Neil deGrasse Tyson:
The rock star of astrophysics speaks his mind in a new book.
There probably aren’t many astrophysicists who have to put on sunglasses when they walk down the street to keep from being mobbed by admirers. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of them. A bear of a man with an authoritative baritone and an irrepressible, thunderous laugh, Tyson has done more to popularize his field than perhaps any of his colleagues. He sprinkles his explanations of complex concepts with pop culture references, and forever looks for ways to keep the tone light.
Tyson’s desire to share his knowledge is seemingly unquenchable. A perennial guest on late-night shows, among many outlets, Tyson directs the Hayden Planetarium in his native New York City. He has hosted the mind-expanding TV series “Cosmos,” a reboot of the original show presented by his mentor, Carl Sagan, and currently hosts “StarTalk,” a podcast that mixes cosmology and comedy. Of late, he has been unafraid to use his pull — he has more than 7 million followers on Twitter — to poke fun at the president, offering a series of “StarTalk” shows titled “Make America Smart Again.” One episode addressed how immigrants in this
country have enriched the sciences.
On a recent visit to San Francisco, Tyson spoke to The Chronicle about his latest book, the concise and profound “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry” (W.W. Norton; $18.95) — and how he avoided getting wedgies as a youngster. His answers have been edited for length. Q: This book is a bit like the universe you describe in its early pages. It’s compact, and it’s got a lot of mass to it. There’s a lot of knowledge in here. A: People had joked, “Oh, was the title ‘Astrophysics for Dummies’ already taken?” And, yes, it was taken. (Laughs.) But this is not “Astrophysics for Dummies” — it’s “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.” So, I don’t pull any punches, it’s all there. It’s real astrophysics, but it’s a curated offering. So I comb the universe and handpick those things that I think are the most striking, most mind-blowing, most intriguing, most mysterious, and then I establish a story arc for it. Q: Humans have long talked about Martians. But Martians might actually be us. There’s this term, can you enlighten us about it? It’s called panspermia. A: Panspermia is the idea that life would form in one place across space, could be another planet, and then by some mechanism or another, transfer from that place where it formed to another place. If Mars had liquid water and had the right temperatures for life and conditions, it is possible that life could have started on Mars before it would have ever possibly happened on Earth.
Now add to that that in the early solar system, there’s major impacts happening because the planets are still vacuuming up debris left over from the formation of the solar system. We know these bombardments were common back then. You can study what it does to the surrounding terrain, and it can create such a force — such a distribution of energy on that impact site — that it can fling surrounding rocks with high enough speed to escape forever from Mars.
If Mars is teeming with life and there’s water everywhere, then it’s not unrealistic to think you could have microbes everywhere, as there are on Earth. If there are microbes everywhere, and you have a rock that was steeped in microbes, you’d have stowaway bacteria in the nooks and crannies of the rocks. And so here they are now traveling through space.
If any one of them had any resistive power to long stretches of time away from water, to being basically freeze-dried because of the temperatures that are out there and then landing on Earth, which later has water, which then reconstitutes this life that happened to survive, then life on Earth would have begun on Mars. Now, you can ask, are we all descendants of these stowaway bacteria? Q: You say that if there are other life forces out there, the first people to hear about this would be the Chinese. Can you explain? A: The Chinese — six, eight months ago — just came online with a huge radio telescope that dwarfs our biggest telescope. So if aliens are trying to talk to us through radio signals, and it’s really weak in the radio noise of space, the Chinese telescope will be the first to retrieve those signals, and so they’ll have the first conversation with the aliens. Q: About Mount Everest, how can there essentially be no mountain on Earth taller than it? A: It turns out that rock has only a certain capacity to hold weight above it before it crumbles or before it changes its structural integrity. And it turns out Mount Everest is about as high a mountain as you’re going to get, given the amount of gravity that Earth has, and what gravity does for large objects is turns things into near-perfect spheres. Earth is a really good example of a perfect sphere. If you were a cosmic giant and you came upon the Earth, and you take your finger and rub your finger across it, it would feel as smooth as a cue ball. Q: So, not quite as globes depict it. A: Oh, they’re lying. (Laughs.) I would hope the globe says “grossly exaggerated.” Q: You’ve turned a little political — how challenging a decision was that? A: Well, I speak facts. Let’s go back to Harry Truman. This could be apocryphal, I don’t know, but they said, “President Truman, why are you always giving people hell?” And he says, “No, I tell them the truth, and they think it’s hell.” So I’m giving you truthful information, and some people will receive it as political. But political would be, “I think we should fund this program three times as much as that other program because it’s more consistent with my conservative values or my liberal sensibilities.” Q: We’re in a moment in this country where there’s a great love of science. It’s cool to be a geek, right? A: Geek chic, I think. You know what it is? I think it’s geeks found one another via the Internet, and I think we’ve always been there, sort of lurking. But there was a day when we’d get sort of slammed into the lockers by the football quarterback and kind of socially abused. I think all that changed beginning in the 1980s after the personal computer became a common thing. We reached a point where, in a previous era, you would have given me a wedgie, except now you need me to fix your computer.
And so this changed the power dynamic between the beautiful people who were, you know, homecoming king and queen, and the nerd set. And from that point onward there was a wealth redistribution to the point where now the patron saint of nerds is the richest person in the world, in the guise of Bill Gates. And you look at all the tech companies — that’s the geek culture that gave you your smartphone, that gave you Facebook, that gave you Twitter, that gave you all these things that are now shaping the dialogue of how information is handled and distributed in our country.
Now, I was slightly different because I was a captain of my high school’s wrestling team, so
no one was giving me a wedgie.
“I’m giving you truthful information, and some people will receive it as political.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson