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EC: Well Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you very much for being here on Conversations. Welcome to Seattle.
NT: Thank you for having me.
EC: Again, I’m sure you have been here numerous times.
NT: It’s one of my favorite cities actually.
EC: Well how does of a kid born in the Bronx end of becoming an astrophysicist?
NT: First you have to say this: Da Bronx.
EC: Da Bronx, I’m sorry…
NT: Just get that straight, all right?
EC: Forgot the “Da.”
NT: Actually I’ve thought long and hard about this, because I wondered, suppose I grew up in the suburb—or if I grew up in a rural setting on a farm, where the night sky was always visible for me from childhood , from infancy. I wonder if it would have ever struck me as boldly as it did in New York, because in New York there is no sky. You can see the moon, ok, of course the sun in the day time… …the moon and maybe a couple of planets at night—that’s it, that’s our total encounter with the night sky as a New Yorker. Even when you look up your sight line mostly will hit a building – so you have to look straight up before you see the sky and it’s not interesting at that point, the lights are too bright.
So it was not until I was nine years old where my family, my parents, took me and my brother and sister to the local planetarium. In New York City, that’s the Hayden Planetarium and that’s when they dim the lights and the stars came out in this unusual ceiling that was round , this domed ceiling , and I didn’t know where I was. It was a little frightening at first, because the room kind of disappears from under you, I mean psychologically, it disappears and it’s just you and the cosmos, I thought it was hoax. I said there aren’t this many stars in the nights sky, because I know , I’ve seen them from the Bronx, It was like five stars in the Bronx, and it would not be ’til several years later where I would actually go in to the rural parts of, on that time, Pennsylvania and also in the Caribbean.
We took some family trips there, and I saw the night sky, as it was intended to be seen. To this day I’m embarrassed to confess that when I look up to the night sky with some finest observing locations in the world, I still say to myself, that’s beautiful, reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. I know that’s a little sick to think like of an artificially produced sky as the reality, the reference, but that’s what it was, but it hit me when I was nine years old and I was star struck, now, suppose I’d seen it my whole life I don’t think I would have been that star struck, and I wonder what I be today where it would not… for that delay in that cosmic encounter.
EC: And Hayden Planetarium is your life’s work now?
NT: Yeah, so now I came back and now I’m like head of the place. (laughs)
EC: Were you always good at math and science?
NT: I liked it and my grades were always all over the places, so people always put so much emphasis on grades when of course in adulthood no one asks you what your GPA was, most like times someone asked you what grade…
EC: I can’t remember…
NT: I couldn’t even remember, so clearly there is something else that matters in life than what your grades are and I think there is not enough support of what could easily recognized in someone as ambition, the urge to want to learn more no matter what is your situation, so there I was, my first encounter with a night sky, and the years that followed in to middle school and into the high school, I joined the amateur astronomers club and I attended extra classes at the museum that contained the Hayden Planetarium. Because once you go to just the public exhibits it’s a point where you want more. In any good museum any good facility, will have programs that go beyond just the permanent exhibit as did the American Museum of Natural History, of which the Hayden planetarium is a, is a part.
And so I just kept growing and I kept growing—that’s not even in school, I’m out of school doing this, after schools, on the weekends. And so, I felt fortunate to be near a facility, as so many people are who live in cities that have science museums, to live near facility that could keep stoking this curiosity, this cosmic curiosity that was planted at age nine.
EC: Not a lot of African Americans in Astronomy…
NT: That’s right. There is about, when I got my Ph.D. in 1991, there was about fifteen, in the world and…out of about 2 or 3,000 astrophysicists. There is more today. Last time I checked it might be 50 or 60, but the total number of astrophysicists has gone up in that same proportion so the relative numbers haven’t changed much.. I don’t have an easy explanation for that, I could make up one…but it’s not for the benefit of research , I think what a luxury it is to say I want to study astrophysics, suppose, you’re the first of your generation to go…… the first in your family line to go to college, and every one sort of bucking for you. Are you going to major in something as obscure as astrophysics, if you were the first to go to the college, when being financially stable is going to be a high priority for the whole family lineage at that point? So I think it might take a couple of generations before sort of financial stability is established within the community, the demographic… …before someone who is born in to a family that doesn’t have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, then have a luxury of thinking about what to study just because it’s fun to do, rather than they need to draw a pay check.
EC: Now did I read?
NT: No, [laughs] the way you started so…the way…no—
EC: Was it the week you were born, that NASA was founded?
NT: Yes, the very same week, the same week that it was founded, the actual week, of the actual year that I was born NASA was founded, I should say that in reverse… And there’s been some talk - your name has been debated about as may be a candidate to the head NASA. Well, there are rumors, I mean the rumors are true, that doesn’t make them factual…there are true lies. I mean my name has come up on lists, but I didn’t put my hat in the ring,I mean I’m not , I’m not bucking for the job, there’re people who want that job.
EC: Do you?
NT: You know, if I’m asked, I’d be flattered. I’d be happy to go to Washington and have that conversation but I don’t, I am doing—I have to ask myself—we all love NASA , we all want NASA to succeed and those who don’t love NASA … don’t know enough NASA to understand why they should, I can tell you that right now. NASA is one of the few agencies where one’s support for it is uncorrelated with your political lineage, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, conservative, centrist…
People who would rather spend their money other ways, it doesn’t—whatever that urge, it does not correlate with their political platform. All I can say is, I have to ask myself, where I can do best for NASA. Is it as head of NASA, which is this huge ship, with this inertia—decades of inertia—in motion. With the man program, and the science program, and the centers. NASA has all these centers across the country, from the jet propulsion labs and…Houston, Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space center, the headquarters and NASA Stennis, all across the country. It’s a huge, huge multi-headed beast that’s there. And you gotta tame it and drive it all into a direction so that it’s all coherent. And that’s hard to do, that’s hard to do. And there are people who want to try to take that on, and I deeply respect that. I don’t know if being head of NASA is the best way to use my portfolio of talents in the service of NASA. As it is now, they publish my op-eds…and they, my books get out there. And I, and I can, I have a TV show, NOVA Science Now, where NASA subjects are major recurring themes within it. On PBS of course! So, I couldn’t do that if I was head of NASA. And if I became head of NASA, who would then do that? Whereas I can continue to do this while someone else heads NASA. So that’s why I’m not, if I’m not called, I’m not going to miss it. But I nonetheless wish NASA well.
EC: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. Although a lot of kids are holding you accountable after this book.
NT: Pluto had it coming! Let’s establish that, here and now. I’ve been blamed for like kicking Pluto out of the solar system. But don’t…don’t shoot the messenger.
EC: Are you guilty of killing Pluto?
NT: I’m an accessory to it. But I didn’t pull the trigger.
EC: So let’s go back…
NT: I drove the car. I drove the getaway car.
EC: [Laughs] You were the driver! You were the driver!
NT: That’s all I was!
EC: So let’s go back to 2000, and at the planetarium, this exhibit’s going to come out…
NT: Newly built, newly invested facility. Rose Center for Earth and Space.
EC: And actually things were pretty low-key when this exhibit opened. Then the NYTimes came out with this article…
NT: [low voice] The New York Times did it, that’s right, don’t blame me the New York Times…so in the 1990s we’re designing this new facility, and we’re thinking to ourselves, what’s, is there any new way we should think about delivering the universe to the public? It’s not just the planetarium, there’s a whole surrounding museum of the universe, that’s there. Part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. So we noticed that in the 1990s, new objects were being discovered at a rapid pace in the outer solar system, beyond Neptune. In orbits that kind of resembled Pluto’s orbit. Objects of sizes that resembled Pluto’s size, that were little. Objects that were mostly ice by volume, like Pluto. And we said, Hmm. Things that make you go—raise an eyebrow, wonder what’s going on out there. Maybe Pluto is a member of this new class of objects that are now being discovered. So while Pluto has always been kind of an oddball ninth planet, it’s actually quite natural in its properties when considered among what we have found in the outer solar system. So all we did was take Pluto and group it with all these other newly discovered objects. We took the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—grouped them together.
Took the, the, rocky terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—grouped them together. The asteroid belt, grouped that together. And that presented a new family photo of the solar system. We didn’t count planets, we didn’t say there are only eight planets in the solar system—that’s what we got stereotyped as doing. And I kept, people kept trying to get a quote out of me—so how many planets are there? And I said, I don’t care how many planets there are, that’s not how we’re delivering the science, pedagogically or scientifically. Taking what I felt was the high road, which was no longer counting objects. There’s no science in the numerical count of planets. There is science in the properties they have, that you can compare and contrast among the whole portfolio that is the family of the solar system.
EC: So did you expect this when you came out with the exhibit…to take off and become the center of a controversy?
NT: It didn’t take off! For a whole year. Not initially, like you were saying. It was…people seemed pretty cool about it. Until the
EC: New York Times a year later...
NT: …someone at the New York Times spotted this, and overheard some kid trying to find Pluto in the groupings of the gas giants and the rocky inner planets and couldn’t find Pluto. It’s not going to be there ’cause there’s four of these and four of these and Pluto is not either of those. And so they overheard this and said, Oh we’ve got a story here. So they got on the horn, called headquarters—downtown in New York, in Times Square, Times headquarters—
EC: Pluto’s missing!
NT: Pluto’s missing, send up a reporter and a photographer…and there they came, and right there came the headline: “Pluto Not a Planet? Only in New York.” And that’s when the hate mail started coming from kinder—from third graders, coming into my office. [mimics kids] Dear Dr. Tyson, why, put my favorite planet back in, why did you take it away? (in crayon, right?) Here’s what Pluto looks like, in case you don’t know—write back soon. One of them said, but not in cursive, because I can’t read cursive yet. The cutest things. But I realized this struck a chord.
There’s this, there’s this, correspondence, there’s this, this permanence of knowledge that people believe this count of planets means to them. And they’re getting conflicting information and they’re upset by this. And I could not otherwise account for it other than to say to myself, Why are Americans reacting this way, in ways that Europeans are not? And I looked around and said, Is there anything else named Pluto?
EC: Think it all had to do with the name? Particularly for kids?
NT: I think so. Even though an American discovered Pluto, you could argue maybe Americans would be a little more jingoistic about it, but I polled people who are Pluto lovers, and they said, “No idea.” So…maybe ten percent of them knew that an American discovered it. So that was not the driver of this American sentiment. And I have to conclude that it was just the dog. There it is, the dog. That was the beginning and end of that.
EC: But I would think…
NT: Mickey’s dog, Pluto. Just to flesh that out. First sketched the same year Pluto the cosmic object was discovered. So they have the same tenure in the hearts and minds of Americans.
EC: But in a way, as much as it became a controversy…and kind of humorous to some extent too.
NT: Yeah, I mean, no one, no one you know went to duel over this. But it was nonetheless, emotions were flowing, people chose up sides.
EC: But wasn’t it a good thing…you got to write a book about it…but…
NT: The book was catharsis for me. Not that I got to write it, I HAD to, otherwise I would’ve gone insane.
EC: But it brought this focus for kids, and other people, on science, the universe, all those things that that’s what you want.
NT: It’s true. I like science literary in a population, whether or not it’s astrophysics, chemistry, or biology, it doesn’t matter to me where it derives. But it made cosmic subjects front page story for many years, and particularly when an official vote was taken by the international community of astrophysicists…in 2006—that’s now six year delay—we did it first, we were the first public institution to re-think Pluto’s public identity. It came to an official vote later on, which created another media storm at that time, but now it was not focused on what we did—because this was a vote taken by the International Astronomical Union—not a labor union in that sense, it’s a society of astrophysicists. They took a vote, in Prague, so all the press went to Prague for that. I was home, doing a backstroke, I was fine because I was not the focus of this. And the vote came down to redefine the word “planet” in such a way that Pluto does not apply.
EC: But what you’re really doing here in this book is explaining how all of this came about.
NT: Exactly. The book is not some diatribe. Most of the book is a celebration of the public’s reaction to this, this Pluto controversy.
EC: In a lighthearted way…
NT: I think so, I think so, yes. You get the science and you get the back story.
EC: What is all this stuff you have in here about Pluto water…
NT: Back in the 1920s, just in the decade that preceded the discovery of Pluto—an American discovered Pluto but an American didn’t name it, nor could an American have named it—because it was a widely advertised, heavily used mineral laxative, called Pluto Water, with the logo: “When nature won’t, Pluto will.” No one’s thinking cosmic object at that time. So in fact it got named by an 11-year-old girl in England, who happened to be very well connected by the way… Her father was like head of the Cambridge Library, friends of the Astronomer Royal, so and she’d just learned about Roman mythology and saw that Pluto was far and distant and underworld—so she nailed it I think, in that effort.
EC: With the work you do…the writing, appearances…are you trying to open people’s minds to science, to the universe? For a lot of kids…science is an intimidating thing.
NT: Well I think it’s intimidating because people believe that they won’t be good at it, or they won’t understand it. And no one likes not understanding something—it’s frustrating, it can be embarrassing. And I think there are levels of approaching science. I think of science as this ladder, and it can go very high, to the point where every next rung fewer and fewer people understand what’s going on that rung until you get to some top rung, where you get the three people in the world who know what’s going on there. But the rungs go all the way down. And my concern is people not even approaching the ladder at all. And I think there are plenty of rungs there that are well within reach, of people of all ages, of all backgrounds. And a lot of what I do, I spend a lot of time thinking about what’s going on in the minds of people in the public—what their different backgrounds are, what TV shows do they watch, what books do they read. And that’s the profile of the wiring of the brain of an audience. And I go into an audience as best as I can with an understanding of that brain wiring. And I take, find out, which rungs on that ladder best fit that audience. And then they’re grabbing at the rungs, and they feel like they’re connected to the cosmos. Or at least they behave—they behave like they seem like they know what’s going on.
[Laughs] So that’s a good feeling. It says that there is a way that the science that’s around us can become part of the—just part of what you think of as life. Rather than, Now I’m about to do science. No, no—science is just there all the time. All the time. There’s ice melting in my water glass here. There’s hot air rising up from the hot lamps. There’s always something going on around you that’s science. It’s not something separate—it is life.
EC: Carl Sagan.
NT: Carl Sagan. I met him like only four times in my life, but three of them were significant. The fourth was just sort of a brief encounter—[but three] were significant. I, coming out of high school, I went to the Bronx High School of Science—I grew up in the Bronx)—
EC: Da Bronx.
NT: Da Bronx, thanks for correcting me. By the way, the most formative years of my life were at the Bronx High School of Science. This is a school that has seven Nobel laureates counted among its graduates. So there’s a legacy there. It really doesn’t even have anything to do with the teachers. It really has to do with just the general environment that you’re in, where everyone cares about learning. This was back when being a nerd was not something that got the respect that it does today – because today the nerds fix your computer. Back then you didn’t have a computer for them to fix, ok?
Today if you’re not in arm’s reach of a nerd you’re missing out on something that’s going on with the technology around you. So I applied to colleges, got accepted at Cornell. A few weeks later I got a letter in the mail from Carl Sagan. He was already famous at the time, he’d done the Tonight Show. He said, I noticed you’re very interested in the universe. If you’re thinking of coming to Cornell, come by. If you come by I’ll be glad to meet you and show you the lab. I’m thinking, Carl Sagan?
So I went up to visit Cornell, he met me outside the lab, showed me his office. Reached behind, and pulled out one of his books, signed it to me. Cool—just reached there and get one of your books just sitting on the shelf. Took me, spent half the day with me. Took me back to the bus station—it’s a bus ride from New York City, four hour bus ride from New York City—started to snow, and he said if the bus doesn’t get through, here’s my home number, come and spend the night. I’m thinking, Who am I? Here’s a famous guy, brilliant scientist, who am I to him?—other than someone with ambition? And to this day—I remember then, I said to myself, if I am ever in a position of influencing others the way he’s influencing me, I’m going to do that.
And so, here I am now a scientist and I’ve got books on the back shelf, I can now do that. I’ve got the books on the back shelf and when students send me e-mail—which would not have happened back then of course, there was no e-mail—they’re the first e-mails I reply to. I have this commitment to this next generation of people in the educational pipeline that was instilled in—within me—simply because Carl Sagan spent time on me and I was nobody.
EC: Isaac Newton.
NT: Isaac Newton—smartest guy there ever was. I’ll make my replies shorter because you said you wanted this to be faster. Smartest guy there ever was, bar none, I don’t care who—Leonardo, Einstein, I don’t care who you say—Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton discovered the laws of optics, the laws of motion. One of them is the seatbelt law, by the way: things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by outside force. People who don’t wear seatbelts never learn that law, right? See so physics can prolong your life!
The laws of gravitation. A friend of his says, why are they orbiting in ellipses, in that shape—planets, ’cause they’re not circles, they’re an ellipse, a flattened circle. [He says] I’ll get back to you. Goes home for a couple of months, comes back: Here’s why. Conic sections—you cut a cone and you get the shape. Well, how did you get that? Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to solve that problem. The guy—and then he turned 26.
EC: Oh my gosh.
NT: Isaac Newton. I can’t read about him without the hair standing up on the back of my—if I had hair there it would be standing up on the back of my neck. It’s spooky how connected to the universe he was.
EC: You’re the father of two children.
NT: Yeah, one aged now eight, and twelve.
EC: Are they interested in science?
NT: I don’t press it on them. I’ll tell you this, by the time I’m done with them they’ll be scientifically literate…whether or not they want to become scientists. In fact if you ask them today…my daughter wants to be a novelist - very much not a scientist - It’s something else completely. But I can tell you this, she’s scientifically literate. And the science literary is coming from the—how I immerse them in their environment at home, when we travel. What surrounds them that forces them to think about how the world works. And I’m actually doing a study on them about the causes and effects of these—of the environment versus how they think.
People think science literacy is being able to recite facts—how long does it take for the moon to go around the earth, how does your microwave oven work. And it’s not that. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the main part. The main part is how do you look at the world. What lens, what does the world look like through your lens. If you’re scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you. It’s not just a lot of mysterious things happening, there’s a lot of things we understand out there! And that understanding empowers you – to, first, not be taken advantage of by others who do understand it. And second, it’s a, there are issues that confront society that have science as their foundation. If you’re not scientifically literate, you are in a sense disenfranchising yourself from the democratic process. And you don’t even know it. So, whatever my kids become, I want them to become scientifically literate.
EC: Well I think they have a heck of a mentor. Your book again, is called the Pluto Files, one of many books that you’ve written. Plus Nova Science well.
NT: Thank you very much.
EC: Well Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you very much for being here on Conversations. Welcome to Seattle.
NT: Thank you for having me.
EC: Again, I’m sure you have been here numerous times.
NT: It’s one of my favorite cities actually.
EC: Well how does of a kid born in the Bronx end of becoming an astrophysicist?
NT: First you have to say this: Da Bronx.
EC: Da Bronx, I’m sorry…
NT: Just get that straight, all right?
EC: Forgot the “Da.”
NT: Actually I’ve thought long and hard about this, because I wondered, suppose I grew up in the suburb—or if I grew up in a rural setting on a farm, where the night sky was always visible for me from childhood , from infancy. I wonder if it would have ever struck me as boldly as it did in New York, because in New York there is no sky. You can see the moon, ok, of course the sun in the day time… …the moon and maybe a couple of planets at night—that’s it, that’s our total encounter with the night sky as a New Yorker. Even when you look up your sight line mostly will hit a building – so you have to look straight up before you see the sky and it’s not interesting at that point, the lights are too bright.
So it was not until I was nine years old where my family, my parents, took me and my brother and sister to the local planetarium. In New York City, that’s the Hayden Planetarium and that’s when they dim the lights and the stars came out in this unusual ceiling that was round , this domed ceiling , and I didn’t know where I was. It was a little frightening at first, because the room kind of disappears from under you, I mean psychologically, it disappears and it’s just you and the cosmos, I thought it was hoax. I said there aren’t this many stars in the nights sky, because I know , I’ve seen them from the Bronx, It was like five stars in the Bronx, and it would not be ’til several years later where I would actually go in to the rural parts of, on that time, Pennsylvania and also in the Caribbean.
We took some family trips there, and I saw the night sky, as it was intended to be seen. To this day I’m embarrassed to confess that when I look up to the night sky with some finest observing locations in the world, I still say to myself, that’s beautiful, reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. I know that’s a little sick to think like of an artificially produced sky as the reality, the reference, but that’s what it was, but it hit me when I was nine years old and I was star struck, now, suppose I’d seen it my whole life I don’t think I would have been that star struck, and I wonder what I be today where it would not… for that delay in that cosmic encounter.
EC: And Hayden Planetarium is your life’s work now?
NT: Yeah, so now I came back and now I’m like head of the place. (laughs)
EC: Were you always good at math and science?
NT: I liked it and my grades were always all over the places, so people always put so much emphasis on grades when of course in adulthood no one asks you what your GPA was, most like times someone asked you what grade…
EC: I can’t remember…
NT: I couldn’t even remember, so clearly there is something else that matters in life than what your grades are and I think there is not enough support of what could easily recognized in someone as ambition, the urge to want to learn more no matter what is your situation, so there I was, my first encounter with a night sky, and the years that followed in to middle school and into the high school, I joined the amateur astronomers club and I attended extra classes at the museum that contained the Hayden Planetarium. Because once you go to just the public exhibits it’s a point where you want more. In any good museum any good facility, will have programs that go beyond just the permanent exhibit as did the American Museum of Natural History, of which the Hayden planetarium is a, is a part.
And so I just kept growing and I kept growing—that’s not even in school, I’m out of school doing this, after schools, on the weekends. And so, I felt fortunate to be near a facility, as so many people are who live in cities that have science museums, to live near facility that could keep stoking this curiosity, this cosmic curiosity that was planted at age nine.
EC: Not a lot of African Americans in Astronomy…
NT: That’s right. There is about, when I got my Ph.D. in 1991, there was about fifteen, in the world and…out of about 2 or 3,000 astrophysicists. There is more today. Last time I checked it might be 50 or 60, but the total number of astrophysicists has gone up in that same proportion so the relative numbers haven’t changed much.. I don’t have an easy explanation for that, I could make up one…but it’s not for the benefit of research , I think what a luxury it is to say I want to study astrophysics, suppose, you’re the first of your generation to go…… the first in your family line to go to college, and every one sort of bucking for you. Are you going to major in something as obscure as astrophysics, if you were the first to go to the college, when being financially stable is going to be a high priority for the whole family lineage at that point? So I think it might take a couple of generations before sort of financial stability is established within the community, the demographic… …before someone who is born in to a family that doesn’t have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, then have a luxury of thinking about what to study just because it’s fun to do, rather than they need to draw a pay check.
EC: Now did I read?
NT: No, [laughs] the way you started so…the way…no—
EC: Was it the week you were born, that NASA was founded?
NT: Yes, the very same week, the same week that it was founded, the actual week, of the actual year that I was born NASA was founded, I should say that in reverse… And there’s been some talk - your name has been debated about as may be a candidate to the head NASA. Well, there are rumors, I mean the rumors are true, that doesn’t make them factual…there are true lies. I mean my name has come up on lists, but I didn’t put my hat in the ring,I mean I’m not , I’m not bucking for the job, there’re people who want that job.
EC: Do you?
NT: You know, if I’m asked, I’d be flattered. I’d be happy to go to Washington and have that conversation but I don’t, I am doing—I have to ask myself—we all love NASA , we all want NASA to succeed and those who don’t love NASA … don’t know enough NASA to understand why they should, I can tell you that right now. NASA is one of the few agencies where one’s support for it is uncorrelated with your political lineage, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, conservative, centrist…
People who would rather spend their money other ways, it doesn’t—whatever that urge, it does not correlate with their political platform. All I can say is, I have to ask myself, where I can do best for NASA. Is it as head of NASA, which is this huge ship, with this inertia—decades of inertia—in motion. With the man program, and the science program, and the centers. NASA has all these centers across the country, from the jet propulsion labs and…Houston, Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space center, the headquarters and NASA Stennis, all across the country. It’s a huge, huge multi-headed beast that’s there. And you gotta tame it and drive it all into a direction so that it’s all coherent. And that’s hard to do, that’s hard to do. And there are people who want to try to take that on, and I deeply respect that. I don’t know if being head of NASA is the best way to use my portfolio of talents in the service of NASA. As it is now, they publish my op-eds…and they, my books get out there. And I, and I can, I have a TV show, NOVA Science Now, where NASA subjects are major recurring themes within it. On PBS of course! So, I couldn’t do that if I was head of NASA. And if I became head of NASA, who would then do that? Whereas I can continue to do this while someone else heads NASA. So that’s why I’m not, if I’m not called, I’m not going to miss it. But I nonetheless wish NASA well.
EC: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. Although a lot of kids are holding you accountable after this book.
NT: Pluto had it coming! Let’s establish that, here and now. I’ve been blamed for like kicking Pluto out of the solar system. But don’t…don’t shoot the messenger.
EC: Are you guilty of killing Pluto?
NT: I’m an accessory to it. But I didn’t pull the trigger.
EC: So let’s go back…
NT: I drove the car. I drove the getaway car.
EC: [Laughs] You were the driver! You were the driver!
NT: That’s all I was!
EC: So let’s go back to 2000, and at the planetarium, this exhibit’s going to come out…
NT: Newly built, newly invested facility. Rose Center for Earth and Space.
EC: And actually things were pretty low-key when this exhibit opened. Then the NYTimes came out with this article…
NT: [low voice] The New York Times did it, that’s right, don’t blame me the New York Times…so in the 1990s we’re designing this new facility, and we’re thinking to ourselves, what’s, is there any new way we should think about delivering the universe to the public? It’s not just the planetarium, there’s a whole surrounding museum of the universe, that’s there. Part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. So we noticed that in the 1990s, new objects were being discovered at a rapid pace in the outer solar system, beyond Neptune. In orbits that kind of resembled Pluto’s orbit. Objects of sizes that resembled Pluto’s size, that were little. Objects that were mostly ice by volume, like Pluto. And we said, Hmm. Things that make you go—raise an eyebrow, wonder what’s going on out there. Maybe Pluto is a member of this new class of objects that are now being discovered. So while Pluto has always been kind of an oddball ninth planet, it’s actually quite natural in its properties when considered among what we have found in the outer solar system. So all we did was take Pluto and group it with all these other newly discovered objects. We took the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—grouped them together.
Took the, the, rocky terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—grouped them together. The asteroid belt, grouped that together. And that presented a new family photo of the solar system. We didn’t count planets, we didn’t say there are only eight planets in the solar system—that’s what we got stereotyped as doing. And I kept, people kept trying to get a quote out of me—so how many planets are there? And I said, I don’t care how many planets there are, that’s not how we’re delivering the science, pedagogically or scientifically. Taking what I felt was the high road, which was no longer counting objects. There’s no science in the numerical count of planets. There is science in the properties they have, that you can compare and contrast among the whole portfolio that is the family of the solar system.
EC: So did you expect this when you came out with the exhibit…to take off and become the center of a controversy?
NT: It didn’t take off! For a whole year. Not initially, like you were saying. It was…people seemed pretty cool about it. Until the
EC: New York Times a year later...
NT: …someone at the New York Times spotted this, and overheard some kid trying to find Pluto in the groupings of the gas giants and the rocky inner planets and couldn’t find Pluto. It’s not going to be there ’cause there’s four of these and four of these and Pluto is not either of those. And so they overheard this and said, Oh we’ve got a story here. So they got on the horn, called headquarters—downtown in New York, in Times Square, Times headquarters—
EC: Pluto’s missing!
NT: Pluto’s missing, send up a reporter and a photographer…and there they came, and right there came the headline: “Pluto Not a Planet? Only in New York.” And that’s when the hate mail started coming from kinder—from third graders, coming into my office. [mimics kids] Dear Dr. Tyson, why, put my favorite planet back in, why did you take it away? (in crayon, right?) Here’s what Pluto looks like, in case you don’t know—write back soon. One of them said, but not in cursive, because I can’t read cursive yet. The cutest things. But I realized this struck a chord.
There’s this, there’s this, correspondence, there’s this, this permanence of knowledge that people believe this count of planets means to them. And they’re getting conflicting information and they’re upset by this. And I could not otherwise account for it other than to say to myself, Why are Americans reacting this way, in ways that Europeans are not? And I looked around and said, Is there anything else named Pluto?
EC: Think it all had to do with the name? Particularly for kids?
NT: I think so. Even though an American discovered Pluto, you could argue maybe Americans would be a little more jingoistic about it, but I polled people who are Pluto lovers, and they said, “No idea.” So…maybe ten percent of them knew that an American discovered it. So that was not the driver of this American sentiment. And I have to conclude that it was just the dog. There it is, the dog. That was the beginning and end of that.
EC: But I would think…
NT: Mickey’s dog, Pluto. Just to flesh that out. First sketched the same year Pluto the cosmic object was discovered. So they have the same tenure in the hearts and minds of Americans.
EC: But in a way, as much as it became a controversy…and kind of humorous to some extent too.
NT: Yeah, I mean, no one, no one you know went to duel over this. But it was nonetheless, emotions were flowing, people chose up sides.
EC: But wasn’t it a good thing…you got to write a book about it…but…
NT: The book was catharsis for me. Not that I got to write it, I HAD to, otherwise I would’ve gone insane.
EC: But it brought this focus for kids, and other people, on science, the universe, all those things that that’s what you want.
NT: It’s true. I like science literary in a population, whether or not it’s astrophysics, chemistry, or biology, it doesn’t matter to me where it derives. But it made cosmic subjects front page story for many years, and particularly when an official vote was taken by the international community of astrophysicists…in 2006—that’s now six year delay—we did it first, we were the first public institution to re-think Pluto’s public identity. It came to an official vote later on, which created another media storm at that time, but now it was not focused on what we did—because this was a vote taken by the International Astronomical Union—not a labor union in that sense, it’s a society of astrophysicists. They took a vote, in Prague, so all the press went to Prague for that. I was home, doing a backstroke, I was fine because I was not the focus of this. And the vote came down to redefine the word “planet” in such a way that Pluto does not apply.
EC: But what you’re really doing here in this book is explaining how all of this came about.
NT: Exactly. The book is not some diatribe. Most of the book is a celebration of the public’s reaction to this, this Pluto controversy.
EC: In a lighthearted way…
NT: I think so, I think so, yes. You get the science and you get the back story.
EC: What is all this stuff you have in here about Pluto water…
NT: Back in the 1920s, just in the decade that preceded the discovery of Pluto—an American discovered Pluto but an American didn’t name it, nor could an American have named it—because it was a widely advertised, heavily used mineral laxative, called Pluto Water, with the logo: “When nature won’t, Pluto will.” No one’s thinking cosmic object at that time. So in fact it got named by an 11-year-old girl in England, who happened to be very well connected by the way… Her father was like head of the Cambridge Library, friends of the Astronomer Royal, so and she’d just learned about Roman mythology and saw that Pluto was far and distant and underworld—so she nailed it I think, in that effort.
EC: With the work you do…the writing, appearances…are you trying to open people’s minds to science, to the universe? For a lot of kids…science is an intimidating thing.
NT: Well I think it’s intimidating because people believe that they won’t be good at it, or they won’t understand it. And no one likes not understanding something—it’s frustrating, it can be embarrassing. And I think there are levels of approaching science. I think of science as this ladder, and it can go very high, to the point where every next rung fewer and fewer people understand what’s going on that rung until you get to some top rung, where you get the three people in the world who know what’s going on there. But the rungs go all the way down. And my concern is people not even approaching the ladder at all. And I think there are plenty of rungs there that are well within reach, of people of all ages, of all backgrounds. And a lot of what I do, I spend a lot of time thinking about what’s going on in the minds of people in the public—what their different backgrounds are, what TV shows do they watch, what books do they read. And that’s the profile of the wiring of the brain of an audience. And I go into an audience as best as I can with an understanding of that brain wiring. And I take, find out, which rungs on that ladder best fit that audience. And then they’re grabbing at the rungs, and they feel like they’re connected to the cosmos. Or at least they behave—they behave like they seem like they know what’s going on.
[Laughs] So that’s a good feeling. It says that there is a way that the science that’s around us can become part of the—just part of what you think of as life. Rather than, Now I’m about to do science. No, no—science is just there all the time. All the time. There’s ice melting in my water glass here. There’s hot air rising up from the hot lamps. There’s always something going on around you that’s science. It’s not something separate—it is life.
EC: Carl Sagan.
NT: Carl Sagan. I met him like only four times in my life, but three of them were significant. The fourth was just sort of a brief encounter—[but three] were significant. I, coming out of high school, I went to the Bronx High School of Science—I grew up in the Bronx)—
EC: Da Bronx.
NT: Da Bronx, thanks for correcting me. By the way, the most formative years of my life were at the Bronx High School of Science. This is a school that has seven Nobel laureates counted among its graduates. So there’s a legacy there. It really doesn’t even have anything to do with the teachers. It really has to do with just the general environment that you’re in, where everyone cares about learning. This was back when being a nerd was not something that got the respect that it does today – because today the nerds fix your computer. Back then you didn’t have a computer for them to fix, ok?
Today if you’re not in arm’s reach of a nerd you’re missing out on something that’s going on with the technology around you. So I applied to colleges, got accepted at Cornell. A few weeks later I got a letter in the mail from Carl Sagan. He was already famous at the time, he’d done the Tonight Show. He said, I noticed you’re very interested in the universe. If you’re thinking of coming to Cornell, come by. If you come by I’ll be glad to meet you and show you the lab. I’m thinking, Carl Sagan?
So I went up to visit Cornell, he met me outside the lab, showed me his office. Reached behind, and pulled out one of his books, signed it to me. Cool—just reached there and get one of your books just sitting on the shelf. Took me, spent half the day with me. Took me back to the bus station—it’s a bus ride from New York City, four hour bus ride from New York City—started to snow, and he said if the bus doesn’t get through, here’s my home number, come and spend the night. I’m thinking, Who am I? Here’s a famous guy, brilliant scientist, who am I to him?—other than someone with ambition? And to this day—I remember then, I said to myself, if I am ever in a position of influencing others the way he’s influencing me, I’m going to do that.
And so, here I am now a scientist and I’ve got books on the back shelf, I can now do that. I’ve got the books on the back shelf and when students send me e-mail—which would not have happened back then of course, there was no e-mail—they’re the first e-mails I reply to. I have this commitment to this next generation of people in the educational pipeline that was instilled in—within me—simply because Carl Sagan spent time on me and I was nobody.
EC: Isaac Newton.
NT: Isaac Newton—smartest guy there ever was. I’ll make my replies shorter because you said you wanted this to be faster. Smartest guy there ever was, bar none, I don’t care who—Leonardo, Einstein, I don’t care who you say—Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton discovered the laws of optics, the laws of motion. One of them is the seatbelt law, by the way: things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by outside force. People who don’t wear seatbelts never learn that law, right? See so physics can prolong your life!
The laws of gravitation. A friend of his says, why are they orbiting in ellipses, in that shape—planets, ’cause they’re not circles, they’re an ellipse, a flattened circle. [He says] I’ll get back to you. Goes home for a couple of months, comes back: Here’s why. Conic sections—you cut a cone and you get the shape. Well, how did you get that? Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to solve that problem. The guy—and then he turned 26.
EC: Oh my gosh.
NT: Isaac Newton. I can’t read about him without the hair standing up on the back of my—if I had hair there it would be standing up on the back of my neck. It’s spooky how connected to the universe he was.
EC: You’re the father of two children.
NT: Yeah, one aged now eight, and twelve.
EC: Are they interested in science?
NT: I don’t press it on them. I’ll tell you this, by the time I’m done with them they’ll be scientifically literate…whether or not they want to become scientists. In fact if you ask them today…my daughter wants to be a novelist - very much not a scientist - It’s something else completely. But I can tell you this, she’s scientifically literate. And the science literary is coming from the—how I immerse them in their environment at home, when we travel. What surrounds them that forces them to think about how the world works. And I’m actually doing a study on them about the causes and effects of these—of the environment versus how they think.
People think science literacy is being able to recite facts—how long does it take for the moon to go around the earth, how does your microwave oven work. And it’s not that. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the main part. The main part is how do you look at the world. What lens, what does the world look like through your lens. If you’re scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you. It’s not just a lot of mysterious things happening, there’s a lot of things we understand out there! And that understanding empowers you – to, first, not be taken advantage of by others who do understand it. And second, it’s a, there are issues that confront society that have science as their foundation. If you’re not scientifically literate, you are in a sense disenfranchising yourself from the democratic process. And you don’t even know it. So, whatever my kids become, I want them to become scientifically literate.
EC: Well I think they have a heck of a mentor. Your book again, is called the Pluto Files, one of many books that you’ve written. Plus Nova Science well.
NT: Thank you very much.
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