Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

truly innovative solutions to problems come primarily from the cross-pollination of disciplines. And

the most innovative solutions to problems commonly come from outside of the field—from people inspired by different priorities.

the Homo sapiens genome is capable of generating trillions of unique humans, which means most people who could ever exist will never even be born. So death is a kind of privilege of those few of us who have known life.

how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world.”

The Judeo-Christian Bible is likely the greatest (single) source of tribalistic conflict the world has ever known.

When you are under the influence of dogma, you say, do, and think what others tell you to. And that’s always easier than thinking for yourself or resisting the powers that established the dogma in the first place.

Of course religion is not the sole source of dogma in the world. There’s political dogma, as well as cultural & ethnic dogma. There’s even, on occasion, scientific dogma. But science contains the methods and tools within itself to ferret it out, so dogma in science doesn’t last long when it arises. Consider also that scientists hardly ever wield power. So when science becomes dogma in a country, it’s usually because a political system that is itself dogma has adopted it. Nazi Germany and communist Lysenko Russia are, perhaps, the best example of this.

I’ve yet to be convinced by anything I see on Earth or in the universe that anyone or any intelligent entity is in charge.

I do not know whether God is real. I simply know that the people who cite evidence in favor of God have overlooked the preponderance of evidence against it.

Science, on the other hand, is a system of knowing and discovery that is decoupled from your nationality or birthplace or ancestry or politics or who you worship. It’s a system of knowing the natural world that is immune to opinion, but not to experiment.

try to spend twice as much time to make things half as long.

Scientists never “prove” anything. This word has a specific application in mathematics, but in science what we do is demonstrate, with sufficient experiments, that a consensus exists and further evidence in support of an idea would be a waste of effort or funding since other pressing questions remain unanswered.

Your writing is potent, but you never want to win an argument for being a better writer, or because you have a bigger vocabulary than your opponent. In this way, the strength of the argument rests on the strength of the argument rather than the strength of your literacy.

Note also that not all belief systems are equal. Most are demonstrably false. The notion that all belief systems are equal is evidence for rampant scientific illiteracy in the nation.

you are in denial of bad design, not because it is not there, but because it falls outside of your religious philosophy, and are thus blind to it.

Natural selection never claims perfect design, or even good design, only a design that is more effective than that of a competing species, allowing survival long enough to reproduce. Nothing else matters to the process.

My personal goal is to leave the world a little better off for my having lived in it. The prospect of making this come true drives my work habits daily.

the only people who are any good at what they do in life are those who are passionate and persistent.

for every astronaut in space, there are a thousand scientists and engineers who got ’em there.

School is not only a place to learn, but a place to learn how to learn.

as often as I can, I seek out people smarter than I am to talk to and hang out with.

exams. If school is to prepare us to achieve in society, then, above a certain minimum level of performance on these means of assessment, your scores are irrelevant to the kind of citizen you become—

Not that you have any obligation to follow my advice, but in my opinion, if you want to make your mark as an educator, then why not explore how to assess, or otherwise code for ambition, and nurture those students? This will be of incomparably greater value to society than you chasing after “smart” kids just because they are smart.

In spite of how science is taught in grade-school, or in spite of what the public thinks, science is not so much about getting the right answer as it is about getting the right idea.

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

One of the great revelations of parenting: when you have curious, motivated children, the intervention of a grownup carries almost as much risk in squashing their ambitions as it does in nurturing them.

to all our collective dismay, research persistently shows that parents have only marginal effect on the personality that their kids ultimately develop.

I do not worry about what they know as much as I worry about how they think.

Teaching someone how to think is hard, and takes more effort on the part of the teacher and student. Among other things, it encourages them to ask questions. It involves being comfortable with ignorance, if that happens to be our collective state of knowledge at the time. It involves experiment and inquiry.

If they believe something in the absence of evidence, I ask them, “Why do you believe this?” or “How do you know this?”

I take the unorthodox view that the concept of a role model is highly overrated. Or rather, role models should be assembled à la carte. I have found skin-color associations, in these modern times, do more harm than good in the maturing child. To pick one person for a role model and not another, for reasons driven by skin color, may preclude entire worlds of ambition from being realized by your kids.

The children will be more likely to grow up believing in no Gods than in the Gods of other religions.

Think about it—when we read fairy tales, we are not judging them for whether they are true or not. Instead, we fold lessons derived from them into our world views.

Rituals and traditions account for some of the strongest binding forces among peoples of the world. Attending Mass on Sundays for Catholics. Prayer five times per day for Muslims. Ancestor worship for the Animist religions. One can participate without judging whether the events that established the ritual have any literal truth at all. The participation creates a sense of community, which has almost always contributed value to civilization.

If you are worried about my daughter’s GPA, don’t be. If you are worried about what college she will choose, or what college will choose her, don’t be. Worry about what kind of adult she will become.

I note here that in countries founded on freedom, and where there is resistance to government control of its citizenry (such as the USA), it may be easier to engineer solutions to problems than to get a hundred million people to change their behavior.

But what’s clear is that we now live in a world where differences of opinion lead to fights rather than conversations.

What today might be called micro-aggressions, back then were parlayed into forces of inspiration to excel.

in life, it’s not good enough to be right. You also must be effective.