Neil de Grasse Tyson grew up in New York City, studied physics at Harvard University, and gained his doctorate at Columbia. He researches star formation and the structure of the Milky Way. He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium on Central Park West in New York City, and a member of the President’s Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond, which will report in June on US plans for exploring space. His book The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an urban astrophysicist will be published in May by Prometheus.
What’s your favourite planet?
Saturn. My favourite star would have to be the sun, and a close second Sirius, simply because it is the brightest in the night sky. It is bright and bold and audacious. I like audacious things in the cosmos.
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And a constellation?
I like to be the champion of the underdog. The southern hemisphere did not have the benefit of centuries of creative mythological thought by the Babylonians, the Romans and the Greeks. The southern constellations were not mapped formally until very late in the 1700s. There is a whole heap with names like Microscopium and Telescopium, there is a ship’s compass and an air pump. I applaud the fact that people felt the greatest expressions of their culture, to be forever remembered in the sky, were not the complicated social lives of gods and goddesses but real scientific instruments that were transforming human culture.
What inspired you to become an astrophysicist?
All I did was look up. The first time I looked up into the dome of the Hayden Planetarium I was 9 years old. It was so rich, I felt as though I could reach in and touch the objects. The first time I looked up into the real sky with binoculars I was 11. I got a whole new view of the moon, with mountains, craters, valleys and hills, and texture. Inspired by that view, and having been “imprinted” two years earlier – almost biologically imprinted like those ducklings – I could not imagine devoting my life to anything else but the universe.
The Hayden Planetarium’s evening classes, special programmes and lectures enabled me to meet professionals. I realised that to become a person who does this for a living would require me to take maths and physics and the like in school. So I was able, very early, to strategise my life’s trajectory toward this goal.
Do you still run classes and courses?
Oh yes. Becoming the director put me in a position to influence a next generation of students as an educator and a scientist, as the previous generation influenced me. I feel an especially urgent sense of duty in this.
Tell me how you got to be director.
I was a full-time research scientist at Princeton University over in New Jersey. My cares and concerns in the world did not go much beyond my research and writing. People knew about me from my appearances in the media and the couple of books I had written for the public.
Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History – the governing body of the planetarium – started knocking on my door, saying, “We hear you have this kind of background, we know we want to do something with the Hayden Planetarium but we don’t quite know what. Can you offer us some advice?” I said of course, the place is beloved to me.
Did this job fit easily with your work as a scientist?
When I was first asked to move to work here in a sort of leadership role I said, of course not. I am a scientist, I am culturally an academic. That would be professional suicide. So the trustees asked what would it take? I said it would take an institutional commitment to build a research department here, so I would not be stepping away from my academic roots.
But the science that the public loves best is hardly ever the science that a scientist loves best. If we did only the science the public loves, there would be whole exhibits on the search for alien intelligence. On the dark side of that, people might request horoscopes. So you have to lead, not follow.
We try to tease out, from the science that the public loves, the science that has the richest core on the frontier of research. And we pluck out of that frontier bits of science that no one might have heard of, but which have immense value and importance in our understanding of the machinery of the universe, and can be immensely satisfying if they are explained the right way.
How do you decide what to include?
Many museums make the mistake of wanting to cover every single bit of information about a subject. People visit a museum for an hour, maybe two. In that time you stand a much better chance of inspiring them than you do of giving them a lesson plan to take an exam when they walk out the door.
So our goal is to create an exhibition so large and immersive that you react to it almost viscerally. Yes, there is intellectual content, but if you only reacted intellectually we would have failed. We want you to come out of here feeling you have just stepped into the universe – and with a burning desire to learn more.
Is it a problem keeping the science up to date?
All too often museums say, “The exhibits are getting old, let’s get a brand new set.” They bring in advisers and designers, who make a nice flashy exhibit without the intellectual capital to sustain it.
We know that some science has a long shelf life: the Earth goes around the sun. We don’t have to worry about that going out of date any time soon. That exhibit text is cut into metal. The most nimble means of conveying the moving frontier of research is our digital video bulletin board. I’d like to believe that visitors know that even though they were here just last month, when they read something in the papers and think, “I want to know more about this,” they can come back and touch the frontier.
Having a frontier means that we don’t know everything…
We want to be candid about our ignorance, but not shy about telling people that we know enough to have some chance of conquering that ignorance.
Which needs open minds – how do you encourage them?
I don’t think there is an easy answer. There is value to breadth, even when you know what you want to be when you are grown up. That includes literature, poetry, music, art and even sociology, anthropology and the histories of cultures. I majored in physics, but half the courses I took were not even science or maths. I read a fair amount of the history of science – the more subtle things like the wrong ideas, and how much currency they had in their day, and why they were believed by so many.
In your book, you talk about thinking far enough outside the box that you weighed up earning money as an exotic dancer before deciding to do tutoring.
To take in all the world around you makes you a fuller human being. For example, I always give money to street musicians. A concert at Lincoln Center can cost you $70, and here are people dancing and singing for you in the street. I make sure that I appreciate what they are trying to do and where they are coming from.
You tutored prisoners in maths. What did you learn from that?
I’m a changed person for that. Forever. It’s a sort of a walk-a-mile-in-the-other-person’s-shoes story. More people should spend a little time in prison, just visiting to understand what happens.
Tell me about your campaign against light pollution.
The good thing about this is that – in America at least – if you can link a problem with earning money or saving money, it stands a much greater chance of getting resolved quickly. If a street lamp is visible from an aeroplane, half of the money spent to illuminate the street is wasted, going out into space. So put a reflective cover over the lamp and halve the wattage of the bulb. Energy is saved, money is saved, astronomers can see – and the public gets to drink in the majesty of the night sky.
Some municipalities have very good relationships with their local astronomers. The Kitt Peak National Observatory is near Tucson, Arizona, and there are city ordinances that mandate what kind of lights you have on your property and the city has on the streets. New York is probably hopeless, and Las Vegas. But there are other places where we can still pull off political and economic and scientific harmony.
When you got your doctorate at Columbia, that brought the world total of black astrophysicists to seven. Do you see yourself as an example or a mentor to young black scientists?
When I think about what I am that influences my behaviour and my thoughts, above all else I am American. I watch stupid TV shows and I watch blockbuster movies. Next, I am a scientist. Third, I am male and part of my life I did male things, like I wrestled in college, I lifted weights. A distant fourth is the colour of my skin. I don’t think about it until somebody says to me, you’re black, tell me about it – or when people treat me differently because I am black. Times when taxis won’t stop when I want to go north in Manhattan. Times people assume I am stupid until proven otherwise.
I am college educated and an academic. But I’d be a wealthy man if I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, “You’re so articulate.” White people don’t tell other white people they are articulate. I don’t know what they expect me to sound like.
In my father’s day, he was denied housing for being black. The challenges of my life don’t compare in any way to previous generations. I am happy to report that incidents like those are dropping in frequency from a few times a week to a few times a mouth.
“Defence of the human species” is one reason you give for studying the universe.
It is not one of my reasons for doing astrophysics. But one of the things a space programme can do is to prevent the fate the dinosaurs met 65 million years ago. To have that power, that intellect and to go extinct anyway would be a galactic embarrassment.
Are you in favour of manned space flight?
As a scientist, I see that the return on the dollar is vastly greater if we send robots instead of people. But I stand at the intersection between the frontier of science and the public’s appreciation of that frontier. One of the ways a frontier gets appreciated is through explorers. So any healthy space programme would have a rich ensemble of robotic spacecraft doing their thing and humans.
The first person who left the cave to climb the mountain to see what was on the other side did not do it for scientific reasons. Space exploration is the natural extension of that human desire, in the era when the whole world is mapped.
When we hold events with an astronaut at the planetarium – even one no one has heard of – more people come. It is the most remarkable kind of celebrity, a celebration of the simple fact that they have been in space. The name doesn’t matter. The first person to land on Mars will become a greater celebrity than any rock star ever.