Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  Dear Mr. Swaim,

  Thanks for your kind words about my efforts to communicate.

  My educational philosophy is quite simple. Think of a professor facing away from you, droning on while writing on the board in the front of class. As a student, especially in college, it’s your responsibility to learn the material. You are paying for the education. So your learning skills will, in many cases, need to compensate for the absence of clarity or enthusiasm in the professor’s delivery. That’s lecturing.

  Now think of a professor who faces you from the front of the room; who makes eye contact with the audience; who has invested time and energy thinking about how you think; who pays attention to your attention span; who is aware of what words you know and what words or concepts confuse you; who knows the demographics of the audience—age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, political leanings, cultural leanings, propensity to laugh, to cry; who carries some pop-culture fluency, for easy reference and analogy, but only when teaching the subject can be assisted by such references. That person is not lecturing to you. That person has opened conduits tailored to that audience in that moment, and at that time. That’s communicating.

  It’s a way to see and feel what someone is thinking, allowing you to serve their curiosity on the spot.

  Also, most things I’ve written for publication passed through at least two editors—English majors in college who care about the language. In at least one of my books I thanked my editor for helping me “to say what I mean and mean what I say.”

  So there are no shortcuts. But you’ll know when you have perfected the task, that’s when under-informed people come up to you and say, “you’re a natural at this.”

  Sincerely,

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  * The Scopes trial, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, July 1925. Substitute high school teacher John T. Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee law by teaching evolution in the classroom.

  III.

  Pathos

  A plaintive appeal to emotions that already reside within us.

  Chapter 7

  Life and Death

  To live one's life.

  Remembering Holbrooke

  New York Times headline:

  “Richard C. Holbrooke, 1941–2010: Strong American Voice in Diplomacy and Crisis”

  Thursday, December 16, 2010

  New York Times

  To the Editor:

  When I gave Ambassador Richard Holbrooke a personal tour of the newly opened Rose Center for Earth and Space and Hayden Planetarium in 2000, I could not help notice how fluent he was in the depth and breadth of his cosmic curiosity.

  True science literacy is less about what you know and more about how your brain is wired for asking questions. Later in the tour he confessed that, as an undergraduate at Brown, he studied physics before switching to politics.

  I could not resist asking him whether that exposure to physics made a difference in his career as a diplomat, especially in tense, war-torn areas of the world that are resistant to negotiated peace settlements.

  He answered emphatically “yes,” citing the physics-inspired approach of sifting for the fundamental drivers of a cause or phenomenon—stripped of all ornament. To get there, one must assess how and when to ignore the surrounding details, which can give the illusion of importance, yet in the end, are often irrelevant distractions to solutions of otherwise intractable problems.

  Mr. Holbrooke’s career was a living endorsement for more scientifically literate peace negotiators in the world.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  New York City

  Dead Man Talking

  Wednesday, March 27, 2019

  Dear Cousin Neil,

  The day after my father died, I went to the funeral home to view his body. He’d been sick for nearly a decade following a series of debilitating strokes and his death, while painful, was expected.

  Walking into the funeral home I could just barely see his body stretched out on a table in front. I gathered my courage and knew the time had come for me to say my goodbyes. Just then, I heard an old familiar voice say to me “What the f%#k are you doing kid? Get out of here!”

  I stopped dead in my tracks and spun around only to find no one there.

  I knew that voice, it was one I hadn’t heard in ten years. My dad’s stroke had left his voice forever changed; yet I knew to the core of my being that the voice I heard belonged to my father.

  Hearing him use the words ‘kid’ and ‘f%#k’ also confirmed it was definitely him. He always called me kid, and to him, f%#k was just an adjective.

  Without thinking, I said (out-loud) “I’m here to see you.” He said, “I’m not there!” I started to leave and stopped in my tracks, turned around and said, “No! I came to see you and I’m going to see you!” He said, “Fine, go look.”

  As I walked up to the body I wasn’t sad anymore. As I looked down at him, his body looked waxy and his face misshapen from the breathing tube he had been on, I heard him say, “See? I told you I’m not here.”

  Happier and more peaceful than I had been only minutes before, I literally skipped out of the funeral home. Years later, it still feels real but logically doesn’t make sense.

  What do you think really happened?

  Seanlai Cochrane

  Delray Beach, FL

  Dear Seanlai,

  Either my first cousin (your dead father) was actually talking to you, or you acoustically hallucinated his voice. While the latter is far more likely to be the case, allow me to suggest an experiment for you to conduct if anything like this happens to you again.

  Next time somebody dead talks to you, try to have a more informative conversation. Try to glean information about the great beyond. Be curious. Ask good questions. Here are a few that come to mind.

  •Where exactly are you?

  •Is anybody else there? If so, who?

  •Are you wearing clothes? If so, where did you get them?

  •Do you eat food? If yes, then who prepares it?

  •Describe what you see around you?

  •How old are you? How is your health?

  •Is there day and night?

  •Do you sleep? Where do you sleep?

  If you have an active, creative, imaginative brain, it’s entirely possible that the hallucinated voice of your father would offer interesting, plausible answers to each of these questions. So to mitigate that possibility, get someone to write a short phrase on a sheet of paper—like “howdy partner” or “diamonds are forever”—making sure you do not see it. Then hold it up and ask your deceased father to read it. You are now soliciting information that does not reside within your own brain.

  If you can demonstrate that the dead person knows things (with accuracy) that you do not know, then you will become famous overnight. If you can’t, then chalk up the experience to yet another occasion when our brain misleads, distorts, or mangles objective realities.

  Neil

  Farewell*

  Thursday, December 24, 2009

  To all of my Professors & Educators,

  It may sadden you, but I hope by the end of this note, it won’t.

  The simple medical fact is, I’m about done. I’ve been carrying some nuisance issues for about a year and decided to have them looked into, and the short story is, I’ve got cancer in so many places I stopped listening to the doctor after the first four. It’s terminal, and it’s short-term.

  The one thing I’m going to have to insist on is that I get no “boo-hoo” email. I consider myself a pretty lucky guy. I got out of corporate life in 1995, and retired for good in 2002, and during this time, I’ve had a really interesting life. For the last seven years, I’ve had my time all to myself to study science and math, and help beginners in these studies. I’ve got a dream telescope and have seen wonders in the night sky that most others will never see for themselves. Through all this, the universe has given me a spiritual awakening that convinces me that life here on Earth is not
hing more than a phase. And as if all this isn’t enough of a prize, I’ve been blessed with a “two minute warning” to make this transition as orderly and meaningful as possible (and, by the way, time to gain appreciation of the very many things I’ve been taking for granted for years).

  You people have made the last several years of my life rewarding—with an objective, with drive, with a purpose. Very many folks spend the last years of their lives with nothing more than trying to find something to do. I’m a floor above those folks—and it was the discovery of The Teaching Company,† astronomy, science and math that drove me to these heights that I would not have found otherwise. No, it wasn’t you alone—it was also my research and my book studies that pushed me forward—but it was you, collectively, that provided the propellant.

  If you reply to this email at all, please let it to be to wish me well in the fantastic adventure I’ll soon be embarking on. My soul is tough, and I’ll see it through.

  Good luck and thanks to each and every one of you, and don’t ever underestimate your contributions. We’ll talk again on the other side.

  Regards & Farewell,

  MJ “Morg” Staley

  Dear Morg,

  You surely know by now that a cosmic perspective offers vistas that may serve and sooth your current state of body & mind.

  And as the saying goes: We’re all going to die. But only a select few of us happen to know when.

  Neil

  Postscript: Morg Staley died eight months later, in August 2010.

  The Cosmic Perspective

  Tuesday, June 19, 2012

  Mr. Tyson,

  Thank you!

  My mother is passing away at this time. I have been by her side as much as I can be. I never had much time with her, as she walked a different road in life; she took my sister’s hand and I lost many years.

  A few years ago, she asked to live with my wife and me. We never really shared anything or discussed much. But you helped her and me to find a point of discussion. Thank you.

  We are born alone, we die alone. It’s what we do that makes the only things we take with us.

  My greatest thanks belong to you.

  Regards,

  Robert Clark

  Dear Robert,

  While you haven’t specified, I presume the points of discussion with your mother have been various things I’ve written or said about the universe. One good thing (among many) about the cosmos is that it belongs to us all. As a consequence, the more you learn, the more ownership you’re compelled to take of it.

  On my deathbed, one thought I will surely have comes from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He notes that we who die are the lucky ones. Most people—most genetic combinations of who could ever exist—will never be born, and so will never have the opportunity to die.

  That, and other reflections on our place in the universe, never fail to bring me intellectual enlightenment and spiritual peace when I seek them. I would be honored if you read the ending paragraphs of my essay “The Cosmic Perspective”‡ to your mother, if there’s still time between you. Reproduced below.

  Strength to you, peace to your mother,

  Neil

  The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it’s more than just what you know. It’s also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

  •The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it’s not solely the province of the scientist. The cosmic perspective belongs to everyone.

  •The cosmic perspective is humble.

  •The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.

  •The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.

  •The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.

  •The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place. The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have. The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.

  •The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.

  •The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix. The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself. We are Stardust.

  Robert Clark replied . . .

  THANK YOU. Your strength has helped me very much and your encouragement to my mother has not gone unnoticed by her. My mother’s condition has stabilized, but she is still in an acute wing of the hospital.

  It seems that knowing those she admired are pulling for her has encouraged her greatly. I will be sitting with her this weekend and I will again read the whole essay to her. She wanted to hear all your words, she reacted better to your words than words from the Bible others have been reading to her (I hate to put you under such pressure).

  Thank you again, and always a student,

  Robert Clark

  Soul Searching

  In July 2007, Jeff Ryan wrote with questions about life after death. Is there a soul or essence of ourselves that transfers, gaining eternal existence? But, most importantly to his curiosity, what does science say about it all?

  Dear Mr. Ryan,

  The human body contains a measurable quantity of energy, stored chemically (in its fat, and in all other soft tissue) as well as energy that derives from existing at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature typically above the ambient air temperature and sustained while alive by the release of stored chemical energy within our bodies. We also harbor trillions of symbiotic and parasitic organisms on your skin and especially in your digestive tract.

  When we die, our chemical processes (the metabolism) ceases to function and we immediately begin to lose energy to the air as our body cools. The rest of our body makes tasty food for microorganisms that are already in our body as well as others that are attracted to it, such as fly larvae, worms, etc. Over time, the entire energy content of our body returns to the Earth and the atmosphere from which it came.

  If you are cremated, none of this energy is made available to nature even though we had been drawing from nature for our entire life for sources of food. When you are cremated, the stored chemical energy gets released into the atmosphere, heats the air, and then radiates energy into space.

  For this reason, it is my strong preference to be buried, completing the cycle of energy that began with my birth.

  All of this derives from the chemistry and physics of measurable quantities.

  If you believe you have a soul, as several of the world’s religions assert, then its existence is faith-based and so you cannot appeal to the methods and tools of science to say what happens to it. Unless, of course, you can make a testable prediction about how to measure the soul. This, in fact, was attempted shortly after the discovery of X-rays. People, eager to prove their faith in a soul, identified dying patients in a hospital and X-rayed them at the moment of death to see if anything rose out of their bodies. They saw nothing.

  Sincerely,

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Hurricane Katrina

  January 27, 2010

  Via Facebook

  How come everyone is so quick to want to help people in Haiti but it seems everyone has forgotten about the poor and displaced people in America? Why not donate to a charity to help the U.S. instead? There are still people just as bad off because of Katrina as th
ose in Haiti, but no one cares about them.

  Ron Marish

  Dear Ron,

  Scale matters. About 2,000 people died in New Orleans from the failed levees. Meanwhile, the earthquake death toll in Haiti reached a quarter million—nearly 3% of that nation’s population. And so the magnitude of the Haitian earthquake dwarfs that of Katrina.

  Personally, I draw the line when people step across a homeless human in the street to feed or adopt a stray dog.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Postscript: More recent government estimates have reduced the 2005 earthquake death toll to below 100,000

  Curing Disease

  Randy M. Zeitman was interested in the age-old dilemma of whether intellectually talented people should pursue their own interests or devote that mental power to solving the pressing problems of society. He questioned the value of walking on the Moon or the Hubble Space Telescope if we still haven’t cured cancer, or if we still have a problem feeding the world. In October 2004, Mr. Zeitman (politely) challenged me on this tension between doing what you want and doing what is right.

  Dear Mr. Zeitman,

  Thank you for sharing your comments and critical perspectives. I once felt exactly as you do, but changed my mind after I learned some basic (yet not widely appreciated) facts of life and of society.

  You referred to a cure for cancer. Tax money spent on cancer and disease research in America exceeds that which we spend on space by a factor of ten. When you include private/corporate R&D spent on curing disease, the factor rises to one hundred. So it is not as though we are not already investing huge resources into these crucial fields. NASA just happens to be the most visible among targets for your line of argument.