Biografía

At his high school's 20-year reunion in 1996, Tyson was voted the graduate with the "coolest job."

First African American director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, in New York City. Tyson is also a researcher, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University, and a general-interest science columnist. Author of books for nonspecialists on space and the universe (listed under Other Works).

Received his Bachelor's degree from Harvard, his Master's from the University of Texas, and his PhD from Columbia University.

Has two children: Travis Tyson, and Miranda Tyson.

All-time favorite Broadway musical is Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice's "Jesus Christ Superstar".

The more your ideas are untestable, either in principle or in practice, the less useful they are to the advance of science.

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That's kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination.

Science is something to be proud of, it allows us to understand the world in spite of ourselves.