The day that 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.
Interpretation
Complacency hinders progress and understanding; one must remain curious and engaged.
In this quote, Neil DeGrasse Tyson emphasizes the importance of curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. He suggests that once a person becomes complacent and ceases to question or seek understanding, they no longer contribute meaningfully to scientific exploration and discovery. Curiosity fuels learning and innovation, while contentment with the status quo can lead to stagnation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation about scientific research to inspire students.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
As you kind of get over the anxiety about [science and evolution], it actually adds to your sense of awe about this amazing universe that we live in, it doesn't subtract from it at all.
Among other things, neuroplasticity means that emotions such as happiness and compassion can be cultivated in much the same way that a person can learn through repetition to play golf and basketball or master a musical instrument, and that such practice changes the activity and physical aspects of specific brain areas.
Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
There's already a lot of active research going on using the Crispr technology to fix diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease. They're all diseases that have known genetic causes, and we now have the technology that can repair those mutations to provide, we hope, patients with a normal life.
From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work - not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.
I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.