The Most Awesome Man in the World

Who is the most awesome man in the world?

No, no, this is a guy who has it ALL.

 

The man I’m talking about is a kick-ass guy who’s really got it going on.

But, no, he’s not the toughest man in the world.

 

Let me give you some hints.

He’s got a day job. He’s enormously intelligent. He spent time at Columbia University in New York. He has a great sense of humor. He gets hate mail along with fan mail. He weighs in on matters pertaining to NASA missions. He’s participated in Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything).  He’s on television a lot, even though he’s not an actor. He can hold his own with the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. And, oh yeah, he’s black.

 

There’s a guy who’s more awesome than Barack Obama, something many people have no trouble agreeing with, although, of course,  47% of us are all about Obama. Really.

There’s just one problem: the Most Awesome Man in the World demoted Pluto, and he steadfastly refuses to apologize for it.

 

But does that make him less than the Most Awesome Man in the World?

In spite of his slander against Pluto, I say no. Neil deGrasse Tyson IS the Most Awesome Man in the World.

 

 

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, is an engaging, interesting speaker and science educator. He bases his views on evidence and proofs. He was already so cool by the age of 15 that he was presenting astronomy research to professionals. Carl Freaking Sagan himself tried – unsuccessfully – to recruit the college-bound Neil Tyson to his astronomy department at Cornell. (Tyson went to Harvard instead, then graduate school in Texas and at Columbia.) He has eloquently explained the God of the Gaps. He has schooled a prosecutor who wanted him, as a juror, to rely on eyewitness testimony, and inquired of a judge why the defendant was accused of possessing 1,700 milligrams of cocaine, rather than 1.7 grams – less than the weight of a dime. His stories of his experience with jury duty underscore something that I’ve often said is wrong with the legal system – it’s set up to discourage critical thinking.

He was asked what he believed to be the most astounding fact about the universe. He responded eloquently:

The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high-mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy – guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.

When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small, because they’re small and the universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity. That’s really what you want in life. You want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant, you want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings-on and activities around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.

I follow Dr. Tyson on Twitter. Twitter is an insipid thing, parsing the world into 144 characters or less. I only use my account to promote this blog, but I have this Twitter feed on my browser’s homepage that shows me interesting things that other people have to say. It’s one way of keeping up with who just posted what where. I see in my Twitter feed when Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, posts news about religion in the public world, when Dante Shepherd posts new webcomics on his blackboard, when Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame finds a cool article. I follow political commentary on Twitter: The Tea Party Cat makes wonderfully pithy comments. Indecision is Comedy Central’s hub for all things political, and – oh! – Wonkette.  The snarky Wonkette site may be my favorite political news anywhere.

I follow the thoughts of people, too. Among my favorites are Andy Borowitz and Ricky Gervais. Those guys are funny. Some people – and I am not among them – can really make those 144 characters work hard.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one such tweeter. His insights are worth repeating. And despite his obvious astrophysical prowess, his tweets don’t focus on the universe so much as they focus on, well, the world. For example:

 and

and

Those Tweets were collected on a single site, which I was glad to see, because I know I’m not the only one who thinks just about everything Neil deGrasse Tyson says is worth hearing. I admire the heck out of the man. His values (“If aliens did visit us, I’d be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy”), his wisdom (“Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first the Chicken or the Egg? The Egg — laid by a bird that was not a Chicken”), his pride in his offspring (“More evidence my 14yr old daughter is a Geek: after prompting me to ask if she knew any jokes about sodium, she replied, ‘Na'”), his knowledge (“According to the song, Rudolph’s nose is shiny, which means it reflects rather than emits light. Useless for navigating fog”), and his insights (“I’ve come to conclude that Fettucini Alfredo is just Mac-and-Cheese for food snobs”) entertain, illuminate, and educate.

What’s not to like about him?  Other than the Pluto thing, I mean. Let’s disregard that for the moment.

Set aside some time and listen to his “Brain Droppings” keynote speech from TAM 6. I’ve listened to it more than once, and I don’t get tired of it. He proves, yet again, that he is the sexiest astrophysicist alive.

Last Updated on September 23, 2012 by Anne