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Exploration is what you do when you don't know what you're doing. That's what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 5
Actor
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Cosmologist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Physicist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Teacher
Trekkie
The Bronx
New York City
Neil Tyson
Scientists
Scientist
Wouldn
Already
Knew
Anything
Every
Exploration
Discovering

More quotes by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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There are two ways you can receive energy from your environment: One is molecules bumping against you. That's the air. The other is radiative energy. That's what you're feeling from the sun. When they say Get out of the sun, out of the heat, the air is the same temperature it's just you're exposed to sunlight.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Society needs to see science not as a luxury of funding but as a fundamental activity that drives enlightenment, economics, and security.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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There's an old saying in the space community: 'If God wanted us to be a spacefaring species, he would have given us a moon'.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Perhaps we’ve never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon earth and decided there’s no sign of intelligent life.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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There are countless space activities that would be no less exciting than the moon missions were, I have no doubt. The search for life on Mars, for example.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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What are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Any time we are answer-driven rather than idea driven, we have lost the true meaning of education.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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For decades, we've been trying to cook up the building blocks of life, in the lab, and recreate the origins of it all, but the parts didn't seem to fit together, until now.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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You don't discard Newton. Newton becomes the limiting case of how you would apply Einstein's theories.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I've always been interested in pop culture. Some of my colleagues think of pop culture as beneath them, or there's the ivory tower and then there's everybody else, and I never could buy into that wall that's been put up by so many people over the decades and even the centuries.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature, will not be fooled.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Knowledge of the natural world and how it works should be counted as fundamental to informed governance. You can't have a functioning democracy, if the electorate is under-informed or, worse, mis-informed.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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No one with a living room radio that was a piece of furniture at the time would say, gee. I want to carry that around on my hip pocket. That was not a thought until NASA initiated this whole exercise. So there's an influence that's not just spinoff.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I recognize that there's an appetite that I'm now serving, and I'm happy to do so. I think it means quite a bit that science has achieved this level of public interest and access. And so I'm simultaneously astonished every day upon recognizing this, and I think it's a good sign for the country and possibly for the world.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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For the film to 'earn' the right to be criticized on a scientific level is a high compliment indeed.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.
Neil deGrasse Tyson