Neil deGrasse Tyson - Greatest Sermon Ever

2006 Neil deGrasse Tyson closes the three day lecture series with an excellent final "sermon" on cosmic perspective and the impact of science. Notice Dawkins in the audience.

Now I said I'd only be ten minutes

I'm sorry, I'm taking it a little longer

but I've got to get this off my chest

So

so now I’m becoming a scientist

I'm in college majoring in physics

I go to graduate school

get the Ph.D in astrophysics

It's my life love

I've known this since I was a kid

I didn't accidentally land at the Bronx High School of Science

I knew

But I wanted to become an astrophysicist not because I chose it

in a way the universe chose me

that first day in the Hayden Planetarium at age nine as a kid

and I looked up and the lights dimmed and the stars came out

and...

I was called by the universe

I had no choice in the matter

I became a student of the universe

with the ambition of, one day, being one of its participants

in research on the frontier of cosmic discovery

and that ambition

that inculcation

stayed with me the whole time

to the point where when you become an astrophysicist

when you become a scientist at all

here is what I´m putting back to you

because what we used to do, and I regret it a little bit

is you would go on pilgrimages to mountains tops

because that's where your telescopes are

And where is the mountain? The mountain is far away from any city

because cities have lights and pollution and other things that interfere with your views

So by construct the best telescopic observing sites are far removed from civilization

which means it takes at least four modes of transportation to get there

The plane, the train, the bus, the all terrain vehicle

Then you get to the mountain top

And what do you have to do next? You have to then start going nocturnal

The day is now your night, and the night is your day

And so, that's part of the pilgrimage

There is the effort of the travel

and then there's the effort of flipping your schedule and going nocturnal

Then, there's the telescope itself

This conduit to the cosmos

It's a phisycal... it's a tube, it's a conduit

And I sit there, and I reflect on it

my specialty was the center of the Milky Way galaxy

30,000 light years away

And so I had my digital detectors, I've got the telescope, it's dark,

it's just me on this mountain and the Universe

And I look up, and I just think to myself: there are photons

that've been travelling for 30,000 years

and I'm sort of snatching them from this journey

and planting them into my digital detector

And then I started feeling bad for the photon

and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way

But then I said, no

those are probably happier photons than the one that slammed into the mountainside

that will go unanalyzed

and will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe

But so, so there's not only the fact that I'm on the mountain top

there's the knowledge, and the feeling

that I'm reaching out to the universe

with these methods and tools of science

And then, add to that

the sum of twentieth century knowledge about the origin of the chemical elements

something the chemists would not be able to answer without the help of the astrophysicists

You can't go to the chemist in your high school chemistry class and say:

"Where did these elements come from?"

The teacher wouldn't know from within the domain of chemistry

That was informed by astrophysics

We can trace the elements

They were forged in the centers of stars

high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives

they exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy

sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life

And so, these ideas, these cosmic perspectives

this pilgrimage to the cosmos

the people who say:

"This makes me feel small, because I need to see the immensity of the cosmos"

And I say: "No, you're not thinking about it the right way"

By the way, when we opened our facility

I got a letter from a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania

He'd seen our show, which is a zoom out from Earth

and Earth just shrinks to nothingness, and you go to the edge of the universe

And he wrote me a letter and says: "I specialize in the psychological effects of..."

Oh how did he word it? Excuse me, he said...

"Hello Dr. Tyson, I'm, you know, Johnny Joe, I'm a psychologist

specializing in the effects of things that make people feel insignificant"

I thought: "Proper of a job! Man, is that what you do for a living?"

And he said, he said:

"Needless to say, your show

was the greatest elicitor of feelings of smallnes I have ever seen

Would you allow me to conduct a survey on the people who visit your show?"

And I thought to myself:

"There's something wrong here, cause why does he feel small

but when I look up in the Universe I feel large?"

Then I realized, the problem was his ego was too large to begin with

He came to the problem

thinking too highly of who and what he was to begin with

Because then everything that happened in the show destabilized his self-image

whereas I know that the molecules in my body are traceable

to phenomena in the cosmos

And that... and it's our 15 pounds of grey matter that figured this out

There's a kinship with the cosmos, that resonates deeply with new age thinking

but I´m not apologetic about that: it's what we find

If whatever we find resonates with whoever, go ahead, take it!

But what I wanna know is, I want you...

We are in one of the greatest centers of neurophysiology

I want somebody to put electrodes on my head

and when I reflect on our kinship with the cosmos

when I do the calculation that shows

that a 15 ton meteorite that we have at the center of the Rose Center for Earth and Space

it's an iron meteorite

when I do the calculation that shows

that if you take all of the iron from the hemoglobin

of the people of the tri-state area of New York City

you can recover that much iron out of their blood

and realize that the iron from that meteorite and the iron from your blood

has common origin in the core of a star

Tell me what part of my brain is lighting up

because that excites me!

That makes me want to grab people in the street

and say: "Have you heard this???"

That is not simply...

as Carl Sagan said, you know, "We are star stuff"

but there's a more poetic and I think more accurate way to say it

It's quite literally true that we are star dust

in the highest exalted way one can use that phrase

And so I feel, and I use words

I bask in the majesty of the cosmos

I use words, compose sentences

that sound like the sentences I hear outta people who had revelations of Jesus

who go on their pilgrimages to Mecca

There's some commonality of feeling. I know it!

Well, I don't know it, I want someone to do that experiment

Because the day you do

if the same centers in my brain are excited

by these cosmic thoughts as are what are going on in the mind of a religious person

that's something to know!

That's gonna be really interesting finding

Because what that tells me, as an educator, is:

"Let me offer the universe to people!"

And they'll start taking it in

and they'll start achieving those feelings that they had before

And I don't so much care whether they abandon previous feelings

I've got an offering that keeps growing, that keeps becoming more majestic

When it was announced that we were gonna cancel the Hubble telescope

the greatest outcry to not do that was not the astrophysicists

it wasn't from within NASA, it was the public!

It was all over the op-ed pages and the talk shows

The public took ownership of the Hubble space telescope

because the universe is coming into their bedroom, into the living room, onto their computer

They were participant on the frontier of discovery

And as far as I can tell

if you let them know

that it's not simply that we're in the universe

but, in fact, given the chemistry of it all

and the nuclear physics of it all

not only are we in the universe, the universe is in us

And I don't know any deeper spiritual feeling than what that brings upon me

I just wanted to leave you with those thoughts. Thank you

(Subs by Paolo Bettera)