Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you instead try to use his books’ content to predict events with any accuracy before they happen, his imprecise quatrains fail badly—and do so consistently. This makes the writings of Nostradamus useless as a source of insight to the operations of the world.

there is tested science that has achieved consensus and there is frontier science.

What can, and often does, happen is that new ideas extend the range of previously tested ideas, but it does not undo them.

Your efforts will be better spent in search of useful evidence than in trying to convince people of what you think is true in the absence of it.

Since any two people in the world have a common ancestor—depending on how far back you look, the line we draw to establish family lineage is entirely arbitrary.

I don’t care if I am a descendent of kings or paupers, saints or sinners, the brave or cowardly. My life is what I make of it.

At the end of the day, America is a portfolio of spending that captures and expresses the values of its residents, via its lawmakers.

But since global warming has political and economic ramifications, money flows easily to create videos that feature this subset of scientists.

Scientists are all human, complete with human frailties and biases and susceptibilities. That’s why trends in the data remain the primary commodity of what is true in science, and not the impassioned testimonies of scientists themselves.

The theory of evolution is not something to “believe in.” Science follows evidence. And when strong evidence supports an idea, the concept of belief, when invoked the way religious people use the word, is unnecessary. In other words, established science is not an ensemble of beliefs, it’s a system of ideas supported by verifiable evidence.

Among religious fundamentalists, biological evolution does not square with their faith-based belief system, in which they invoke the Bible as an inerrant understanding of the physical world.

No evidence supports this. Not only that, all evidence argues against it. And so one is left “believing in” stories that are demonstrably false.

A great challenge of revealed truths by divine prophets is that nobody has ever made a successful prediction of previously unknown objects or phenomena based on the contents of any religious texts. What typically happens is that devout people learn what scientists have discovered about the natural world and then go back into their religious texts in search of passages that hint at what is already known.

But, like I said, that source does not have your science literacy or intellectual enlightenment as a priority.

If faith is a personal construct, then there can be no agreed-upon book of answers.

Why implies purpose set by external forces. I have always felt that purpose is not defined outside of ourselves, but from deep within.

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.

It’s a system of knowing the natural world that is immune to opinion, but not to experiment.

And no engineer, in his or her right mind, would ever design a system that ingested liquids, solids, communicated, and respirated through the same orifice.

When you do this, and do it for your entire life, it becomes hard to imagine life without this kind of spiritual structure constructed for you and around you.

consider this fact a shortcoming of our educational system, where we are not trained how to think but what to know.

The worst that can happen to the theory is that it gets incorporated into a larger, more powerful idea of how the universe works.

the word “truth” will not serve your child’s needs as much as the word “investigate,” or, better yet, the word “explore.”

They do not view the Torah as the word of God. They see it as a book of stories—not to be judged for their truth or falsehood, but as a repository of insights from which wisdom for living one’s life can be derived.

it may be easier to engineer solutions to problems than to get a hundred million people to change their behavior.

the arc of social justice will continue to bend towards righteousness.