Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Whatever people thought the first time they held a portable phone the size of a shoe in their hands, it was nothing like where we are now, accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips.

We thought our vision was right, which was that someday everyone would be walking around carrying phones with them.

No one with a living room radio that was a piece of furniture at the time would say, gee. I want to carry that around on my hip pocket. That was not a thought until NASA initiated this whole exercise. So there's an influence that's not just spinoff.

Miniaturization of electronics started by NASA's push became an entire consumer products industry. Now we're carrying the complete works of Beethoven on a lapel pin listening to it in headphones.

Among many other things, a smartphone functions as a handheld digital sensor for the physical world. In other words, we don't necessarily need our real world things to be directly connected, when the Web interface in our mobile devices provides the network access and intelligence.

What would happen if our clothes were Internet-enabled? Can you imagine if you lost a sock? You could send out a search, and sock No. 3117 would respond that it's under the couch in the living room.

The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.

In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War.

Future is mobile computing - smartphones and tablets are just elements of it. The industry is on the verge of a whole new paradigm.

I'm a computer guy, and one of the things I did with the good fortune that 'Presumed Innocent' brought me was to buy one of the very first laptop computers. It weighed about eight and a half pounds, by the way.

The Mac defined 'personal technology', and the iPhone defines 'intimate technology' as a convergence of communications, content and location.

Practically everyone is going to have a general purpose computer in their pocket, it's so easy to underestimate that, that has got to be the really, really big one.

Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.

The way I see it, what is going to come out of the moon activities is a respect for U.S. leadership.

Well into the 20th century, scholars viewed economic advances as resulting from commercial innovations enabled by the discoveries of scientists - discoveries that come from outside the economy and out of the blue.

I know about technology, about research, scientific applications, culture, civilization, differences between nations of the world, the nature of history.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

I think most people in the developed world would admit to carrying some sort of handheld device, whether it's a laptop or a cell phone, at all times.

On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier.

We carry around computers in our pockets. Many people barely use them as phones. We use them as computers. If you think about the future, when you're traveling around, it's great to have a lightweight, small form factor.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

I don't think the space station is innovative. Going to the moon was innovative because we had no idea how to do it.

In 20 or 30 years, you'll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches