Q&A with Neil deGrasse Tyson

The communication of science is now arguably more important than ever, gaining a resurgence in appreciation since the beginning of the pandemic, and recently bolstered by the success in raising awareness around the COP26 climate change conference in November. Although, over the years, many scientists have not considered the public dissemination of their research to be a crucial aspect of their work, a small few have pioneered the field of communications, and led by example. Carl Sagan, who back in the ‘70s and ‘80s pioneered television programmes about space and astrophysics, was one. Neil deGrasse Tyson, well-known television series narrator and YouTube commentator (his interview on the Joe Rogan experience now has sixteen million views) is another – a modern star of science who has followed in the footsteps of Sagan.

Tyson, currently the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, has previously been awarded the 2004 NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal and the 2015 Public Welfare Medal, issued by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, for his “extraordinary role in exciting the public about the wonders of science”.

Our regular contributor, Conor Purcell, had the opportunity to interview Tyson for this edition of SCENARIO. Speaking by video call from Purcell’s home in County Donegal, Ireland, to Tyson’s in New York City, they discussed topics around the latter’s life in science, his new book ‘A Brief Welcome to the Universe’, the importance of science communications, and why he remains sceptical about UFOs.

Q. Why did you co-write this new book, and why now?

This book is basically a brief, condensed version of a much larger volume called ‘Welcome to the Universe’. That volume is essentially a textbook created for teaching purposes, but it reads differently to a textbook. Myself and my two co-authors, Michael Strauss and Richard Gott, previously co-taught a class – an introductory astrophysics class – at Princeton University. This is going back to the 1990s. The reason why we co-taught it is that no single one of us wanted to teach the entire class alone, as we had very busy semesters, you know, with research commitments. So we banded together and asked ourselves, what do we need to do that will lighten the load on each of us? So we decided to write a textbook.

We were teaching what we thought was cool, interesting stuff about the universe, and that motivated the content and the syllabus. That’s why the textbook doesn’t read like a textbook. The book reads like, well, “Here is a bunch of guys having fun and enjoying their science”. A lot of the content for the book was derived from transcripts of videos taken in class. The whole course was videoed and transcribed. Then the book was predominantly recreated from those transcripts, and is therefore very conversational. But later on we realized that not everyone is going to pick up a five-hundred-page book, or however many pages it was. So, more recently, the publisher, Princeton University Press, asked us if we would be interested in making a shorter version of it. And we said, “Yes, sure”. So we created this pocket-sized version which can now be enjoyed by everyone.

Q. What got you personally so interested in science early on in your life?

That’s a great question. I think there are certain branches of science that have an accessibility from childhood. If you ask people in those sciences when did they begin, typically they’ll say when they were a kid. So it could be something like botany, for example. You know, if you’re really interested in flowers and plants, you can start that early. Even geology. We all knew rock collectors when we were kids.

For me, it was the universe. A lot of kids have access to the universe because almost every city in the world has a planetarium. Just think about that – with a visit to a planetarium, kids can get exposed not only to fascinating night-time sky phenomena, but if the demonstrators are good, they’ll take you to the frontier, to that boundary between what is known and unknown. Such an environment can stimulate your curiosity at any age, but especially as a child.

I think we all remember our first trip to a planetarium. It’s one of those indelible forces in our memories. It may have been a kind of collective first virtual reality experience, if you think about it that way. So, yeah, I’ve been interested in all things space since I first visited my local planetarium, which is the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where I was raised. By the time I was eleven, if you had asked me that annoying question that adults always ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, I had an answer, and it was that I wanted to be an astrophysicist. So that allowed me to align, or rather to shape, the decisions in my life to meet that curiosity.

Q. Was there a figure in your life who guided you – some kind of mentor?

We can’t overstate the importance of mentorship in this world, for anything. However, I take a slightly unorthodox view of mentorship. I think a person can lead by example. If you can pay attention to what people are doing, you can observe and replicate attributes you admire. You can look around and see if you like the way a person works or teaches. You can say to yourself that you like the way a person expresses their sense of humour, or if you like the expertise and the command that a person has. So what I did, personally, was I cobbled together bits and pieces of people into this sort of hybridized thing. So, in that way, it’s not that I wanted to be one person in particular. I wanted to take all these great attributes of others and create the person I wanted to be. I wanted to be myself.

Q. Why is science communication so important to you?

Scientists are generally not rewarded for bringing their work to the public. They’re just not. It’s not in the equation of what gives pay rises in science, or advances, or anything like that, or even getting hired. I’ve seen people give lip service to it, and they’ll say, oh yeah, we care about your teaching. But in the end, no, they don’t really, at least not here in the US. I know that to be the case and unfortunately I don’t think that I alone can change it.

So I can say that duty is a part of why I communicate science. If I can do it, and I can do it well, and people embrace it, then there’s a benefit to society by boosting the scientific literacy of the electorate, or just human beings who live on this planet Earth. So for me to not do it would be irresponsible. That’s how I think of it. Also, we cannot forget that the grants we get from the National Science Foundation and NASA, here in the US, are all generated by tax money. It’s the nation’s citizens who pay these taxes, so I believe it is our collective duty to at least let them know what the hell we’re doing.

Q. Why did you shift from science to become a science communicator?

Over time, I just became increasingly responsive to artists, writers, producers, designers, and novelists, in their quest to have real science in their work. It was a gradual process. They didn’t have to give me the call – they could have just invented the science, or made it up – so I was impressed because they cared. In each case, they actually care about the science being right. I deeply respect that, and so I practically drop everything in the service of those calls, and over time I really began to love how the science was reaching the public.
I have also found that the attention I give to being better every day at bringing science to the public has resulted in the public wanting even more. So it’s almost a runaway process. Okay, I say to myself, maybe what I did there really worked. So can I improve on that? Yeah! So I do, and then even more people show interest. So this leads to interviews on the evening news, on talk shows, and on documentaries.
There are people who have an enthusiasm for science, have formal training in science, and have devoted their adult lives to bringing it down to earth for the public. For me it’s likely the same as it has been for them. I bet they all feel a sense of duty. So I don’t claim this as a choice. It’s kind of descended on me, simply because I asked myself, can I do this better tomorrow than I did it today? So it really wasn’t a decision. It was this sense of duty.

Q. How do other scientists feel about communicating science?

I know that the great Carl Sagan, early on, when he began to publicize his work, and the work of his colleagues, received some pushback. In his day, no scientists went near television or anything like it, such as science comedy shows which came years later, and were somehow inspired by him.

But what happened was that, as time passed, it became more accepted, even important. I’ll give you an example. Here, in the United States, as a scientist in your district, or wherever in your state you happen to live, you might be hoping to get funding for a science project, a telescope or a probe, or whatever, and you would end up speaking to your member of congress. Then the congress member would say, “Wait a minute, are you doing the same thing that I saw Carl Sagan do on television? That’s cool. Let’s do it.” And what people found is that the tide waters rose for everyone, the more attention he got, because he was reaching everybody in ways that most scientists couldn’t.

So I think my field matured to that point earlier than other fields, because we had emblematic people such as Carl Sagan, and even Stephen Hawking, involved. Hawking became a household name, not because of his physics, but because he wrote a book on the universe.

Q. What about the rise of anti-science? You were embroiled in some debate around the Pentagon’s release of images of UFOs this past year.

People often misrepresent my position on this. I simply said – I tweeted – if you look at the Pentagon navy videos, which we’ve all seen by now, there are billions of high-resolution photos and videos uploaded to the internet every single day, most of which are of better quality. So, if your best image of an intelligent alien visiting from outer space is monochromatic, out of focus, and hazy, then we have more work to do. It’s that simple. If there are aliens here, I’m just surprised we don’t have better images than that. And just because you don’t know what you’re looking at, it doesn’t mean, therefore, that you know what you’re looking at! So, I try to reinforce in people what the U stands for in UFO. Think about that.

So people got angry with me, on social media. They were saying things like “You’re not a scientist if you’re not curious about this”. But I am curious. I am curious, but I remain completely unconvinced, precisely because I am a scientist. Just consider the number of smartphones that exist – it’s something like three or four billion smartphones in the world right now – and if you go back thirty or forty years, nobody carried cameras around with them, certainly not video cameras, so the number of reports of alien abductions was very high. Today, where are the abduction reports? Well, okay, maybe there are some, but nobody has any pictures or videos of their encounters, despite there being cameras everywhere. Plus, you could live-stream it these days. It just doesn’t add up at the moment.

Then there are the people who say we have already captured some of the aliens. They will have you believe that the government is keeping it a secret, of course. These are the conspiracy theorists who already know what they want to be true, what they want to believe. When there’s a gap in their supporting data, they have to say that the data is being withheld, and that allows them to continue to think what they want to be true, and on it goes.

Q. Do you think we should fund such investigations in the future?

Regarding UFOs? Yes, for sure, despite the doubts I’ve just outlined. I see it like this. I think some percentage of any research budget should go to investigating flying objects which cannot be identified. That should be an obvious part of the job for any defence system. Is it a threat? What is it? Should we worry? And then, if they do exist, and are extra-terrestrial, maybe one day we’ll capture one! That would be really cool. Then we could study it.

But even that aside, we’ve actually had active research programmes ongoing since the 1960s. We’ve been sending out signals, trying to receive signals from potentially intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. The SETI Institute is all about that, of course. Now, a new programme at Harvard, the Galileo Project, established by Avi Loeb, is trying to get people to be a little more open to the possibility that there could be alien artifacts floating around out there, throughout our solar system, and beyond. Of course, the UFO enthusiast community has always been interested in that, but what’s different here is that Professor Loeb carries the pedigree of a Harvard professor and is associating real analytical science with the endeavour. I wish the project the best of luck.

This Q&A was featured in the latest issue of SCENARIO Magazine.