Jack’s mom
Dear Jack’s mom,
People with borderline Aspergers are not uncommon in the physical sciences, a collection of fields (chemistry, physics, engineering, astrophysics, geology, etc.) in which social talents carries less currency than intellectual development.
Consider further that in almost every example of an academic professional in my field, high grades were the norm. Possibly a third to a half of my department was the valedictorian of their high school. And in nearly all of those cases, their primary intellectual stimulation came not from school, but from books they read at home—alone. That mode of solitude learning was true for me as well. So your urge to get the public school to serve his needs and interests may be futile. And in the absence of a private school option for him, unlimited access to books and full computer access to the Internet may be your best option for him.
As you surely know, one can build an impressive home library with not much money if you regularly peruse the “remainder” tables of book stores—paying anywhere from $1 to $10 per book on all subjects of the world.
Beyond these measures, from what I know, I will not assert that you have an easy task ahead of you. But it’s surely not hopeless.
With best wishes,
Neil
Half Black
Monday, March 23, 2009
Dear Dr. Tyson,
I want to bring my children to New York City. I want to kindle within them the thirst for science. To help me meet this goal, I was hoping you might clue me in on the best days to bring them. I want to encourage, within my children, a love for learning the sciences—not a fear or disdain for all things scientific.
And, since my children are one-half Black, I want them to have you as one of their role models of possibilities. Often, there is much on TV and online that shows them the negative side of their race, and I want to counteract this with positive influences.
So, when do you think would be a good time to bring them to your city, and hopefully spark within their little souls, a passion for science?
Cathy L. Jones
Dear Cathy,
I take the unorthodox view that the concept of a role model is highly overrated. Or rather, role models should be assembled à la carte. I have found skin-color associations, in these modern times, do more harm than good in the maturing child. To pick one person for a role model and not another, for reasons driven by skin color, may preclude entire worlds of ambition from being realized by your kids.
If you come to visit, it should not be because I am labeled as Black. But because I am a scientist/educator, and you care for the science literacy of your children.
Sincerely,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Bible Stories
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Dear Dr. Tyson.
I wanted to send you a note because I am having a discussion with my 10-year-old son. We have been doing what generations before me have done . . . sending my child to Hebrew School. We send him so we can have him learn about his religion and where he comes from. However, my son, who by the way is on the Autism Spectrum, said to me last night that Hebrew School is ridiculous because he does not believe in G-d, he believes in science. He believes that bible stories just cannot be true. And the truth is, I can’t deny that he just might be absolutely right.
When I asked where he got a lot of his ideas, he said “Cosmos,” so I know he believes and respects what you teach. (and, I thank you for that!) MY question is . . . are both possible? Do you think that there might be a higher power out there, or that science and faith CAN find common ground?
I ask, because I respect my son enough for him to have his beliefs, and I don’t want to impose anything on him that cannot be proven to be true. I know you are a busy man, but I am working on being a good parent.
I am so thankful for you taking the time to read this.
Sincerely,
Ingrid
Friday, March 30, 2018—Passover
Dear Ingrid,
An embarrassingly belated reply to your thoughtful email. The universe has been keeping me quite busy lately, but I do get to all my emails—eventually.
Of course in a free country, within limits, you can raise your children how you please, on whatever belief system you choose. For this reason, most people in the world who are religious, practice the religion of their parents. For example, the chances of Christians raising a child who later becomes Muslim, or a Muslim family raising a child who later becomes Jewish are extremely rare. The children will be more likely to grow up believing in no Gods than in the Gods of other religions.
So the urge to raise your son as a devout, practicing Jew, being one yourself, is entirely normal and natural. But of course you have, at most, only 18 years of direct influence on him. Your son will spend more than eighty percent of his life under a different roof than you.
From what I have seen and encountered, Judaism manifests across a huge range of practices—from emboldened Jews who enthusiastically eat bacon to the various sects of Orthodox Jews who, among other practices, maintain separate kitchen utensils for dairy and for meat. As a scientist, I have much more experience with atheist Jews. They do not view the Torah as the word of God. They see it as a book of stories—not to be judged for their truth or falsehood, but as a repository of insights from which wisdom for living one’s life can be derived.
Think about it—when we read fairy tales, we are not judging them for whether they are true or not. Instead, we fold lessons derived from them into our world views. Not only this, atheist Jews will commonly celebrate the high holidays with no less ritual than practicing Jews, right on down to leaving an open seat at the Seder table for Elijah, and making sure the front door is unlocked, so he can just walk right in if he happens to show up.
Why would an atheist Jew do this? The answer is not hard. Rituals and traditions account for some of the strongest binding forces among peoples of the world. Attending Mass on Sundays for Catholics. Prayer five times per day for Muslims. Ancestor worship for the Animist religions. One can participate without judging whether the events that established the ritual have any literal truth at all. The participation creates a sense of community, which has almost always contributed value to civilization. It disrupts civilization only when people require that others share their particular rituals, with threat of force to achieve it.
Being on the spectrum and liking science as he does, your best bet might be to not enforce the literalism of anything religious, but to keep him plugged into the beautiful traditions of the religion, and emphasize the value of ritual as a seed and taproot of community. Often that alone represents the greatest challenge when raising autistic children—getting them to embrace the value of love and compassion for people and for relationships.
Rest assured that you can raise a wholesome, intelligent, law-abiding child without requiring he believe that Moses turned a staff into a snake, or that manna fell from heaven.
Good luck. In my experience, it takes some of that too.
Happy Passover to you both.
Neil
First Telescope
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Dear Professor Tyson
I thought I’d pass this along to you, and that you’d appreciate this story more than most people. If not, apologies.
I realized I was over-telescoped and decided to get rid of my 2003 60mm Meade brand refracting telescope. The town of Tombstone, Arizona, is small, and trying to sell it would probably cost more in advertising than anyone would be willing to offer. So, I put up a note in the post office, “Free to any kid 10–17 with parent.” Even with “free,” it took five days before I got a call.
This guy called and later came over with his 12-year-old daughter. I showed them how the telescope and control-box worked, and all throughout this, the kid’s eyes were as big as headlights. I even threw in a spare copy of H.A. Rey’s The Stars†—the first astronomy book my dad gave me, way back in 1955. The kid’s entir
e face consisted of eyes and a smile.
I never had kids myself, so today I got a brief glimpse into what I missed out on. And this little girl will get a lot of glimpses into a brand new universe.
Fair trade.
MJ “Morg” Staley
Dear Morg,
There’s nothing like the right telescope in the right hands of the right person at the right time for the right price.
Neil
Happy 30th Anniversary
16 August 1982
Calligraphy on Parchment
Dear Dad & Mom,
This month I am to receive my master’s degree in Astronomy;
A major achievement of my life which cannot pass
Without the due acknowledgment of two of the most
Warm, caring, and rational people I know.
Central elements of my personality, character, wisdom and perspective
Are traceable to each of you.
Throughout my twenty-three year quest for the cosmos
You have never failed to keep my feet on the earth;
To promote my awareness of the aged,
The crippled, the blind, and the other
Inequalities of life and of society.
All the while, your unfatiguing tolerance
Of my interests has found you
Driving many miles for “that particular lens”
Or assisting the transport of my telescopes
In and out of cars, to and from the fields and up and down stairs.
My life has taken me many places;
From twenty-two stories over the Bronx to a snow- carved circle on Peacock Farm,‡
From the plains of Mojave Desert§ to the summit of Mount Locke,¶
From the Bronx High School of Science to the Harvard College Observatory,
And from Bell Telephone Laboratories# to the University of Texas at Austin.
Let there be no doubt that I continually felt your guidance ahead of me, your support behind me, and your love beside me.
For the next thirty years** may you share each other
The way you have shared yourselves with me.
Happy Anniversary.
—Neil—
* Name changed.
† H. A. Rey, The Stars: A New Way to See Them (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
‡ For one academic year, while I was in seventh grade, my family lived not in a New York City apartment but in a private sublet home in Lexington, Massachusetts, while my father was a one-year fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. We lived on Peacock Farm Road. On one occasion, after a heavy winter storm, I shoveled a backyard path to create a cul-de-sac in the snow large enough to use my first telescope.
§ During the summer between my eighth and ninth grades, I attended an astronomy camp for geeky middle and high schoolers, located in the Mojave Desert, southern California, where we lived nocturnally as we observed the clear night skies from a battery of telescopes on location.
¶ The University of Texas at Austin owns and operates the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, which sits atop Mount Locke. I penned this tribute in graduate school, while observing there during the summer of 1982.
# During the summer between my junior and senior years in college, I was a research intern in the Material Science division at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey.
** My parents would remain married another thirty-four years, before my father’s death at age eighty-eight.
Chapter 12
Rebuttals
Every now and then, you just have to fight back.
Making the Grade
My daughter attended and graduated from my high school alma mater. While a junior there, beginning in the fall of 2012, she wanted to take AP calculus, but had not yet taken a formal class in pre-calculus, considered by the Math Department to be a strict pre-requisite. The principal’s letter to me was a strongly worded defense of the school’s educational mission complete with placement exams, assuring that students never step anywhere academically over their heads, leading to high grades for college admissions.
Who in their right mind would argue with those goals? I did.
To: Principal of the Bronx High School of Science
Thanks for your note, which includes the statement:
“It is our job to help protect your daughter’s GPA”
That’s noble. But my life experience tells me it’s not the noblest goal out there. As a scientist, an educator, and as a parent, I offer a countervailing quote:
“It’s my job to protect her interest in learning”
A true love of learning never ends. Meanwhile, a GPA ends after college and couldn’t be more irrelevant to the rest of one’s life.
My daughter enjoys math, and wants to take Calculus now, bypassing a year of pre-calculus. She has studied pre-calculus on her own over the summer in anticipation of this. Yet you have a system in place that efficiently prevents this step.
I don’t know when it became common for a school to stridently prevent a student from skipping to an advanced class. Especially in an era where promoting interest in STEM fields for girls is a national priority. Most students in most schools take the easiest classes they can find—driven, of course, by the urge to protect their GPA. I’m compelled to note that my mediocre high school GPA prompted no comment from any teacher about whether I would “go far.” Yet I had a love of learning that apparently had value to me and to the college of my choice, if not to my high school teachers.
None of us knows for sure how she will do on your pre-calculus placement exam. But dare I recommend that the test score be used as guide, in anticipation of her forthcoming workload in calculus, rather than as a fence, to be kept closed for scores below what you have judged to be acceptable.
If you are worried about my daughter’s GPA, don’t be. If you are worried about what college she will choose, or what college will choose her, don’t be. Worry about what kind of adult she will become. Because what we worry about is whether her High School nurtures a learning environment, without rules designed to impede urges to “go far.”
If my daughter does not score well on the placement exam your role should not be to prevent her from advancing but, perhaps, to strongly advise against it. If she wants to proceed in spite of the caution, then your role should be to support the ambition. But even if you can’t, or if it’s against your pedagogical philosophy, it’s not every child who has two parents fluent in calculus,* so her progress in this regard should be the least of your worries as Principal.
Sincerely,
Neil
Postscript: My daughter took a pre-calculus placement exam, offered by the school as a compromise. We do not know how well or poorly she did on it, but they allowed her to take calculus that year, formally skipping pre-calculus. She would score a 5 (the highest grade) on the year-end AP exam.
B.o.B. and the Flat Earth
The popular hip-hop artist B.o.B. (“bee oh bee”) is vocal about his flat-Earth beliefs. Early in 2016 he took to social media with his ideas. Normally I would ignore such a foray, but he got my attention when he claimed that the laws of math and physics show that Earth is flat. In the geekiverse, those are fighting words.
Friday, January 27, 2016
Video Letter to the Rapper B.o.B.
Delivered on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore,
Comedy Central
Listen, B.o.B., once and for all, Earth looks flat because, (1) you’re not far enough away at your size, and (2) your size isn’t large enough relative to Earth to notice any curvature at all. It’s a fundamental fact of calculus and non-Euclidean geometry that small sections of large curved surfaces will always look flat to little creatures that crawl upon it.
But this whole thing is just the symptom of a larger problem. There is a growing anti-intellectual strain in this country that may be the beginning of the end of our informed democracy. Of course, in a free society you can and should think whatever you want. And if you wa
nt to think the world is flat go right ahead. But if you think the world is flat and you have influence over others, then being wrong becomes being harmful to the health, the wealth, and the security of our citizenry.
Discovery and exploration got us out of the caves and each generation benefits from what previous generations have learned. Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen farther than others it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” So that’s right, B.o.B., when you stand on the shoulders of those who came before, you might just see far enough to realize the earth isn’t f%@#king flat.
And by the way, this is called gravity. . . .
<< Mic Drop >>
A Horse’s Astrophysicist
Unprompted by any major incident, a conservative radio show host and journalist-blogger for a local paper serving Idaho Falls posted an article in August 2016, playfully critical of all I do, with the title “Neil deGrasse Tyson Is a Horse’s Astrophysicist.” It was filled with political jabs common when people from opposite sides of the political spectrum meet in the boxing ring of social media. His tract labeled me a liberal atheist, and questioned my academic standing as well as my statements on climate change. He also criticized a tweet of mine that referenced the national medal count for the ongoing Olympics, in which I declared that, per capita, some smaller countries were kicking our ass. He viewed this and many other liberal tendencies as anti-American. His name is Neal Larson, and I was the first reply in the comment section.
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Comment Thread
Hello Neal,
First, I’ll forgive you for not spelling your name correctly.
Second, and more importantly, I don’t mind being labeled a horse’s astrophysicist (I see what you did there), provided it’s based on factual information. So what we must do is subtract the false information from your article, and then re-assess what name you choose to call me. If it still justifies “horse’s astrophysicist,” then so be it.
Letters from an Astrophysicist Page 15
