86. Neil deGrasse Tyson — Letters from an Astrophysicist

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2019

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has attracted one of the world’s largest online followings with his fascinating, widely accessible insights into science and our universe. Now, Tyson invites us to go behind the scenes of his public fame by revealing his correspondence with people across the globe who have sought him out in search of answers. In this hand-picked collection of 101 letters, Tyson draws upon cosmic perspectives to address a vast array of questions about science, faith, philosophy, life, and of course, Pluto. His succinct, opinionated, passionate, and often funny responses reflect his popularity and standing as a leading educator. Tyson’s 2017 bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry offered more than one million readers an insightful and accessible understanding of the universe. Tyson’s most candid and heartfelt writing yet, Letters from an Astrophysicist introduces us to a newly personal dimension of Tyson’s quest to explore our place in the cosmos. Shermer and Tyson discuss:

killing Pluto
killing God
science and religion
why he takes a relatively conciliatory approach to religion
why he takes a hard-line against science deniers in religion (and elsewhere)
progress in science
how vs. why questions
race and racial progress
why the arc of the moral universe still bends toward justice
race and IQ and the curious letter he received about how to address this sensitive subject
his middle name and why one correspondent objected to it
Neil’s father and why he ends the book with a eulogy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	For those of you watching this you can see we're in a new studio here in Santa Barbara
0:03.8	that I think hope we'll be using for all future podcast recordings now.
0:08.8	Sound quality and the visuals are a little bit better here than in the previous studios. As you know, we post these
0:16.9	every Tuesday. Tuesday is the pub date for new books and that's kind of become my
0:22.2	specialty is new non-fiction mostly science
0:24.8	books my guest today in fact my first and only so far returning guest Neil
0:30.5	degrass Tyson whose new book comes out today when we release this and it's called
0:35.6	Letters from an astrophysicist. It's a beautiful book, not too long, very personal,
0:42.1	lots of insights into Neil's life and his personal thoughts
0:47.8	as well as the usual science material.
0:51.6	And so we had a good conversation about Pluto of course because he
0:57.2	always gets affiliated with that but also how and why questions in science
1:01.3	scientific progress science and religion especially
1:04.8	of course because not only did Neil allegedly kill Pluto, he allegedly gets accused of
1:11.4	allegedly killing God.
1:12.8	So we talk a little bit about his attitudes.
1:14.8	His attitudes about religion are a little more
1:17.8	conciliatory than a lot of the other new atheists.
1:20.9	And so I ask him about that.
1:24.0	And then he also gets personal toward the end talking about race and I.
1:28.0	Race in general, his middle name, where that came from and why somebody wrote him a letter about that,
1:34.0	telling him he should drop that name, because that's his so-called European name or whatever.
	...

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