Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Now that people communicate with one another primarily by social media, letter-writing has become a lost art. The greatest casualty may be our growing inability to find words that precisely communicate our feelings and emotions. Why else the need for that burgeoning catalog of emoticons to supplement our written correspondence?

you should nonetheless know that among my colleagues, I am the rare few in my generation who became an astrophysicist in spite of your achievements in space rather than because of them.

I came to recognize that when you’re at your best, nothing in this world can inspire the dreams of a Nation the way you can—dreams fueled by a pipeline of ambitious students, eager to become scientists, engineers, and technologists in the service of the greatest quest there ever was. You have come to represent a fundamental part of America’s identity, not only to itself but to the world.

But there is another kind of hope—it’s the challenge of learning about the real world and using our intelligence to change things for the better. In this way, it’s the individual who is empowered to bring hope to the world.

The people who fail in life are those whose ambitions were insufficient to overcome all the forces that work against them. And yes, failure is common to us all. But ambitious people use their failures as lessons to heed, as they push forward toward their goals. Don’t fear change. Don’t fear failure. The only thing to fear is loss of ambition.

because if IQ mattered on the level that IQ purveyors claim, then all the shakers and movers of society would be people drawn from this population.

IQ correlates nicely with GPA in high school and college, but after your first job, nobody ever asks what your college GPA was. What matters are your people skills, leadership skills, real-world problem solving skills, integrity, business acumen, reliability, ambition, work ethic, kindness, compassion, etc. So for me, conversations about race and IQ are of no practical consequence, any more than are conversations about race and hair color, or race and food preferences.

In my experience, when money is the sole carrot, people can lose sight of life’s deeper sources of happiness.

One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.

knowing enough about a subject to think you are right, but not enough about the subject to know you are wrong.

The number of ways that life might be alive, for which we have no foundation to select, vastly exceeds the one way we know life can be alive.

Note that eyewitness testimony is, by far, the weakest form of evidence that a person can present in support of a claim. In spite of its high value in the court of law, in the “court” of science, eyewitness testimony is essentially useless. Psychologists have known for quite some time how ineffective the human senses are as data taking devices.

Over the years, the methods and tools of science have shown us that, despite what some philosophers have claimed, a reality exists independent of our perception of it.

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.

nearly all behavior of electromagnetic waves (light) can be derived from a set of four equations that all fit on a Post-it® note?

you can be awed by the complexities manifest the world, or you can instead be astonished at how simple it all is.

Consider other things that look alike. When Sir William Herschel, in the 1800s, first saw dots of light that moved slowly across the sky, he knew they could not be stars, but they looked like stars through his telescope, so he called them “star-like,” which in Latin becomes “aster-oid” or just asteroids.

I look to the entire human race for inspiration for what I can be—because I am human. 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.

The Gregorian calendar is, quite simply, the most accurate and stable calendar ever devised. The Jesuit priests, appointed by Pope Gregory back in the 16th century, did a bang-up job in their calculations. They corrected the failing Julian calendar, in which the spring equinox had back-drifted over the centuries from the familiar date of March 21, to March 10.

except for the introduction of BCE and CE—Before Common Era (replacing BC) and Common Era (replacing AD).

Consider that Handel’s Messiah is among the greatest choral works ever composed. So too is Bach’s Mass in B-Minor. Yet neither of these works would exist were it not for somebody inspired by Jesus. This does not (or at least should not) subtract from the brilliance, the beauty, and the majesty of these great works of music.

I am reading this while the BLM movement and the protests that fight against racial injustice are stronger than ever. And I am thinking about the statues some of the protesters topple and the changes some brands and institutions make to mark they arepolitically correct and socially responsible. Those statues most likely do not deserve to be venerated as they are and should be moved. The problem is we, as a whole, appear to disregard the ambivalence of a lot of events and people, most of which are both good and bad. Christianity was used to start wars, forcibly convert entire societies and get rid of their cultural heritage, kill and torture people. At the same time, Christianity served as inspiration and breeding ground for countless works of art and people trying to be better and kinder. This duality is an example of many more. A lot of wealth was built on oppressing other people. It’s tragic, it’s sad, but it’s something we should use as a cautionary tool, not as an excuse to rewrite history and place the blame on entire groups of modern people, most of them having nothing to do with events long passed. Making peace with this duality and accepting our shortcomings as humans and as a society is more important, in the end, than just simply removing statues. As long as we don’t make peace, don’t process and accept our own imperfection and our own shortcomings as an inevitable parts of life, there is constant frustration and guilt-placing. And we keep perpetuating a constant cycle of self-destroying tactics, of self-sabotaging. As a society, we need to make amends and have a open eye and ongoing conversation.

The most enduring thing about being human is the discovery of cosmic truths that transcend culture, politics, religion, and time, forming the corpus of knowledge and wisdom that we call civilization.

the 1998 film Armageddon, which violates more laws of physics (per minute) than any other film in the universe.

Principles can, should, and do matter without regard to sheer numbers of adherents.

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

your knowledge of our place in the universe—the only human pursuit that has transcended culture, region, and time. All

The fact that the people who wrote the Bible made Pi = 3 and Earth a flat disc is of some historical interest and worthy of study in history class, philosophy class, or religion class. But it has no place in the field of science, whose goal is to find truths of the universe that sit independently of opinion.

I hate arguing semantics. I would rather argue ideas.

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.

is that science is not inherently good or bad. It’s just a base of knowledge about how the natural world works. It’s the engineering applications of science that take on patinas of good or evil.

Control of nature is not unique to humans. Beavers wreak havoc on their environment. We have revisionist comments regarding what they do: “Their dams create a habitat for all manner of wildlife,” when, in fact, their dams completely change the local ecology. Swarming locusts and cicadas also create imbalances in their habitats. But the worst of them all? Four billion years ago, cyanobacteria transformed Earth’s atmosphere by making O2 in the greatest ecological disruption in the history of life on Earth, killing all surface-living anaerobic bacteria.

I therefore retain a confidence that you do not have—that science has the power to solve the problems it occasionally creates, provided the political and cultural will is there to enable it.

And I maintain that without the progress of science, I, today, would be someone’s slave, and half the world would not have not survived past age five. Not only that, 70% of who did survive would be hard at work on farms, barely making enough food for the growing population.

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.

If you are a successful species, there is no driver to influence change.

mammals have changed dramatically over the past 65 million years. When I say dramatically, I mean visually, not biologically. We share more than 90% identical DNA with all mammals, even mice.

I would think it’s morally wrong to harm anything, regardless of its measure of intelligence, without reasons of promoting your own survival or the survival of your kin.

I refuse to enter arguments over words. I would rather state what science does, and leave you free to attach whatever words you wish to the enterprise. If we agree on the word, then fine. If we do not agree on the word, the expressed idea remains unaffected.

science seeks all three (truth, understanding, meaning), but primarily concerns itself with obtaining sufficient knowledge of how the universe works to be able to make testable predictions about its past and future behavior.

Active scientists do not run around declaring that science can explain everything. For example, no one of us claims that science can explain love or hate or beauty or valor or cowardice.

All too often, modern philosophical arguments are traceable to disagreements in the definitions of words rather than in the analysis of ideas themselves.

I note further that religion-bashing occurs primarily among atheists and not by scientists (while there is, of course, some overlap, the loudest atheists are generally not scientists). And yet, my read of modern culture tells me that attacks by religion on science are vastly more common than the reverse, contrary to your statement.

I never think much about “why.” Why implies purpose set by external forces. I have always felt that purpose is not defined outside of ourselves, but from deep within. My purpose in life is to lessen the suffering of others; advance our understanding of the universe; and enlighten others along the way.

Think of a professor facing away from you, droning on while writing on the board in the front of class. As a student, especially in college, it’s your responsibility to learn the material. You are paying for the education. So your learning skills will, in many cases, need to compensate for the absence of clarity or enthusiasm in the professor’s delivery. That’s lecturing. Now think of a professor who faces you from the front of the room; who makes eye contact with the audience; who has invested time and energy thinking about how you think; who pays attention to your attention span; who is aware of what words you know and what words or concepts confuse you; who knows the demographics of the audience—age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, political leanings, cultural leanings, propensity to laugh, to cry; who carries some pop-culture fluency, for easy reference and analogy, but only when teaching the subject can be assisted by such references. That person is not lecturing to you. That person has opened conduits tailored to that audience in that moment, and at that time. That’s communicating.

True science literacy is less about what you know and more about how your brain is wired for asking questions.

We’re all going to die. But only a select few of us happen to know when.

One good thing (among many) about the cosmos is that it belongs to us all. As a consequence, the more you learn, the more ownership you’re compelled to take of it.

On my deathbed, one thought I will surely have comes from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He notes that we who die are the lucky ones. Most people—most genetic combinations of who could ever exist—will never be born, and so will never have the opportunity to

The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place. The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.

Note that you did not compare the cost of curing cancer with money Americans spend on the Defense Department, or on farm subsidies.