Accessory to War Quotes

“Space exploration may pull in the talent, but war pays the bills.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“...exploration is hardly ever motivated by the desire to explore. Part the curtains of curiosity, and you'll find individuals hungry for political, cultural, or economic dominion funding the expedition.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“With only rare exceptions, history shows that while strategy and bravery can win a battle, the frontiers of science and technology must be exploited to win a war.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“If you don’t have a dream, you can’t have a dream come true,”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Einstein himself, acutely aware of the world’s newfound capacity for annihilation, said in a 1949 interview in Liberal Judaism, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Brick walls are opaque to our eyes, but to microwaves those walls are transparent, which is why we can talk on our cell phones while indoors.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“America will aim no higher than the creation and aggressive marketing of minor consumer products that replace similar, and perfectly satisfactory, consumer products. “America may be losing a competitive edge in many enterprises, from cars to space,” riffed National Public Radio host Scott Simon in the summer of 2010, “but as long as we can devise a five-bladed, mineral-oil-saturated razor, we face the future well-shaved.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“The relationship between physics and war is clear: the ruler and the general want to threaten or obliterate targets; destruction requires energy; the physicist is the expert on matter, motion, and energy. It's the physicist who invents the bomb. But to destroy a target, you have to locate it precisely, identify it accurately, and track it as it moves. That's where astrophysics comes in. Neither protagonists nor accomplices, astrophysicists are accessories to war. We don't design the bombs. We don't make the bombs. We don't calculate the damage a bomb will wreak. Instead, we calculate how stars in our galaxy self-destruct through thermonuclear explosions – calculations that may prove helpful to those who do design and make thermonuclear bombs.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“STAR DREK Human beings are such slobs that, from now on, pigs must declare us the other white meat. Do you know that right now there is so much discarded trash in outer space that three times last month the International Space Station was almost hit by some useless hunk of floating metal—not unlike the International Space Station itself? So really, you’ve got to give the human race credit: only humans could visit an infinite void and leave it cluttered. Not only have we screwed up our own planet; somehow we have also managed to use up all the space in space. Now, history shows over and over again that if the citizens of Earth put their minds to it, they can destroy anything. It doesn’t matter how remote or pristine, together, yes, we can fuck it up. The age of space exploration is only fifty years old, and we have already managed to turn the final frontier into the New Jersey Meadowlands.12”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Among the many spots used by philosophers and astronomers over the centuries to mark the meridian for zero degrees longitude were Ferro, in the Canary Islands; Ujjain, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh; the “agonic line” (a line along which true north and magnetic north coincide, but not forever) that passed through the Azores; the Paris Observatory; the Royal Observatory at Greenwich; the White House; and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“The former pair offered physics and logic; the latter offered primarily politics and fear plus a”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Here in our solar system, a hundred-meter-wide asteroid sails into Earth every millennium or so at speeds upward of fifty thousand miles an hour, generating a destructive impact equal to 2,500 atomic bombs.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“What you might not have come across is the fact that Hubble is basically a photoreconnaissance satellite whose cameras point upward at the heavens rather than downward at Earth.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“So by looking in X-rays, you are seeing aspects of nature which we did not even suspect existed but which are very important in the formation, evolution, and dynamics of the structures in the universe.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Noise” includes any unwanted signal that contaminates the target of measurement.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Since everything warmer than absolute zero radiates heat, detecting infrared at a distance means, in principle, detecting everything.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“If you travel fast, several weird things happen. One is that your inner time clock will appear to tick more slowly, as seen by all those who observe you. Your time “dilates.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“But because the particle shower moves so fast relative to us and our detectors on Earth’s surface, the muons experience the passage of time more slowly than we do.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Incidentally, gamma rays and a myriad of subatomic particles are generated by the collision of superhigh-energy cosmic rays with Earth’s atmosphere. Within this cascade lurks striking evidence of time dilation, a feature of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Cosmic-ray particles move through space at upward of 99.5 percent the speed of light. When they slam into the top of Earth’s atmosphere, they break down into many subproducts, each with less and less energy per particle, forming an avalanche of elementary particles that descend toward Earth’s surface.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“But whenever the War Department supplies the funding, part the curtains and you’ll see the needs of conflict masquerading as the needs of science.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Nowadays our mobile phones relay microwaves.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Fear not, till Birnam wood / Do come to Dunsinane”).”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Some species of snakes have small pits on their heads that pick up infrared rays from tasty warm-blooded prey, readily revealed at night against the rapidly cooling surroundings”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Detecting without seeing was now a scientific reality.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Take America’s Global Positioning System, GPS—two dozen satellites in orbit at about 12,500 miles above Earth, more than fifty times higher than ordinary low-Earth-orbit satellites”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“If you don’t have avocados, you can’t make guacamole.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“By 2017, Star Wars had barely made it past the concept stage.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“near real time. . . . If the intelligence establishment can in effect use a credit card to buy excellent commercial imagery, so can tyrants and terrorists.71”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Anyone who can’t afford to depend on serendipity would say you have to identify your target or goal in advance.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“your canary, and your houseplants, dead or alive, all emit infrared.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military