Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

As an astrophysicist, my research work involves mapping dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for about a quarter of our universe.

It is an embarrassment that the dominant forms of matter in the universe remain hypothetical.

All the stuff we've ever seen in the laboratory, all the kinds of particles and matter and energy, that only makes up 5 percent of our universe.

The idea of combining the physics of modern particle theory with cosmology was very young when I started working on cosmology.

Every field of astrophysics - whether it's our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.

The realization that baryonic matter is only a trace component of the universe revealed our understanding of the cosmos as shockingly incomplete and was one of the milestones that ushered in the era of modern cosmology.

We became astronomers thinking we were studying the universe, and now we learn that we are just studying the 5 or 10 percent that is luminous.

With the search for the Higgs, we're involved with 5% of the visual universe, and now we have 95% of the invisible universe that's coming into view. That's amazing.

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

I've known from long ago that the universe was calling me. If you were one of those annoying adults that said, 'Oh, what are you gonna be when you grow up?' I would say, 'Astrophysicist.' And then they'd walk away real quickly.

From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.

We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive.

Most gravity has no known origin. Is it some exotic particle? Nobody knows. Is dark energy responsible for expansion of the universe? Nobody knows.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And with every step, every window that modern astrophysics has opened to our mind, the person who wants to feel like they're the center of everything ends up shrinking.

The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.

The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great 'open frontiers.' These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth - where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe 'here be dragons.'

One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity.

General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures.

Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations.

The universe at large is full of questions that we still don't know anything about, and there will be always young people, brilliant, who are going to make new discoveries.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

What really made me think about space and begin to think about ways to use it was Einstein's statement that there are no fixed points in space. Everything in the universe is moving all the time.

Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.

My passion is to understand the non-linear dynamics of warped space-time, and the ideal venue for this is black-hole collisions.

The natural phenomenon of the universe is so mind-blowing, but you have to know about it. You have to be curious. You've got to find it on your own. If you're lucky, you do.