Cosmic Queries Quotes

“I occasionally wonder if the entire Universe is nothing more than a snow-globe on the living room mantle of a space alien.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going

“NEUTRINOS | The neutrino (meaning “little neutral one”) has no electrical charge and almost no mass. A fundamental particle, neutrinos are copiously produced in nuclear reactions and hardly ever interact with matter. As you read this, one hundred billion of them pass through every square centimeter of your body every second, but only a few will ever jostle even one of your atoms in your lifetime. The only way to detect neutrinos, then, is to force-feed them lots of atoms with which to interact. This is the idea behind IceCube, a giant neutrino detector located at the South Pole. Hot water bores holes in the ice, into which cables carrying light detectors are lowered. Then the water freezes around them. When neutrinos jostle an atom in the ice, these detectors see a characteristic flash of light. By this clever technique, IceCube transforms an entire cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into a dedicated neutrino detector. Even more amazing, some of the neutrinos IceCube detected will have hit Earth at the North Pole and traveled all the way through the planet without interacting with a single atom before they enter the cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going

“Greek astronomer Hipparchus compiled the first star catalog, in the second century B.C.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going