Neil deGrasse Tyson on Why We’re Wired for Science & How Originality Differs in Science vs. Art

“Every child is a scientist.”

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson may well be the Richard Feynman of our day, a “Great Explainer” in his own right, having previously reflected on everything from the urgency of space exploration to the most humbling fact about the universe. In this short video, Tyson contributes a beautiful addition to this omnibus of notable definitions of science and explores subjects as diverse as the nature of originality and the future of artificial intelligence.

Watch and take notes.

I can’t think of any more human activity than conducting science experiments. Think about it — what do kids do? … They’re turning over rocks, they’re plucking petals off a rose — they’re exploring their environment through experimentation. That’s what we do as human beings, and we do that more thoroughly and better than any other species on Earth that we have yet encountered… We explore our environment more than we are compelled to utter poetry when we’re toddlers — we start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist. And so when I think of science, I think of a truly human activity — something fundamental to our DNA, something that drives curiosity.

One particularly interesting line of thought examines the difference between originality in science and originality in art — a refreshing complement to last week’s tangential musings on the subject by Mark Twain and Henry Miller.

If I discover a scientific idea, surely someone else would’ve discovered the same idea had I not done so. Whereas, look at Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” — if he didn’t paint “Starry Night,” nobody’s gonna paint “Starry Night.” So, in that regard, the arts are more individual to the creative person than a scientific idea is to the one who comes up with it — but, nonetheless, they are both human activities.

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The Sky Is Calling Us: A Cinematic Love Letter to Space Exploration

“…if we ignore the calls of the sky, who then will draw the maps of the universe?”

Our voyage into space, propelled by equal parts curiosity and awe, is among humanity’s bravest quests and most rewarding leaps of the imagination. Carl Sagan knew it. Neil deGrasse Tyson knows it. We believe it. And yet the future of space exploration is more precarious than ever. From University of Oregon copywriter Nickolaus Sugai and interaction designer Lauren Geschke comes this poignant, poetic piece of video poetry, a kind of love letter to NASA posing a difficult question that we as a culture and a society must answer.

…because if we ignore the calls of the sky, who then will draw the maps of the universe?

Visit theskyiscalling.us to tell Congress you want more of your taxpayer money diverted to space exploration. For a deeper look at the politics of the issue and just what’s at stake, see Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Space Chronicles.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Testifies Before Senate on the Spirit of Exploration

On the heroism of curiosity, or what The Little Prince can teach us about longing for infinity.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who recently made a chill-giving case for the whimsy of the Universe, is among our era’s most articulate advocates and storytellers of science. On March 7, Tyson testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on the economic, social, and cultural benefits of space exploration — an urgent message at time when space funding is at an all-time law and Carl Sagan’s vision lives on only as a poetic lament.

Tyson opens with a beautiful quote from French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, better-known as the author of The Little Prince — a philosophy treasure chest all its own:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Any nation, any time, has the capacity to create a hero. It just has to have ambitions with goals set.

[…]

If people see NASA as a charity agency for the satisfaction of some engineers and scientists, they are not understanding the actual growth NASA has played in the growth of this nation — and the economic growth of this nation.

[…]

The pathway from the investment to the return on the dollar takes a little longer than an elevator ride to explain… Innovations take place, patents are granted, products are developed, the culture of innovation spills over. Everyone feels like tomorrow is something they want to invent and bring into the present. That’s the culture that so many of us grew up with, and that’s the culture that so many of us who read about it want to resurrect going forward. Without this, we just move back to the caves.”

So what happened between the golden age of space exploration, when the design of the spacesuit was a feat of cross-disciplinary ambition and excitement oozed even from the ad pages of science magazines, and today? When did we forget that infinity beckons? Perhaps Muriel Rukeyser was right when she said that the universe is made of stories, not of atoms, but the stories we tell about those atoms are the fabric of our understanding, our culture, and our society. Without cosmic storytellers like Tyson, the universe would contract into a ball of anthropocentricity — next thing we know, we’re back to believing the Earth is the center of the universe.

Tyson’s new book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, isn’t merely an eloquent case for space exploration — it’s an intelligent and necessary manifesto for rekindling an infinitely important torch of human curiosity.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Space, Politics, and the Most Important Thing to Know About the Universe

What our sense connectedness has to do with NASA’s budget and the osmosis of rationality and intuition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson might be one of today’s most prominent astrophysicists, but he’s also a kind of existential philosopher, bringing his insights from science into the broader realm of the human condition — a kind of modern-day Carl Sagan with a rare gift for blending science and storytelling to both rub neurons with his fellow scientists and engage a popular-interest audience.

Nowhere does this gift shine more brilliantly than this chill-giving mashup by Max Schlickenmeyer, remixing images of nature at its most inspiring with the narration of Tyson’s answer to a TIME magazine reader, who asked, “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?”

When I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than most of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up — many people feel small, because they’re small, the Universe is big — but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity — that’s really what you want in life. You want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant. You want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings on and activities and events around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.

Tyson’s book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, explores the future of space travel in the wake of NASA’s decision to put human space flight essentially on hold, using his signature wit and scientific prowess to lay out an urgent manifesto for the economic, social, moral, and cultural importance of space exploration. This excerpt from the introduction captures Tyson’s underlying ethos and echoes other great thinkers’ ideas about intuition and rationality, blending the psychosocial with the political:

Some of the most creative leaps ever taken by the human mind are decidedly irrational, even primal. Emotive forces are what drive the greatest artistic and inventive expressions of our species. How else could the sentence ‘He’s either a madman or a genius’ be understood?

It’s okay to be entirely rational, provided everybody else is too. But apparently this state of existence has been achieved only in fiction [where] societal decisions get made with efficiency and dispatch, devoid of pomp, passion, and pretense.

To govern a society shared by people of emotion, people of reason, and everybody in between — as well as people who think their actions are shaped by logic but in fact are shaped by feelings and nonempirical philosophies — you need politics. At its best, politics navigates all the minds-states for the sake of the greater good, alert to the rocky shoals of community, identity, and the economy. At its worst, politics thrives on the incomplete disclosure or misrepresentation of data required by an electorate to make informed decisions, whether arrived at logically or emotionally.

Complement Space Chronicles with Tyson’s selections for the eight books every intelligent person should read.

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