Neil deGrasse Tyson

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"I pity the fool who still refers to Pluto as the ninth planet."

Neil deGrasse Tyson (born 1958) is an astrophysicist and a public intellectual. Tyson is one of the most prominent advocates of science and science education in the United States today.

Tyson survived public schools before going on to earn a BA in physics from Harvard and a PhD in astrophysics from Columbia.[1]

Tyson was instrumental in downgrading Pluto to dwarf planet status.

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[edit] On television

In 2014, Tyson hosted a sequel to Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, titled Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.[2]

He has also hosted the show NOVA ScienceNOW on PBS, which discusses recent topics in science.[3]

He has also made frequent appearances as a guest on popular television shows, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Real Time with Bill Maher.

[edit] Religion

Despite frequent claims that he is an atheist,[4] Tyson professes to being an agnostic (particularly disliking the "in your face" attitude of New Atheism), stating: "The only 'ist' I am is a scientist."[5] Blasphemy!

However, he still professes methodological materialism as necessary to scientific advancement:

The day you stop looking because you’re content God did it, I don’t need you in the lab. You’re useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.
—Responding to a rather famous mouthspewing from Bill O'Reilly.[6]

[edit] Watch out, we got a badass over here!

Tyson is well-loved by the Internet, and is the driving force behind a popular meme sarcastically calling out Internet tough guys.[7] This was his reaction.

He is also all over the utubez. We will leave it up to you to copy and paste his name there.

Tyson also qualifies for this himself, as he was an accomplished Greco-Roman wrestler. He went undefeated in high school and served as the captain of the Harvard wrestling team.[8]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

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