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.
The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.
I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'
I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.
In my relativity theory I set up a clock at every point in space, but in reality I find it difficult to provide even one clock in my room.
All the scientists who are working on solving the problem of curing paralysis say that it won't do you any good if you don't keep your body in shape.
There we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.
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