring the saltwater

you hook the wires up to Gilligan's fillings and you listen to his ears

so it's an understanding of the relationships

While we're on it: Ginger or Mary ann?

Totally Ginger

Ginger, completely

That was like .. she came around the wrong time in my life it was like

Ginger, all the way

for sure

so it is a way ... it is ..

it's a way of approaching the world

it's a way, not only of approaching the world

it's a way of equipping yourself

to interpret what happens in front of you

i think of science

the methods and tools that

enable it

as kinda like a utility belt that you walk around with

you know, and you come upon something .. Are you a superhero?

In your mind, are you Super Science?

Actually, when I was a kid, I wanted to be Mighty Mouse, when I was a kid

really?

And I wanted to sing opera as I went to save..

"Here I am to save the day!"

So it's a tool belt no, it's a .. utility belt

Utility belt, sorry.

because tools.. I'm picturing you in the singlet, with a utility belt

A tool belt .. the difference is a tool belt

you know if you have a hammer

as they say "you can hammer in the morning"

if i had a hammer, the problem is

If you start wielding a hammer, then all your problems look like nails

and maybe they're not

maybe it's more subtle than that

and so your tool kit has to be able to morph into what is necessary for

what it is that you confront at that moment

and so yes there .. you're equipped with

methods of mathematical analysis, methods of interpretation

you know some basic laws of physics so when someone says

"I have these two crystals if you rub them together you will get healthy"

So

rather than just discount it

because that's

that's as lazy as accepting it

both of those are just lazy-brain

what you should do is inquire?

So do you know how to inquire?

and every scientist would know how to start that conversation

start the conversation

they would say well "Where'd you get these?"

"what kinds of ailments does it cure?" "How does it work?" "What does it cost?"

"Can you demonstrate that it works"

And you go through this whole ... and at the end the person's in tears

because they weren't prepared

for that level of questioning

and, so, science literacy is ..

vaccine

against

charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance

of the forces of nature

Neil, if you don't like the crystals I gave you you can just say it.

and they're not working for you because you don't believe

Is there any science fiction you admire?

or that you enjoy?

or do you see the holes in science fiction and go "i can't enjoy that of course
he would know the effects of a neutron star! He doesn't know tidal forces?"

Do you have that problem?

I only have the problem

if the movie is

marketed for its accuracy

number one. Number two .. they gotta get some basic science right. after that, I'm OK

so for example in the latest star trek movie the had this like ..

this red

this liquid .. the red matter ... the red matter thank you

release the red matter, and you drop it into the core of a planet

and it turns the planet into a black hole?

I thought that's kinda cool

Now what was a little weird was Why didn't it turn the ship into a black hole?

Because they had this special apparatus that surrounded it

this special device And the apparatus did what?

It's the anti-black-hole apparatus. hold on.. I'm OK with that

See, I was not losing sleep ...

That didn't bug you?

... over what held the black hole I didn't have an issue with that

Oddly, what I had an issue with was

they needed this drill, which is a very cool kinda .. that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen

(exactly) a drill that would drill to the center of your planet

and they drop the..

i'd say

If that would turn a planet into a black hole, from its center

it surely would turn into a black hole from its surface

but.. then what would Kirk and Sulu fight on?

I know, right, they had to fight on the platform

so, I'm OK

I got angry with Jim Cameron about "Titantic"

that's how i got angry

Did I ever tell you this story? You did not

I've never seen you this angry before

Hold me back

I can't wait to see what you have to say about "Avatar"

you might turn blue with rage go on.. so what was your problem with "Titantic"?

There's a colleague of mine who saw "Avatar" and he got home and he

he told his wife he wanted to paint her blue, and that didn't go over very well

is she ten feet tall?

So "Titantic", you may remember, was marketed as a film of "high accuracy" because

Cameron had funded this submersible to go down and

check out the state rooms

and the wall sconces and the china patterns and so they reproduced that

to detail

and so here they recreate the ship for the movie, can you double check that?

no because he had the submersible. You just have to trust him ok

You gotta trust him. So now

the ship sinks (yes) right?

Did I give away the plot to anybody here?

You see the movie yet? I'm sorry, ok

so the ship sinks I do, I remember you remember, ok

and there's Kate Winslet on the flow

remember that (yes)

and she's delirious This isn't the scene where she's naked

Oh sorry.. go on

No, she's on the flow.. on the.. whatever, the plank and

she's looking up

We know

the date, the day, the time,

the weather conditions, the longitude, the latitude

we know all of this about the sinking spot of the "Titanic"

There is only one sky she shoulda been looking at

and it was the wrong sky!

Worse,

worse than that, worse than that

the left side of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right side of the sky

So it's not only wrong, it was lazy! And I was ...

So halfway through they went, "Just flip it, just flip it"

No one'll know

and so, I was livid

I got out my finest stationary

and i wrote a letter to Jim Cameron

no reply

Five years later I bump into him he was on a NASA committee

and my sort-of presence with NASA was growing by then

and I bumped into him in a meeting

and I said Mr. Cameron, I just want to .. I just have to ask

you know the sky that .. is not the right.. what? what?

and he says "Well actually, that happened in post-production"

So .. so he's absolving himself of guilt

but I wanted him to grovel in front of my feet which he did not do

wait, wait .. so, I was angrier after that

later on

Wired magazine honors him

for "Discoverer of the year" or "Explorer of the year"

and they want to hold their party

at the Rose Center for Earth and Space

you don't come into MY house and get the sky wrong!

my microphone working?

you're loud enough, you don't need a microphone

Can you hear me now? ok

So,

he's in my house
and as a courtesy, they extended me an invitation to have dinner

with a small group of them after this award ceremony

So I said "yeah"

So, we go to dinner there's six of us at the table

the wine is pouring

So I said "Jim, I don't know if you remember but I brought this up some time ago

about the sky

and I wouldn't be so upset except that everything else you boasted was

so accurate

and we can't even check how accurate that is

but anybody can spend $50 for a planetarium sky program

and look at the sky and know that you got the wrong sky

What gives?"

And you know what he said?

he said "last i checked,

worldwide

Titanic has grossed

one point three billion dollars

imagine how much more it would have grossed had I gotten the sky right"

Oh

Oh, I'm so sorry

that ... if i had a tail, it would have been like between my legs, and I would've

oh I think you won that conversation

No actually I did

no he retreated into his bank account

Here's what happened

but you know that money will all eventually be gone

and he would still have gotten the sky wrong

Oh that's an interesting point that's right the sky will..

Outlived even James Cameron

However, however as dejected as I was

two weeks later i get a phone call

forgot the guy's name he calls me up and said "Is this Dr. Tyson?" I said "yeah"

He said, I forgot his name, "Johnny Smith"

I work

in post-production

for Jim Cameron

He is releasing a ten-year director's cut anniversary edition of the Titantic

and will be adding new footage

from the deck and he tells me you have a sky that he can use

Not bad (so) Not bad you got your taste, right?

You got a little taste of that, right?

Yeah, it was good.. oh no no I'm a public servant, I don't need it

Me too

So I don't, you know if you're gonna make

if you're gonna claim it's right then I'm gonna hold you to it

If you're not, then I'll just sit back and enjoy it

(what is) you know what I don't like? I gotta.. you know what I don't like?

Is the people you go see a movie with

who read the book first

Get rid of them!

They don't belong in the movie theater

Alright

It's like "Oh no the book was better"

Well get the hell outta oh excuse me

Get out of the movie theater

go back to your book

Leave me alone

Those people I can't stand

Stay home!

we should not go to the movies together

Now, ok, what is the what is

I got three different things What is the latest discovery

in astrophysics that we should all know about?

Ah, one of my favorite

i gotta go back maybe six months for that, eight months? may I?

Uhm, okay

well we discovered water on the Moon, that's kinda cool

because where you're going, you want there to be water.

alright that's a good thing for life

but what struck me the most

Earlier, in .. 2009

we discovered

methane

on mars

Methane

if you have a gas stove and you live in the city, chances are it's methane

it's a flammable gas, you say "well so what? who cares?" except that

methane

is the byproduct

it's part of the gaseous effluences

of anaerobic bacteria which on Earth

operates deep in the intestinal tract of farm animals

That's a very scientific way of saying

there are Mars farts

That's what you're saying, right?

I didn't want to say it

You got a "Dr" in front of your name

You can't say stuff like that I can't say stuff like that

but that means that

that is a possibility or is that or is that

"yeah there's life" and no one will come out and say it?

It means
while you can generate methane other ways

Such as?

well it's (sunlight?) it's

it's .. there

a combination of pressure, temperature, and energy source you can manufacture

methane (magic!)

so.. but

chemical magic, yes chemical magic

but it is a natural by-product of

bacteria that

thrive in the absence of oxygen.

And you don't have oxygen deep in your intestinal tract, neither do any farm animals

and and if you're down under the.. Mars doesn't have oxygen, so

it's tantalizing to think

that maybe there is

there are life reservoirs

in aquifers beneath the martian soils Speak.. as I was saying before about

is it better to know or not to know

and there are things about our own identity that we take from the knowledge

that we have, (yes we do) or the things that

or the things that we don't know

the assumptions of things that are not there to be known

And I .. instead of using the word "identity" I'd say: They have an impact on our ego

(yes) because the more we learn about the universe, the smaller we get

in time, and space, in size and so if you go .. except not the way you just described it

the way you described it

you're a supernova

(well I) that makes you bigger

well i think if you know about what's going on

then it's not mysterious and you're a participant in the

unfolding cosmos
otherwise

you are consumed by it

and you fear it and you shun it

and you say "I don't want to know that I live on a speck called Earth

orbiting an undistinguished star, in the corner of an ordinary galaxy

in an expanding void of the cosmos

There are some happy thoughts in there, like

like understanding how that worked

recognizing that the human brain figured that out that's kinda cool

There's a lot we still don't know

but what we do know, I think we can sit proudly

and celebrate

what we know about the universe

maybe not everyone of us figured.. it took a few key people like Newton and Einstein

but we learn what they taught us and each of them stands on the shoulders of giants

that came before them

just as the quote goes

but celebrate

not fear it

but if we found out

that there was life

someplace other than Earth

what do you think that would do

to our identity

or our ego

It may

signal a change in the human condition that we cannot foresee or imagine

i think it would

now, i think the issue would be not if we find bacterial life

which is kinda what we're looking for now

bacterial life there's no question about

whether in our minds eye we

reign supreme over bacteria although it can win

bacteria

do you know in one linear centimeter of your lower colon

lives and works

more bacteria

than the number of people who have ever been born in the history of the world?

so in fact we are just hosts

for bacteria to lead their lives so from the point of view of a bacteria

we're just a place to live

a dark, warm, place to live

but we're a planet

and they don't believe there's bacteria in any of the other planets

that'd be another that'd be interesting sci-fi

so the real issue is, if we find life on another planet

that's smarter than we are

that would totally mess with our ego

That'd be the last, like, nail in the coffin of our ego

that used to be, well, we're humans and we're on Earth and Earth is small

and the Sun, sun is insignificant

that'd be the last one and I don't know how we'd be able to handle that

do you think that there have been discoveries that have happened.. for instance

I have heard

discoveries that have changed our point of view about the universe that we are not aware of

that they've changed; in other words the change has been so gradual

we don't realize we see the world differently

Has E=mc^2, because

that's .. coming up on a hundred years

I'll tell you, yes it is actually well, no, we passed it

Last year was a hundred?

No, 1905, so, 2005 (OK)

So, I got one for you

in the 1920s,

which was a watershed decade in the history of science

in that decade

we discovered that

not only our galaxy, the milky way, is not the only

existence of anything in the universe that there are other

milky ways out there

that recently

1920s ... Was it just the optics didn't exist for that?

We needed a big enough telescope and Edwin Hubble

wielded all the glass that was necessary to accomplish that

back in the 1920s. He's ..

Hubble, before the telescope, was a man and

had his own telescope, the biggest of its day

and he made that discovery

that there were these spiral fuzzy things in the night sky

we thought they were just local to us

They were whole other

systems of stars

hundred billion stars unto itself

outside of our system

not only was that discovered in 1926 1929 he discovers that the

universe is expanding

which means

it may have had a (back then) it may have had a beginning

if it's expanding that meant it was little-er in the past

well there must have been a day when it was all together in the same place

thus was born

the Big Bang

okay so now
also in that decade

quantum

quantum mechanics quantum physics

was discovered that is the science of the small

the science of electrons, protons,

neutrons, particles, nuclei

at the time you'd say

this is just the this is just physicists

burning tax money

cause who cares about the atom

I got my horse to feed, I got

kids, I got.. you know you got issues in society

yet it's quantum mechanics

that is the entire foundation of our technological revolution

there would be no computers , there would be no

there would be none of what you take for granted

your iPod, your iPhone, cell phones

the space program ... without our understanding of the laws of physics as

they operate on that atomic and molecular and nuclear level

and so

the chemist has no understanding

of the periodic table of elements

without quantum mechanics

to them it's just a list of elements

quantum mechanics tells you why this column is there

and that's there, why this mates with that and why that makes a molecule with that

that's quantum mechanics and it's unheralded

you asked me if there is any discovery that has changed how we live

It is quantum mechanics

and I make.. I make this point because

I'm ready to
today you hear people saying

"why are we spending money up there when we got problems on Earth"

And people don't connect

the time delay between the frontier of scientific research

and how that's going to transform your life later down the line

all they want is a quarterly report that shows the product that comes out of it

that is so shortsighted and that's the beginning of the end of your culture

So it's

so it's better to know

That's a really long answer to my first question. My second question

Let's take some questions do we have time to do that?

Q and A?

you gonna hit me in the head with a rubbed band?

Ok, very quickly before we get to questions here

How many can I ask?

[???] Do we have microphones or are we going around the room?

We can repeat the question if there aren't enough microphones to go around

Uh, let's start right here with just one please, sir.

Is there a brown dwarf star approaching?

okay uh...

dare I suggest that i think i know much more deeply

about what's behind that question

he's asking about

"Planet X" (do share[???])

that would swing by Earth in the year 2012 and tip us on our axis

and have it be the end of civilization as we know it. Is that right sir?

I heard about that.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm digging a subterranean chamber

(yeah) me and my kids are gonna be fine.

Go on, when's it get here?

Uh, it doesn't exist

moving on, next question

Yes no, there is no "Planet X"

All gravity.. all principal sources of gravity in the solar system

are present and accounted for

anything discovered now would be tiny and insignificant, like

Pluto's relatives

What do you have to say about Apophis?

Apophis

Apophis

an asteroid the size of the Rose Bowl

discovered december 2004

headed towards Earth

it's not alone, among asteroids headed towards Earth except that this one

is headed, excuse me

there's a whole set of asteroids that cross Earth's orbit

that alone is not a problem. You cross the street all the time

but at different times than trucks drive by, OK

so the issue is

are you crossing the street, when the truck is driving there at the same moment

that simultaneity is what matters

Apophis when you ran the calculations showed that there was a chance of it hitting us

in the year 2036

with a close approach in the year 2029 on april 13th

a Friday, by the way

but here's what's significant about that.

we've had close approaches before

but none this close

this is the size of the Rose Bowl and on April 13th, 2029

it'll come close enough to Earth to dip below our orbiting communications satellites

Do you think 2.5% is a big number, for that asteroid to come to Earth?
No, right now the best estimates are seven in a million that it will hit us

in 2036

and if it does, it will likely hit the Pacific Ocean

plunge into a depth of three miles

explode, cavitate the ocean send waves of tsunamis

the first one from the impact

the second one because the water splashing back into the cavity

goes high into the air, drops back down and sends another pulse

this will go on about forty times

there will be multiple tsunamis, I was just on the Santa Monica beach

two nights ago, because Santa Monica

is the first city to get hit

because it's

it's the bee-line right up from Santa Monica 600 km into the Pacific

five-story tall tsunami would take out the entire west coast of the United States

but nobody has to die

because we know this well in advance

but i think two people will die

the stupid surfer who wants to surf that tsunami

you know, we know people like this, right? you know, you see them!

And you know who else of course, the

weatherman who wants to bring the camera guy closer

"Can you see the waves hitting the shore?"

OK, take him out too. we don't need either one of them.

That would make a great James Cameron movie.

Ah, yes.

Tonight there's a wolf moon can you explain what that means?

"What's a wolf moon?" OK, each full moon of the year has a name

and there are regional variations among those names

and the wolf moon

it's when it's snowing

and the wolves howl

You can see the wolf

in the light of the moon because the whole landscape is white

and the wolf doesn't.. the wolves don't turn white

so you can see them against this and

so depending on where if you live in a region where there are wolves

that would be what you'd call it other full moon names you've heard of

the harvest moon is one of them

the honey moon is one

that's the moon that's in June. The honeymoon

because that moon actually never gets very high in the sky

and it's amber the entire time it takes on the color of honey

and it's call the honeymoon and you get married in june -- that's where we get the name
"honeymoon"

Anyone over here? No?

Yes sir

Uhm, the I think, yeah, in astronomy probably dark energy was sort of a real game changer

about 10 years ago, the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up

If there's a game changer in the next 20 years

What is it?

The question is dark energy

he said ten years ago was like a game changer -- can I foresee any game changers

on the horizon?

Well, turns out dark energy

was not as much of a game changer as you might think

because that .. we already had a slot for it in Einstein's equations

we already had a placeholder no one had ever measured

it before so we just assumed it was zero and got on with life

the moment it was discovered

we said, hey

now we can stick it in the equation it was like whoa,

its presence in the equation shows that there's this force

there's this pressure operating against the action of gravity making the universe

accelerate in its expansion

and that's extraordinary because it means the day will come

when these galaxies that Hubble discovered

will expand

will move away from us

with such speed

that they will disappear beyond our horizon

and the total known universe at that time

will only be the Milky Way

restoring the state of mind of our universe that existed before 1920

that's a spooky time, we'll have to hand down the annals of cosmology

from previous centuries

to hear about the galaxies that were once

in the night sky

so game changers going forward: if we discover

the dark matter particle

that'd be kinda cool

if we ... if dark energy, and dark matter, cause we don't know what's causing either one

of them but we measured them so

they are real in their action on the universe

we just don't know what it is

as distinct from the ether a hundred years ago we never measured it

we just assumed it was there there was no data, it was just

dark matter, dark energy, we could call it "Fred" and "Wilma"

don't think it's matter or energy we don't know what it is

don't let the name fool you

I'll for henceforth call it "Fred" and "Wilma"

So, "Fred" and "Wilma"

these two things

it may be

a game changer once we figure out what it is

it's a new particle

that then we can exploit to our benefit in the same way our

understanding of quantum physics

enabled us to exploit the behavior of atoms and nuclei

to our benefit so a new kind of physics would transform how we live

that's one way I think it might go

[???]

Will Pluto not only be humiliated by Neil deGrasse Tyson

That's not the word she said she didn't say that word

Excised from

from the family of planets

Neil was on the group

that gave the recommendation

that Pluto be demoted, correct?

We, uh, we..

we thought differently about

Pluto's identity than Pluto did

and other supporters of it.

we just grouped it with other icy bodies in the outer solar system

that at the time

were being discovered

you know, don't shoot the messenger

Pluto was alone for sixty-five years

and so you can't have a category of one

that doesn't work in science, you need a few things to make a category

it was in a category it was a planet

well yeah. My very elegant mother just sat upon nine porcupines

Now she just sits upon nine it doesn't make any sense

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense

Where's the porcupine?

If she's that elegant, she wouldn't have sat on a porcupine, I don't think

but, so once we found other icy bodies we .. what we did is group them together

we said

Pluto, we found family for you

in fact, we think you're happier there cause now you're one of the biggest icy bodies

Rather than a pipsqueak planet

You sent Pluto to a farm upstate to run and chase rabbits, is what you did

It's much happier there, kids

It's happier there and I didn't do this alone

is there a super-giant beyond pluto that that pulls comets in? is there

is there a chance there is something out there that's drawing

There was a hypothetical star

which is related a little bit to what led to this

invention of this 2012 , the 2012 brown dwarf (the brown dwarf that you won't talk about)

there was a come down to the bunker, too

There was a suggestion that there was a companion star to the sun

provisionally called "nemesis"

that had this elonged orbit that would

jostle comets in the outer solar system

and send them raining down on Earth

creating mass extinctions

accounting for the extinction

episodes in the fossil record

but.. it was an interesting hypothesis that was never supported by data

and so when you're not supported by data you discard the hypothesis

that's how science works

you don't believe something just because you want to

or think something's true just because it feels good. at some point

you've gotta confront the data so getting back to the point

You've never been in politics

so getting back to the point

the recognition that Pluto's made half-ice

and ice evaporates

so won't Pluto one day disappear? no, Pluto's too far away from the sun

for that to ever meaningfully evaporate and disappear completely

What was the point of the Large Hadron Collider?

"what was the plan", did you say? "The point?" "what was the point?" he speaks in past tense

as though we're done with it

well we just turned on the switch

the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland

the point of the the Large Hadron Collider was to embarrass America

to make us feel bad that we didn't have our collider built

back in the 1980s when it was first funded

That's the whole point of the Large Hadron Collider

It's Europe saying "Ha! Gotcha this time!"

now apart from that ego bit,

uh, it's to probe nature

on levels of energy never before seen

and right now it's hard

practically impossible to discover a new law of physics on your tabletop

we've been there

we've done that

and almost

the entire history of physics

is: go to the edges,

of your points of exploration and then take a step beyond that

you're bound to discover something new

it's like one climbing the next mountain, crossing the next valley

so the large hadron collider the energy inside that particle accelerator

will exceed the energy of all the accelerators

that have ever been built before

probing nature as never previously imagined

What is the Higg's boson?

Higg's boson

that's a particle

proposed

that you can think of it as a kind of uh...

it's like a

think of it like

molasses

well, ok, not molasses, uhm

it's a field through which all particles move,

and the interaction of those particles with that field

endows them

with the mass

that we measure for them

it is granting them

the property of mass

we have yet to find this particle but if we do .. so mass is not explained presently

That's correct, we just measure.. we don't know why

we get fat

we don't know why something has mass right now (correct)

and so we

now, may I ask you something if you have.. if you build

let's say you build an equation this way you've got an equation over here, you've built it

and it's a house, ok?

and you've got another equation over here that works, it's another house

but in your mind you think

these two houses are actually probably shoudl be one house

you invent something that fits into the shape between the two houses, right?

(yes) [??]

Ok, there's something in universe that is the shape

of the space between these two houses (yes)

does that necessarily mean that thing is there

the history has shown that

almost every time

we propose something that connects one house to another .. if those two houses

themselves .. work

there's something in between them connecting the two

for example

for example

the 1930s, we had this experiment .. 1930s

quantum physics is in place

we start probing the atom

we find out there's an atomic reaction, a nuclear reaction

where there's some missing

energy

we account for all of it and there's something missing

there's this much energy here and then it's missing here

and we swear we've accounted for everything

Fermi comes up (a famous physicist) said

I bet there's a particle

that came out of that reaction

that escaped with the energy before you got a chance to measure it

E=mc^2

That would've endowded that particle with it's energy to do so.. the mass to do so

E=mc^2 is in every one of these

it's all over the place

it's writ with E=mc^2 the point is

he hypothesized a particle

gave it the properties that is would have to have

to account for what was seen

that's your conduit between the two houses

then he said, it's gotta have this much energy

and it's gotta be pretty hard to detect because we surrounded this in lead

and it went straight through the lead

I'm gonna propose a particle that's hard to detect

and it's gotta be little, cause there's not that much mass, and it has no charge

so it's neutral

so, he called them neutrinos "little neutral ones"

he hypothesized, he said let's look for them

twenty years later they were found, neutrinos

and now we [kept?] them coming out of these reactions

he built the porch

the walkway between the two houses

practically every time you have two working

understandings of the world

at they have to coexist in the same universe there's something that's going to connect them

it's like

electricity and magnetism

previously discovered as separate things

until Faraday and Maxwell said hey, wait a minute

this works, and that works

and they kinda smell like each other a little, maybe they're the same thing

so a whole theory came out

to put the two together, and it is the theory of electromagnetism

you know this word, you just take it as a single word, but those used to be separate concepts

so, we're going good with this

we're on a roll here

so why not continue

Yes, right there

Do parallel universes exist?

Do parallel universes exist? we don't know,

uhm
parallel universes are losing favor to the multiverse

we have some cogent theoretical

expectations

that our universe might be just one of many

spawned from this, sort of, this hyper-dimensional

medium which we'll call the multiverse there's no data to support it

but we have good theoretical

premise

to think that it's there and we have philosophical precedent

we used to think Earth was special and

unique. It wasn't, we got 8 .. 9 .. 8 planets

we thought the Sun was special

it's one of a hundred billion suns, the galaxy's special, no there's a hundred billion galaxies

we have one universe

or do we?

The track record said

why should there only be one?

be open to the possibility

that you don't live in the majority [looking?] universe that's out there

Would a separate universe .. when you say "different universe"

slightly different laws of physics which (that's what I'm asking)

oh this is the fun part

because if you find, if you manage to get a portal to another universe

don't be the first one to volunteer to go through

because your atoms are working in this universe

if a slightly different law of physics.. you could implode, explode

come out with three heads who knows?

There's a different exchange rate over there Yes

someone .. let's go in the back

in the middle of

and I think.. you have a white sweater on

Is it possible to tunnel through a black hole, like, quantum mechanically speaking?

Can a black hole be used to travel how about that, can we say that? No

no, it's a little different

Steve, get with the program tunnel through a black hole

(yes, quantum mechanically ) as if it creates a tunnel, in space or time?

quantum mechanically is what she said

quantum mechanically, can you tunnel through a black hole?

I'm not gonna try to interpret this one

Well I have to ask, did you want to land someplace else when you're done

or are you content with being dead when it's over?

I need to know before I answer

I guess it's ok if I die

It's ok if you die

For science Stephen Hawking showed just recently

that, and for me this is kinda spooky/amazing

that black holes

remember everything that they have ever eaten

which means, it's not a tunnel to anywhere

everything that it ate is sitting there at the singularity at its center

now the spooky part, that's not the spooky part

the spooky part is

Stephen Hawking showed forty years ago

that black holes can actually evaporate

the matter that's within a black hole

can

rise up out of the gravitational field that surrounds it

and spontaneously birth a pair of particles

that's just E=mc^2 doing it's thing

E=mc^2

the gravity field has high energy density

out of that pops particles

and those particles escape

taking

matter away from the black hole

from the

from the gravity field of the black hole

doesn't that fly in the face of.. how we think of a black hole

in a black hole, gone forever

because nothing escapes, because nothing has

nothing can surpass the energy needed to go faster than the speed of light

except quantum mechanics

quantum physics from the 1920s gets you out of that problem

that's a classical understanding of black holes you layer quantum mechanics on it

weird stuff happens

completely legitimately weird stuff happens

so you birth these particles outside the thing now here's what happens

That sounds like

science is making magical exceptions for itself

quantum physics

is kind of magic

because none of it issues forth from your common sense

particles pop in and out of existence

one time it's a wave, the next time it's a particle, and it interacts with itself

and you measure here but it shows up there

if we were forged in that world

then all that would be common sense

And E=mc^2 would be a daily phenomenon

you wouldn't need Einstein to figure it out

You'd be learning it in elementary school

but that is a foreign universe to us

as to what goes on there, you are prone to say: that doesn't make sense

you know something -- it's of

no obligation to make sense to you because your senses

didn't come out of that universe

out of that universe of tiny particles we don't live there

if you let something go and it drops you say "that makes sense"

if you let something go and it goes up you say "that doesn't make sense"

in quantum world, that happens all the time

it would make sense in the quantum world

so I submit to you

that if I take your body and dump it into a black hole, what Stephen Hawking showed

is that

all the particles that went into the black hole let's say

it's Stephen Colbert black hole ok, no other contaminating bodies

but your atoms in the center of this black hole

and i wait around and out here

in the gravity field

particles pop into existence

and I check, make a check, how many protons

how many neutrons

how many electrons, how many neutrinos

by the time this black hole has evaporated

it would have been every single particle that you were

having fallen in in the first place

extracted out of the energy field of the black hole so it remembers who you

were, even out in the gravitational field

that's spooky to me

Is the black hole now gone? gone

disa .. pops out of existence

evaporated. it takes .. by the way

it takes several trillion years for that

so don't wait around for it

that young man right there

How do you figure all this out?

it's an excellent question yeah, it's a good one

Isaac Newton

did it all by himself

he was like, really, really

really smart

a quick Isaac Newton story

he discovered the laws of motion, the laws of gravity

shows that planets don't orbit in circles as Copernicus had thought

but in slightly flattened circles we call ellipses

and

and some friend of his said, "Ike, why ...",

[ thought maybe he'd be called Ike ??]

"why that shape, and not some other shape?"

he couldn't answer that question, he said "I'll get back to you"

goes home for two months, comes back, here's why it's that shape

the conic section that cuts through the thing

and said well how did you figure that out he said, well

i had to invent integral and differential calculus to figure it out

so some people invent their own

tools and methods

to discover the world

most people

learn the tools from someone else

and then apply them to make incremental changes some people make huge changes

like Isaac Newton and

and and and

Einstein and others

Isaac Newton once said, "if i can see farther than others

it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants

who have come before me"

But I've read Issac Newton

and his stuff makes the hair .. if I had hair there

rise up on the back of my neck how plugged-in he was to the universe

and i'm saying to myself that quote cannot have possibly have been honest

what it really meant if [i could re-give] that quote to him

If I can see farther than others it's because i'm standing

among midgets, that's why he could see farther than everybody else

in the case of Isaac Newton

I'm afraid we only have time for one more question, yes sir

Actually that was a great segue to my question

we organized this all for your question

earlier in the evening you brought up

the ideas of scientific literacy and technology [???] management

I'd like to hear your opinions of where the policy needs to go to make a positive impact in that area

alright Neil could you repeat that for everybody

the question is

we were talking earlier about scientific literacy and our approach toward science

as a nation

in your opinion and you you serve on science advisory panels

where do you think

we need to go as a nation what do we need to do to increase of scientific literacy

I'll answer it two-pronged

one is: what do you do with your kids?

and kids

need to be able to explore freely

and if you look at most households

they're not designed for that

they're designed to have the kid not explore

the kid come into your kitchen and pulls out the pots and pans

and starts banging on them, what's the first thing you do as a parent?

stop that, you're getting the dishes dirty

yet these are experiments in acoustics

that's what that is

okay

whatever the kid is doing, if it has the chance of breaking something

you're gonna to tell them to not do it

without thinking that that's the consequence of an experiment

that they are conducting

and every time the kid wants to do something provided it doesn't kill them

it's an experiment

let it run its course

even if it makes something messy

you agreed to have a kid in the first place, fine, clean up after them

when they're old enough

Because it's those seeds of curiosity

that is the foundation

of what it is to become a scientist

i don't want everybody to be a scientist that'd be a boring world. i want the poets

and i want

musicians

we need that and I don't have a ...

but I'm talking about promoting science literacy

and so the first step

for the parents is to get out of the way

allow the child to explore

they start playing in the mud "don't do that in the mud I just cleaned those pants"

you're getting in the way of another experiment

they start plucking the petals off the flowers you just bought

from the florist

and you say "stop that I just paid $10 for the flowers"?

had you let that continue they'd find in the middle the stamen, and the pistil

and they'd learn something about the flower

for 10 bucks that's cheap

Derek Bok, one-time president of Harvard once said

if you think

education is expensive, try the cost of ignorance

and so

that's so.. that's gotta start at home. in the schools,

I don't have a problem with the fact memorizing

but don't equate that with what it is to be wise

or

what it is to be smart

smart should be some combination

of that yes, but also

what is your lens on the world? how do you figure things out?

and you promote that by stimulating curiosity

and I don't see enough stimulated curiosity

in this world. this is a famous school right here, I saw the banner in the opening

corridors, so you probably don't have that problem here

all right, but the whole world is not educated in this building

so a lot of change would need to happen in that regard

now getting back to policy

I've tried

you do a simple Google like "youtube and tyson" well, put "Neil" so you don't get "Mike", all right

dining on someone's ear

half of what ends up thrown onto youtube

are talks I've given

where 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

and those seed corns what they do is

whether or not you know it today

advancing a frontier history has shown has advanced the culture

ever since the industrial revolution got underway

and we can speak more

hegemonistically about it that anyone who has embraced

the powers of technology has enjoyed economic wealth the likes of which the

world has never seen attendant with

strength strength of security

and so people say today

they'll say suppose the next attack

terrorist attack is like a chemical attack

do you call out the marines, or do you get your best chemists

to figure out what to do about that

there's a point where your weapons are not as useful

as the brain of the scientist who you could bring to bear on the problem

and so

i see science and technology and creative investments in it

as the most significant

infusion

to our economy that could possibly be conceived

the problem is, it's not going to boost the economy next quarter

it's got a time horizon longer than most people have the patience for, and most

politicians have the re-election cycle to be tolerant of

so what we need is a longer view

on those investments

I don't want to have to have NASA going hat-in-hand trying to get money to stimulate

the frontier of cosmic discovery

and that frontier now involves biologists in the search for life
chemists, in understanding the soils of Mars

uh, aerospace engineers. you know what I don't want to do, I don't want to

stand in front of eighth-graders and say "who wants to be an aerospace engineer

so you can design an airplane that's

fifteen percent more fuel efficient than the one your father flew?"

That's not going to get them but if I say

who wants to be an engineer

and design an airfoil that will fly in the rarified atmosphere of Mars

I'm going to get the best students in the class and you know it

because that's an exciting project for smart people work on motivated people to work on

and when you have them, they invent stuff they discover things, they transform the

culture in which we live, on a time horizon that is not be easy to just

tell someone

in a one-sentence sound bite

and what i want is a level of science and cultural literacy

that will allow the public

to be able to think beyond the election cycle

to think for themselves and say this is a good investment

how many times have you heard people say if you're not among us here

why are we spending money up there when we have the problems down here.

Have you ever asked how much money were spending up there?

ask that question

you know what the answer is?

I've asked people how much money do you think we're spending there

here's your tax dollar

how much is it? ten percent? fifteen percent? those are the kinds of answers I get

you know how much is getting spent the rovers, the space station, the

the space shuttles, all the launch vehicles all the NASA centers, is 6-10ths

of one penny

on your tax dollar

6-10ths of one penny pays for it all

and you're telling me, why are we spending there [not] down here

if you need that money to solve these problems, you got some other problems going on OK?

That's a whole other problem with society

so

I'm sorry, I'm spitting I'm getting all ...

so my point is I think the greatest

the greatest

need

is to be able to have the foresight necessary

to make investments on the frontier of science

even if at the time you make those investments

you cannot figure out how that might

make you rich tomorrow

Michael Faraday in 1840s was the first one to pass a wire

through a magnetic field

and it made a little meter

tick on .. it moved uh, a meter

he hooked up to it

[now this guy?] you do this, and this happens. That's kinda cool

if you're nerdy .. to a nerd that's a cool thing right you do this and this happens

and so what was happening is

it induced a current through the wire

he showed his colleagues, it looked like just kind of a curiosity, a toy

showed it to Parliment, they say why? this is what we're funding?

we're funding this toy?

this may be apocryphal but it is said of Faraday

in response to this inquiry said

because they asked, what value is this to the british empire

and to the King he said i don't know

without value it is today

but I know, one day, you're going to tax it

and in fact that is the foundation of how all electricity is made today

and it would take another sixty years before electricity would come to homes

but who could've known it at the time?

I don't want to be left behind

I will not leave you behind

last thing I'll say

the biggest news story last year to me

was not the methane, uh, flatulence

the biggest news story

happened december 22nd, something like that

I forgot what day

a press release comes out

Russia says

they want to send a mission to deflect Apophis

the killer asteroid (oh yeah)

by the way, I said if that hits it's gonna hit the Pacific

which affects us

ok, Russia says

we're gonna launch a mission

we're gonna start designing it now and we're gonna fund it. oh by the way

the United States is welcome to join us and people say oh that's nice

a little international thing, I'm saying wait a minute

something's wrong here

aren't we the ones

who are supposed to be starting missions and then advising other people to join us?

isn't that how it's been?

so that was a sign

one of many

that our significance and meaning on the world stage

is fading

and it's fading fast

and it's not a cliff

it's just a fade

and the day will come, where the rest of the world just makes their own decisions

about the future of their own space exploration and technologies

and we're sitting back saying

Hi fellas, can we join along

Neil

we already proved

we can deflect asteroids in the movie "Armageddon"

so there's our fantasy: we don't do it in the real [world], we do it on the silver screen

and we're happy about that

maybe we gotta fix that disconnect. last question

why is there something

instead of nothing?

ten words or less

just because

So, I gotta do this in haiku then

ok, five seven five

words that make questions

may not be questions

at all

I am well-rebuked

Neil deGrasse Tyson, it is an honor to have you here and an honor always to talk to you

please, come on get up for Neil deGrasse Tyson

Uhm, Dr. Tyson is going to be down here he will signing books until 9:30 so

if you'd like to come down and have then signed, feel free

For the rest of you, thank you all for coming and get home safe