Life’s Work: An Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson decided he wanted to become an astrophysicist at age nine, after his first visit to New York City’s Hayden Planetarium. Less than 30 years later, he was appointed its director. The Columbia University PhD has since parlayed his passion for science into a media career spanning radio, television, and Twitter. Download this podcast HBR: You’ve described yourself as a servant to the public’s appetite for science. But that’s meant moving away from a dedicated academic career as well as one in industry. Why did you choose the role you did? Tyson: When a professor goes to a university to do research and also teaches a class, you don’t say it’s moving away from research. It’s blending together these two noble activities: teaching the next generation of students and trying to advance on the research frontier. In my case, it’s not a formal classroom, but the informal classroom of pop culture. Research became just one dimension of what I do. I’m still a member of the astrophysics department at the American Museum of Natural History. How do you balance your TV work with your day job, your academic work, and your family life? Balance might be overrated. If your life is perfectly balanced—everything going smoothly—is it as dynamic as it could be? When life is out of balance, usually something is changing, and that’s not always a bad thing. It gives you a new perspective. New projects always send things out of balance. I embrace disruptions to circumstances I’ve grown complacent about. Practically, though, how do you manage your time? It’s a bit of the squeaky wheel philosophy. Some e-mails don’t get tended to for weeks. I also use all the interstitial time available. While I’m waiting for the subway, I’m doing e-mail. With a little more time, I’m composing book chapters or op-eds. How much of your life can you recover by using those slots? When you stitch them together, it’s a lot. At the planetarium and on your show StarTalk, how do you lead? I don’t think you can ask a manager that. You have to ask the people who report to me. After we hang up, you call my assistant. But I think I’m a good listener. I like it when people tell me I’ve done something wrong. I’ve seen people with underlings who are always telling them they’re great and I’m thinking, “If you’re actually that great, what do you need people telling it to you for? And if you’re not, then you’re missing possible adjustments that can improve your ability to manage, make decisions, or solve problems.” As an academic, I like dissenting ideas, because out of them comes a deeper understanding of how things are or should be. I also try to set a good example: You want your boss to be a person who you know works harder than you. And as an educator, if somebody makes a mistake, my attitude is, “Let’s help you work harder so that you don’t do that tomorrow.” People have said that your strength is the ability to explain complex concepts in terms that laypeople can understand. How did you develop that skill? I don’t agree that’s what I do. I’ll tell you what I think I do: Last Sunday, I channel surfed and landed on a football game. It was in overtime, so I watched it—the Cincinnati Bengals playing the Seattle Seahawks—and the game was won by a 42-yard field goal. The ball tumbled through the air, hit the left upright, and went in between the posts. I quickly did a calculation and saw that a football kicked from that distance deflects a third of an inch to the right during its flight, because of Earth’s rotation. So I tweeted that to the Bengals: “Your field goal was surely enabled by the rotating Earth.” It got picked up by all the sports outlets and became a thing. Now, I didn’t translate physics. All I did was plug astrophysics into the landscape of pop culture. Then I stepped back, and the rest took care of itself. And the benefit is that people start talking about science? Yes, because they care about football. I’ve cross-pollinated. I think people feel empowered when they learn a little more about how the world works. You have more than 4 million Twitter followers. Why does that medium appeal, and what makes you so successful at it? I got an account, like other early adopters, back in ’09. I started tweeting what everybody else was: “Crossing the street now.” “A little bit cold today.” Why am I doing this? I’m wasting my time. Then I had an epiphany. I was in the Las Vegas airport a couple of months after I published The Pluto Files, and I did the vain thing that authors typically do: go to the bookstore to see if your book is on display. I said, “Excuse me, ma’am, where’s the science section?” She said, “Oh, we don’t have a science section.” I thought, “Of course—you wouldn’t want any rational thinking going on before you gamble.” And I said to myself, “That’s a tweet.” From then on, I’ve been tweeting random thoughts that come to me because of the lens I carry as a scientist and an educator. You are seeing how I think about the world (I call it my brain droppings), and, if you don’t hang around other scientists, that might be intriguing—to be a little closer to the operations of nature and the universe. People tried to dissuade you from a career in science. What made you persevere? When I first saw the universe on the Hayden Planetarium dome, I was struck by it. Starstruck. I think the universe chose me, because from that moment on, I wanted to commit my life to learning about it. You have no idea how deep my fuel tank was to resist a force in my way. This awesome view of the moon? Just added a gallon of fuel. Looking at Saturn for the first time, buying my first telescope—more fuel. So I could survive affronts to my ambitions. I’ve often reflected on the brilliant minds that didn’t make it because their fuel tanks didn’t go as deep as mine: underrepresented minorities, or women. Trying to enter a profession with some residual attitudes about who should or shouldn’t be in it—you need a lot of energy to get through that. Is the field changing for the better in that regard? Yes, it is. Look at the case of Geoff Marcy, who resigned from Berkeley after being found in violation of its sexual harassment policies. Those transgressions used to happen all the time, but no one wrote about them. The fact that this made news tells me that things are better than they once were. There’s a parallel story with regard to police shootings of unarmed people. At one time those incidents did not go beyond the local news report. Now they are national news. That doesn’t mean we don’t still have problems, but it’s better. You talk a lot about the importance of curiosity. What’s the best way to promote it, especially in adults who may have lost some of the innate curiosity they had as children? I think that if people learn something that empowers their decision making or their outlook on life, you can reignite the flames of curiosity. I try to do that in my Twitter stream. No one wants to be lectured to. Nobody wants to hear you dumb something down. So I toss out little biscuits of knowledge or wisdom or perspective. Just yesterday I tweeted, “The irresistible force beats the immovable object every time.” People asked why. The follow-up was, “Because a strong enough force will simply obliterate the immovable object, and you will no longer care about whether or not it moves.” That common philosophical conundrum has a physics answer. Another one is, “Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” The answer is based in biology: The egg came first, but it was laid by a bird that was not a chicken. I try to make sure that the best of my tweets have you thinking in a new way. How can schools and workplaces emphasize curiosity? There should be a class where you learn how and why science works and what the methods and tools of science do. In many people’s understanding, science is just this body of knowledge. But really it’s a way of querying nature. If you understand that, then as you look around, the world becomes your laboratory, your experimental playground—which preserves your curiosity. Are today’s top scientists and companies focusing on the right things? History shows that if you let people go where their curiosity takes them, great things unfold. You might say, “All right, I want all the scientists to put their heads together and solve cancer.” But maybe the cure for cancer comes from a machine invented by a physicist who has no interest in medicine. Or take the discovery of quantum physics, in the 1920s. If you were around then, you would have said, “Why are you studying atoms? You can’t even see an atom.” But 40 or 50 years later, quantum physics became the foundation of the IT revolution, which by some estimates is responsible for a third of the world’s GDP. I will not tell someone what research to do. You’ve got to fund all the frontiers and then cross-pollinate them. How do you make sure that research on all the frontiers is funded? The economic return on pure science research can take years, possibly decades—maybe even half a century. The government has to do it, because it does not fit the paradigm of our corporate structures—the quarterly report, the annual report. But I don’t argue with policymakers. I talk to the people who elect the policymakers. What do you tell us to tell them? I don’t tell you anything so that you can tell them. I tell you so that you don’t even have to tell them, because you’ll elect people who know the difference in the first place. That’s really how society should function. Yes, it’s hard to persuade someone to put money away for 10 or 50 years. But if you give these examples, I think people will catch on and value that some percentage of their tax dollars would go toward the R&D of the United States. We all—Republicans and Democrats—understand the R&D of corporations. That is your seed corn. You have to always be innovating. Otherwise you’ll die on the vine.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

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