Archive for February 15th, 2007

Science geeks of the world rejoice! We have a new, sexy leader to rally behind. He has the jivin’ -jiggly hips of James Brown, the pimped out pompadour of Prince and a trimmed up 80’s Daddy-O mustache not unlike a Nubian Cap’n Crunch.

His name is Neil DeGrasse Tyson and he’s the closest thing to a rock star astrophysicist the world has seen since Sir Iaasic Newton. Tyson is the director of the Rose Science Center (formerly the Hayden Planetarium, the old home of Laser Floyd).

He is a lively, wonderfully laid back, genuinely likeable genius. In the words of Ben Oppenheimer, the man who introduced him at a lecture the other night, Tyson is, “dynamic, but kind of a slacker”.

He was at the Museum of Natural History speaking about his new book “Death by Black Hole”. The book is a series of essays he wrote dating back to 1995 when he was a columnist for Natural History Magazine. Here’s what he had to say about the experience:

“Writing an essay every month is like giving birth. I can see the women in the audience are giving me a dirty look, but still…it was like my flesh was being hewn from my body each month. But it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.”

For over an hour Tyson wrapped us all around his pinky finger spinning anecdotes, history, astrophysics and cocktail party stories into a monologue worthy of Johnny Carson or P.T. Barnum. At one point he was explaining how as humans our five senses are completely inadequate for truly “making sense” of the universe around us, when out of nowhere he interrupted himself…

“Oh, if we have time later, remind me to tell you of the asteroid coming our way that will make the western part of the U.S. unlivable. But only if we have time.”

Spoiler alert: He never got around to it again, so I guess we’re pretty much fucked.

The man has done his math and is smart enough to know he knows nothing! He offers no answers but points out that the human condition brings with it constant discovery and accumulated knowledge over the generations and that there is salvation in knowing what we don’t know. “We are participants in the cosmos, vulnerable,” to its whims.

He implored us all to lose our intellectual egos. “We are not the top of anything!” Quite the opposite, we are merely a step in the evolutionary process of the cosmos. Consider this: The most common elements in the universe: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, are also the most common elements in the human body. With Yoda like wiseness he summed it up: “Not only are we in the universe, the universe is in us.”

Lessons Learned:

• Genetically speaking chimpanzees are 99.99% identical to you
• Spacettification: verb- meaning- to die while going through a black hole
• Words O Wisdom: “Black holes, we really want to avoid them”
• Buy “Death by Black Hole”- it’s the best book by an astrophysicist with a Cap’n Crunch mustache that you will ever read!