Frases de Neil deGrasse Tyson

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“Hay gente que dice: "Nunca voy a necesitar las matemáticas. Como la trigonometría que se da en la ESO y Bachillerato [en inglés, grado 10 y 11]. Incluso puede que tú nunca hayas aprendido algo de matemáticas. Ahí está el truco: vayas o no a usar las matemáticas en tu vida, el hecho de que hayas sido capaz de entenderlas deja una huella en tu cerebro que no existía antes, y esa huella es la que te convierte en un solucionador de problemas.”

“En este momento me siento eufórico. No por la bendición de ningún dios falso, sino por la iluminación de mi propia inteligencia.”

“La gente dijo que era una violación de la Primera Enmienda [de la Constitución de Estados Unidos] que un profesor de Nueva Jersey afirmara que la evolución y el big bang no era ciencia, y que el arca de Noe llevó dinosaurios. No se trata de separar Iglesia y Estado; se trata de la necesidad de retirar a los ignorantes, especialmente a gente analfabeta, del profesorado.”

“La creatividad es ver lo que todo el mundo ve, pero idear un pensamiento nuevo que nunca se ha pensado antes y expresarlo de alguna manera.”

“En un solo centímetro de un colon trabajan más bacterias [sobre 100 billones] que todos los seres humanos que han existido juntos. Aún así mucha gente afirma que nosotros estamos al cargo del mundo.”

“Cuando ocurrió el atentado del 11-S, George Bush dió un discurso, intentando distinguir entre "nosotros" y "ellos". Dijo: "Nuestro Dios es el Dios que dio nombre a las estrellas". El problema es que dos tercios de las estrellas tienen nombres árabes. No creo que él supiera esto, lo que podría causar confusión en lo que estaba haciendo.”

“Los niños nunca son el problema: ellos son pequeños científicos. El problema son los adultos: destrozan la curiosidad de los niños. Superan en número a los niños. Votan. Manejan los recursos. Es por ello que mi público objetivo son los adultos.”

“Si la velocidad orbital de la Tierra fuera mayor que la raíz cuadrada del doble de su velocidad actual, nuestro planeta alcanzaría una «velocidad de escape» y, como cabe suponer, escaparía del sistema solar. Podemos”

“Las personas que creen que lo saben todo nunca han buscado ni se han encontrado con los lindes entre lo conocido y lo desconocido en el cosmos. Y”

“Sí, el universo tuvo un principio. Sí, el universo continúa evolucionando. Y sí, cada uno los átomos de nuestro cuerpo salió de la gran explosión en esos hornos termonucleares de gran masa, llamados estrellas. No estamos simplemente en el universo, además somos parte de él. Se podría decir que somos la facultad que tiene el universo de conocerse a sí mismo. Y tan solo estamos empezando.”

“No lleves un gato muerto al veterinario. Es decir, por poder podrías, pero ¿para qué?”

“Soy optimista. Veo que cada vez menos gente acepta pensamientos raros sobre el mundo. El cambio no está en que la gente diga cosas estando informada. El cambio está en que si estás en poder de decir algo de forma informada, hay gente que te pedirá que demuestres cómo te has informado.”

“Mi punto de vista es que si tu filosofía no se actualiza cada día, estás cegado a todo lo que el universo puede ofrecerte.”

“No hay mayor poesía que aquella que revela a un lector que algo es mucho más simple de lo que se había estado dando por sentado.”

“Al principio, era la física. La”

“Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.”

“Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive”

“Scientific inquiry shouldn't stop just because a reasonable explanation has apparently been found.”

“So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going.”

“I love the smell of the universe in the morning.”

“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.”

“The remarkable feature of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.”

“Our nation is turning into an idiocracy.”

“Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.”

“Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.”

“Some morning while your eating breakfast and you need something new to think about, though, you might want to ponder the fact that you see your kids across the table not as they are but as they once were, about three nanoseconds ago.”

“Every living thing is a masterpiece, written by nature and edited by evolution.”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.”

“We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out — and we have only just begun.”

“You know that passage in the Bible that says, “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”? Always wondered if that was mistranslated. Perhaps it actually says, “And the geek shall inherit the Earth.”

“In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.”

“There are no limits when you are surrounded by people who believe in you, or by people whose expectations are not set by the short-sighted attitudes of society, or by people who help to open doors of opportunity, not close them.”

“People like death and mayhem.”

“I don’t have an issue with what you do in the church, but I’m gonna be up in your face if you’re gonna knock on my science classroom and tell me they’ve got to teach what you’re teaching in your Sunday school. Because that’s when we’re gonna fight!”

“The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.”

“It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything, closes the door to finding out what's really there.”

“What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos.
Have a nice day.”

“Yes, Einstein was a badass.”

“The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience. (From the second Cosmos: ASO episode, Some of the Things That Molecules Do.)”

“The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth — that we have culture.”

“Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it.Let there be cosmology.”

“[wrote_the_exam]What keeps me awake at night: wondering whether human species is just too stupid to figure out the Universe. I just wonder. I lose sleep over that. Because we define ourselves as intelligent— because we made up the test to say that. And we sit alone at the top of the intelligence chart because we invented the exam, and all the other species of life on Earth are not. So who's to say that the first species (us) to be intelligent (us) has just enough intelligence to actually decode everything that's decodable in the Cosmos? […] Think of the next closest thing to us, the bonobo chimp— 98½% identical DNA, yet you cannot teach them trigonometry, they have no concept of it. So if that's only 1½% difference in our DNA— and so imagine 1½% beyond us, rather than below us, in intelligence. […] Their toddlers would be talking about things that would completely confound us.”

“That makes me want to grab people on the street and say, "have you heard this?"”

“A few years ago I got a phone call from a marketing executive who wanted to light up the Moon with the logo of her company. She wanted to know how she might proceed. After slamming down the phone, I called her back and politely explained why it was a bad idea. Other corporate executives have asked me how to put into orbit mile-wide luminous banners with catchy slogans written across them, much like the skywriting or flag-dragging airplanes you see at sports events or over the ocean from a crowded beach. I always threaten to send the light police after them.”