An Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Haegwan Kim (HK); I’m going to talk with Doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is internationally renowned astrophysicists and also renowned for many as a best-selling author. It’s an honour to talk with you Doctor Tyson, thank you so much for your time.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (NDT); I’m happy to be with you.

HK; First I want to talk about your personal life. Why did you become an astrophysicist?

NDT; I had no control over it myself, the universe called me. It was my first day in the dome of the Hayden Planetarium, actually here in New York City. I was nine years old. I looked up and the lights dimmed and the stars came out, countless thousands of stars, and that didn’t look like anything I had seen before from New York City, from the Bronx. I said that can’t be true, there’s a dozen stars in the night sky. I know that’s false, but it turned out to be that’s obviously what the night sky was. Then I was called by the universe and I returned the call. I had known that I wanted to think about and do the universe ever since I was nine years old.

HK; What did the universe tell you (laughter)?

NDT; It said come, come… No what it did was, it was such a profound depth of undiscovered content. When you’re a kid, what do you do? You turn over rocks, you look behind things, you open things up… You’re an explorer as a child. When I looked up to the universe I realised that there was no greater unknown box of knowledge than the universe. And if I were lucky, I would get to be a kid for my entire life.

HK; Then the beginning was from your sheer curiosity?

NDT; Yes, that’s a simple way to say it. It was my curiosity and realising that the universe has no end of places where your curiosity can go.

HK; Do you possess that curiosity yet? It pasts decades since then.

NDT; It’s every day I wake up. My eyes pop open and I say to myself what undiscovered truth in the universe lay before me waiting for my attention?

HK; Gorgeous. Can you tell me how to keep that curiosity? People consider as they become adults, many people lose it.

NDT; It’s not hard; it’s easy when you’re talking about the universe, because one day we’re searching for life, another day there’s a black hole, the next day an asteroid’s coming. The next day NASA’s putting something in orbit. We’ve got pictures from Saturn, Pluto needs a readjustment. So there’s no end of tasty places to experience in the universe. My hope is that most people in their life will get to study or think about subjects that could be that scintillating to them. Let’s say you have a job, maybe it’s on an assembly line, something where the work is very constant, then fortunately we have TV programs that could take you on these journeys. There’s no shortage of programming today on the universe. Back when I was a kid, there were 10 TV stations and you would go months and months before you would see any programs on the universe at all. Nowadays every third time you channel surf, there’s a show on the universe. So even if you can’t do it yourself, you can be a vicarious participant on that ever expanding frontier.

HK; Unlike other scientists, you are focusing on not only your research but also on spreading your idea, spreading what astronomy is, what drives you to do so?

NDT; That’s an excellent question. Because I’m not actually driven to do it, I’m asked to do it. If I had my way I would just stay at home and I would do my research and play with my kids, and I would never leave home. When I come to the public it’s because I’m asked to do so. Yes I do write a book and I want you to buy the book when that happens, but most of the time people see me it’s because a producer, a news caster, a radio station, a newspaper, the universe flinched, something happened in the universe and they quickly want to call me to get me to respond. So it’s a duty that I have to bring the universe to the public when the public wants to know. I think all of us as scientists should participate in that effort. Why? If for no other reason, the public pays tax money that funds NASA and here in America the National Science Foundation, but other government agencies that fund the science that we do. You have a right, not only a privilege, but a right to know what it is we’re discovering. So I feel it as a sense of duty to bring the science to the public.

HK; So you feel kind of a responsibility to spread the idea on the universe.

NDT; That’s a good word, it’s a responsibility.

HK; I’ve heard that you got a huge influence from Carl Sagan as one of your mentors. Do you want to do a kind of same thing to our young generation?

NDT; Yes. That story with Carl Sagen, that for me was an important one. It was the attention that he gave me when I was a 17 year old kid. He was already famous, I was just a 17 year old kid, he doesn’t know me from anybody. Yet he spent time with me, he gave me a tour of his lab, gave me a signed copy of his book. My lesson there wasn’t whether I would ever bring science to the public at the level that Carl Sagen did. While that could happen and in some ways that is happening, that wasn’t my lesson at the time. My lesson was no matter what happened in my life, if I had the power to assist others who are coming up through the educational pipeline, who want to do what I do professionally. I will put them first in line on my list of who I give time and attention to. And so that is how I became different from that encounter with Carl Sagan.

HK; What a fantastic story. You’re the director of the Hayden Planetarium, do you want the young to get involved more in the field of astrophysics? Or that’s just your curiosity?

NDT; That’s another excellent question. I don’t ever assume that everyone else or anyone else will love the universe the way I love the universe. I can’t assume that. That’s unrealistic. Because there’s other places you can bring your curiosity to. Suppose you’re curious about how the human body works. Maybe you’ll become a medical researcher. Maybe you’re curious about rocks and volcanoes and continental drift, then you’ll become a geologist, or a geo-physicist. So I think curiosity can reveal itself in many different ways. I have two kids and people say, “Hey, are you going to make them scientists?” It’s like no, I don’t want to force anybody. What I will make sure is that they stay curious about the world around them, and that they will have a level of science literacy that allows them to think intelligently about issues in the world, global warming, energy. There are science issues that affect how you vote in the next election or how you conduct your life. So, science literacy is not memorising science facts, science literacy is how do you think about the world. If I had a mission statement it would be to get everybody around me to become a little more scientifically literate.

HK; I am engaging in the research on the law of success. And I am often thinking about imagination, creativity, innovation, all these sort of stuffs. I want to ask you, are these things inborn talent, or the thing everybody has when they was born?

NDT; I have an opinion there. Maybe there’s research that gives one answer or another, but I have an opinion based on my life experience that we are all born with an innate curiosity about the world around us. If you put a child in a room and give him blocks, they will create things with the blocks. You don’t need an adult telling them to create things. They will build things. They will see how to knock them over to and that’s the meaning. Stability experiments. If you put them in a room where there’s running water and you have funnels and tubes and angle conduits, they will put them together and try to create something new. The problem is, as you get older all of that gets beaten out of us.

There’s an old saying that I’d like to repeat, as parents – as grownups – we spend the first year of a child’s life teaching them to walk and talk, and the rest of their life telling them to shut up and sit down.

HK; Hahaha.

NDT; Right? But in school, and it’s fascinating too. If you look at the difference between the west and the east, in either case you are considered a good student if you sit there and do not disrupt the class. You listen to the lesson and you obey the teacher and you do not speak up in class unless you’re pointed to. Your controlled behaviour is considered being a good student. When some of the best behaviour exhibited in discoverers is just what would make them a bad student. When the teacher says, “Don’t go behind that door.” But I want to know what’s behind the door, I’m going to go through it. “Don’t push that button.” I’m going to push the button.

HK; Hahaha.

NDT; All these things they tell you to not do are forces that prevent creativity. So I think the lesson for grownups is to give children much more free space to create, and to explore and to innovate. Innovate is the adult version of a child playing. Right? That’s what children do. You put children in a yard together, they’ll invent games … that’s the big critique of video games, because there’s less space for you to invent something new. If you just put a kid in a room with raw materials, magnets and blocks and sticks and trees, they’ll create stuff. So I think creativity is part of us.

HK; So do you suggest for teachers to let children free simply?

NDT; I don’t have an easy answer because at some point they’re going to want to test them, and at some point you want to be able to grade them or assess the way they’re doing. But I can tell you this, we need much more time in a classroom where you have the freedom of creative thought.

HK; Great opinion, but the counter-argument is that people say if we don’t teach them, children will be criminals or will get bad effect.

NDT; Okay. So there’s a little bit of truth to that. Let me see what I can agree with in that statement. You still have to be taught the rules of society. And the rules of society enable us to live in what we call civilization. You can’t have unlimited freedom. You can’t just take money from people or take the candy from the shelf. So yes, some of those freedoms need to be restricted. That’s what we call civilization. But simple creative freedoms about how to create something new. There’s got to be a place where you can draw the line and allow some of those freedoms, but still teach them to be law abiding citizens. So I agree that yes, you can’t have a lawless society and I understand. And you need some part of the day when you’re learning actual content out of books, yes. But I just think there’s room for more creative time.

HK; Ok. Talking about astrophysics, what is the important thing to be an astrophysicist?

NDT; You need to love all the mysteries of the universe even when you don’t know the answer. That’s one. Second, just as if you want to learn another language. If I say I want to learn all about Korea. So I’ll say a good way to do that is to study Korean. Well for me that’s even a different set of characters, a different alphabet. It’s not like Spanish where I can pronounce a Spanish word even if I don’t know what it means. If you put Korean in front of me, totally I can’t get it.

HK; Haha, that’s true.

NDT; So I study it and I learn what the characters are and the symbols, and eventually the signs in Korean and books in Korean, I say this because some of my books have been translated into Korean.

HK; Congratulation.

NDT; They send it to me and I say, “I don’t know, I guess they translated it okay.” I have no way to verify.

HK; Hahaha.

NDT; So to be able to converse with people in Korea, you have to learn Korean. To converse with the universe you have to know mathematics, because the universe speaks mathematics. So if you want to become an astrophysicist you need boundless curiosity for the unknown and the cosmos and you want to be able to speak the language.

HK; That’s really cool to say the language of the universe is mathematics. But I guess there are some people who love the astrophysics but don’t like mathematics right?

NDT; Alright. In astrophysics there’s about 15% of what one can do in astrophysics that would involve much less mathematics. For example, if you’re making observations of the universe using large telescopes and you bring down the data. Yes there’ll be some analysis of the data, but it doesn’t require a high level of mathematics, it requires relatively low level … it’s relatively speaking. I don’t mean two plus two is four, I mean basic advanced algebra, but not necessarily calculus. But that’s only 15%. The rest you need some more math. And if you have basic conversational calculus, that’s probably good enough for a lot of astrophysics that you might need to do, but not high level. But to some people calculus is high level math. I can’t help you there, you need calculus.

HK; From another angle, can we say the lingua franca of astrophysics, or even science, is English?

NDT; Well I thought about this interestingly. 100 years ago you could not get a PhD in the sciences in America unless you were also fluent in some other European language, typically German or French. Why? Because science in the world was done by people who were publishing in German or French and you’d have to read their journals. It wasn’t just some annoying requirement that you had to learn a second language, the research journals were this way. What happened though, basically 20th century is America, the United States invested heavily in its sciences. In ways that it had not in previous centuries. And so we created our own journals.

The astrophysical journal, which is the premier journal in my field, was born in 1895. And that then became so important and so famous that everyone started publishing in English. That continued right on through the wars, the first and second world wars, and we led the world in observational astronomy. Hubble was American, he discovered the expanding universe, he discovered that there are other galaxies in the universe. We had the biggest telescopes in the world. So because we were leading the field, we published in our own language. This is how that worked. And as a result, as we continued to lead the field, anyone else who wanted us to know about their discoveries, they would have to publish in English, then we’d know what you’d discovered. It didn’t matter whether you were in China, in France … maybe you would publish in your own language, then no-one would know about it for a long time until somebody translated the article for you. So why not learn the language upfront first and then publish it in the journal. And then everyone sees it immediately. .

HK; So language is not the primary thing for scientists… And mathematics can be universal because of its scientific feature…

NDT; Right, and so you raise an interesting point. The math is the same everywhere in the world, that doesn’t require translation. We all use the numerals, the Arabic numerals zero through nine, all the symbols are the same, the plus sign, the minus sign. Pi has the same value in America as it does in Asia, or in Europe or in Africa. So math is not only the language of the universe, it’s international in the world. Astrophysics in particular, it’s because so much research was happening in America and a little bit in England that English became, as you said, the lingua franca of my field. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that in the future another country leads a brand new field in research and they invent all the words because it’s a new field. We pioneered computing here in America as well.

So there’s a whole language and a whole intersection between computing and the frontier of science that go together. Here’s a simple case, the constellations of the night sky, they all have names and stars all have names. Two thirds of the names of stars that have names in the night sky are Arabic. Well how come they’re not English? Because when the stars were laid out and mapped, in the Middle East in Bagdad, they designed and invented these astro names that would enable you to navigate through the desert of the Middle East. So they named the stars of the night sky that we still have today. The naming has a property of investing as a culture, in this phenomenon or not. If not, then it passes you by or you have to jump on everyone else’s wagon. You don’t get to make your own wagon unless that’s what you invest in. so what I like about the history of science is that it remembers cultures that participated and made great advances because of whatever was valued at that time and at that place.

HK; Can people collaborate across the border in the 21st century?

NDT; It’s another excellent question. The greatest international peace there ever was has been amongst international scientists. So in other words, you have countries at war and who’s got oil, who’s got land, who’s got resources, and the politicians are fighting. Meanwhile I have collaborators in Spain, in China and in Korea and in Africa. And we come together and study the universe. The international space station is one of the greatest examples of international collaboration there ever was. Peaceful collaboration, there’s no weapons on the space station, there’s only a little bit of politics on the edges of it with regards to China, but basically it’s scientists and explorers working together. So I think politicians and nations in general need to take more lessons from scientists.

HK; Fantastic opinion. I will spread that voice definitely. Talking about the development of technology and science in the 21st century, for instance especially biotechnology, we will witness radical movement which possibly will change even the meaning of human beings. Are you afraid of these transformations?

NDT; Okay, I read a lot of history. History of science and history of culture as it relates to science. And in my read, my tracking of human behaviour, what I have found is that people have always been afraid of new sciences. They’ve always been afraid. When we learned that there was such a thing as an atom, people said, “Don’t go into the atom, don’t be bad, don’t go there.” But of course we made bombs out of atoms and nobody likes bombs. But the understanding of the atom has brought so much more great things to our culture including the entire technological revolution, than bad things to our culture. It also brings energy. Nuclear power is a major source of energy in Europe for example. This is either a knife can cut through it or it can kill you. All of these things have two sides to them. Right? Practically everything. You drive a car to move to a place, oh but it puts Co2 into the atmosphere or you could die in an accident. But we still use the car, we understand these risks. So we need to manage what is bad and try to exploit what is good. That has always been the case ever since there has been technology. So no, I don’t fear the frontier of technology. But it’s always good to have informed and enlightened governments, thinking about the best ways to use the technology for our greater good rather than for our greater evils.

HK; Then let’s talk about doomsday in 2012. Many people are thinking that all human beings will be eradicated in 2012. I’m not sure whether it’s right or not but can you give me your understanding of these things? Do you think ‘science’ should be ‘scientific’?

NDT; Okay, another interesting point that you make. Because 2012 is a very good example. Part of what it is to be scientifically literate is to know how to question those people who tell you that the world is going to end in 2012. So you ask them, “Well why do you say the world is going to come to an end?” “Oh well the Mayan calendar ends there.” And so why would the Mayans know anything about us today? Oh well they had an accurate calendar. Oh well tell me more about the Mayan culture. Oh well, I’ll tell you more. They believed Earth was a flat square on the back of a crocodile in a lily pond, held up by five trees of different colours. This is part of the Mayan descriptions of the natural world. Where did the Mayans put the beginning of the world? Oh they put it on August 13th in the year 3113 BC. Well they got the beginning of the world wrong by four and a half billion years. So why is anybody giving extra attention to when they think it will end? So science literacy is not knowing the answer in advance, but how to ask questions to weave your way through the folly, the falsehoods of a belief system. That’s empowerment.

HK; Brilliant, I’m just stunned by your answer. So you think even those kinds of superstitions can be eventually truth.

NDT; Yes, so if you are a searcher of truth you need to be ready for that truth no matter what that truth tells you. Provided the experiments are reliable and repeatable. So not all truths are good truths. One truth that you may have terminal cancer. That’s a bad truth. But wishing it away doesn’t make the cancer go away. Okay? So now if you make a religious statement that is testable, then why don’t you test it to decide whether it’s justified? Whether there is a heaven and you’ll be there when you die, it’s hard to test that. What I can test, if you want to pray that something is going to change tomorrow about something. That you can do statistics on that and you can test that. So if you can then why not? It’s what it is to live in a real world, and not one that you just invent in your head. A cleaner way to say it is I don’t want to live in a world where truth is what you want to be true, rather than what is. What kind of world is that? That’s a fantasy world. That’s a, you know, those are pre-scientific times where superstitions ruled people’s behaviour. I don’t ever want to move back to those times.

HK; So interesting. Can you give me your advice to be successful in general as the final question?

NDT; Success applies very broadly. You want to be very hard working, you want to love what it is you do, otherwise you don’t have the energy for the hard work. You can work at something that you’re not interested in and then you’ll give up or get distracted, or you’ll procrastinate. You want to love it, okay? You want to be able to work hard, you want to be able to love it and you want to be able to have the energy and the urge to learn as much as you can about everything else. Because new ideas are not always derived linearly from the subject that you’re studying. Sometimes they come in from a different direction, sometimes those different directions are entire other fields. You want to be the expert in the core of your interests, but not to the exclusion of other interests that orbit it, that are nearby, that are in reach. Because where does inspiration come from? It comes when you’re sitting at the beach or when you’re mountain climbing, or when you’re on a bicycle or on a treadmill.

Inspiration can come from all kinds of things and activities that you are engaged in. Inspiration is not some logical deduction from a, b then c. inspiration is a, b … l, m, n, o, p over here, inserted between the c and the d. I’ve got a new phenomenon here that I’m about to reveal. That’s how discoveries happen. That’s how innovations unfold. And futurists that try to tell you what tomorrow will be, can typically get the next few years correct, but they’re hopeless after ten years. Because after ten years you can’t extrapolate from what was to what will be, because things come in from all different directions. 20 years ago, if I had said, “You know, in just a few years I’m going to be able to hold 10,000 songs on something the size of a postage stamp and just clip it to my lapel.” Who’s going to believe that? Nobody’s going to believe that, right? Or I’m going to be able to hold up a device no bigger, slightly thicker than a credit card and be able to navigate my way street by street in any city of the world. You know, no-one would have thought that. But because you have global positioning system, you have the miniaturisation of electronics, you have high precision screens that you can read, you have storage devices on solid state chips, all those come together and then you get the iPod. No-one 30 years ago said, “I want to invent an iPod.” No-one … and you would not have got to an IPod from a Sony Walkman. No, no. You need these other pieces to plug in. And so knowledge of other ways that can influence your thoughts will that much more powerfully enable your creativity.

HK; Thank you so much. This is the end of the interview.