The Books That Shaped My Childhood

Hello, StarTalkians. Neil deGrasse Tyson here. Welcome to our StarTalk Plus YouTube channel. If you didn't know we had one, you know now, because this is where we put content that doesn't precisely fit the formatting, the timing, the content of what would normally go on our flagship YouTube channel. This might have travel logs. It could have short content, differently formatted content, different content. And so it's where we experiment, which we always like to do in our efforts to bring the universe down to earth. I hope you enjoy what follows. And if you do, then you know the drill.

Somewhere down there, you can subscribe. Check it out. When I was a kid, my parents were well aware of my interest in the universe, which began when I was eight years old on a first trip to our local planetarium, family trip. Me, my brother, and my sister, mom and dad. Family trip to the American Museum of Natural History here in New York City. And we went running up and down, saw the dinosaur bones. But what was part of that trip was a visit to the Hayden Planetarium. And at age nine, I became starstruck having seen the night sky as nature intends. not the night sky as revealed to me from the streets of New York. So upon noticing this, this birth interest in the cosmos, my parents, neither of

whom are scientists, they would frequent bookstores. And back then, not so much today, there'd be this mound of books on a huge table out in the open space. And those were remaindered books. Books the publisher wasn't selling at the rate that they wanted, they need to make room in their warehouse, they shake the tree, all these books fall out, they're put on this table, deeply discounted. 99 cents, 50 cents, 25 cents. That was cheap even back then.

And my parents, we didn't have much money, they would buy any book they found on the universe, on math, on physics, So by the time I was in middle school, I probably had the largest library of books of anyone in my class. And these are books that took me places intellectually. Math books, physics books, astronomy books. And I just want to share a few of them with you, if I may. This might be the single most influential book on my life. I don't have the original copy.

In fact, I think I lent it to someone. I never got it back. This is a book by the physicist George Gamow. He's really a cosmologist and he wrote this for the public. And I thought that's kind of cool. There's an actual scientist writing for the public. Little did I know that these were sort of seeds planted within me about what kind of life I might shape for myself.

This is titled one, two, three infinity. And he gets the title from this tribe somewhere. I think it was in Africa where he noted that their counting system only went up to three. And after that, if there's more than three, the word was many. And that was sufficient for the lives they were leading. It's funny because in the Bible, there are many references to the number 40.

There's 40 days and 40 nights with Noah's Ark. There's 40 years in the desert. Jesus gets only 39 last years because 40 might be too many. 40 was the big number in the Bible. So different cultures will have different ways to represent something that they can't count. So that's just the title of this book. What the book is about is I'll read the subtitle facts and speculations of science. Oh, I couldn't get enough of this. And it was written for the lay reader and the chapter titles.

I mean, oh my gosh, I just couldn't get up playing with numbers. This is where I learned about the Googleplex and the Google. That's gotta be anybody's favorite number. Google is a 10 to the 100th power, a one with 100 zeros. The Google Plax is a one with a Google zeros. You cannot even write that in the universe.

You just have to say 10 to the Google power. There's too many zeros to fit on material surfaces in the universe. A space-time in Einstein, the microcosmos, the macrocosmos. And there are illustrations in here that he drew. He was a little bit of an amateur artist. Anyhow, these were speculations on math and on science and how the two work together to make discoveries in the universe. And it opened up an entire world of thought and curiosity for me. I had normal childhood curiosity. What's behind the tree?

What's under the rock? You know, how does a tadpole become a frog? you know, the usual stuff, this took it to another level. And I embraced this clear through middle school, uh, in my library, this book stonehenge decoded paperback. This is the same book I've had for now 50 years. Uh, it's written by Gerald Hawkins. He is a, uh, what would we call him? An anthropologist of sorts. He studied stone monuments such as Stonehenge. That's what he does, but he was also an astronomer. So if you study Stonehenge and you're an anthropologist, you'll notice that the sun matches up with the heel stone on the solstice, but that's all you're really going to think about the universe because nothing else is obvious to you other than it looks

like a temple for ancient peoples to perform whatever rituals they might. Hawkins comes to it as an astronomer and said, could there be more than just this alignment of the rising sun with the summer solstice? And indeed, he discovers all manner of other astronomical elements of this configuration of stones.

I went on an expedition while in high school to England to analyze, well, to visit Stonehenge with him as a guide and But also to decode some other stone monuments that were there and less celebrated than this, that had not yet been documented. So it was an expedition I went on. This puts Stonehenge in my head and coming back to New York city, I would later say, I want Stonehenge for New York. Look at all these buildings here. Surely there's some alignment of buildings. They got stones doing it in England. We can do this in New York city. And I looked hard. Uh, and I settled on, I had bigger ideas with buildings lining up, but I settled on the Manhattan grid aligning with the sunset happens two days a year because the grid is

perfectly laid out. And I came to call that Manhattan hinge. So that's where I got that word from because I went to Stonehenge with the man who figured it out in charge of that expedition. So that expedition seeded. my thinking about what I would call this event with the sun sets perfectly on the Manhattan grid. I would later learn and be flattered by the fact that Manhattan Henge as a word was lifted into the Oxford English dictionary.

So it's now official part of our language. All began back then. Other things, I begin to notice that by the way it was 1973. December, a comet had been discovered that was on its way towards the sun. There was a big hoopla made of it because it was discovered very far out. And you discover a comet farther out than most other comets, chances are it's gonna be really bright when it gets close. So it was hailed as the Christmas comet and everybody was excited about it.

And I was 15 at the time, had just turned 15. I was invited to give lectures. Because I knew, I'm 15, so I've been interested in the universe since I was nine. I had a big library, and I knew all about the comet. And so I was invited to, and I gave my first paid talk on the campus of City College of New York. And it was, I would have done it for free, and then they wrote me a check.

And the check was for $ 50, which was, Might've had been might as well had been infinite because first it was 1973. I just turned 15. I do something cause I love it. And then they hand me $ 50. Okay. That was like, oh my gosh, what? Okay. So back then I noticed that news of the comment had reached the public, but it wasn't quite visible in the sky yet.

And I saw full grown adults. with these poster boards saying, these sandwich boards walking up and down the street, repent now, the comet is coming, the end of the world is near. And I said, what the. This is a full grown adult. I'm 15. What's going on here? What world am I entering that people would possibly be thinking this way about a natural cosmic phenomenon? And that worried me deeply as I ascended into a world where adults run things, they wield resources, they vote, okay? Determine who's in charge of things.

And so I took interest in this book written by Martin Gardner, a longtime columnist for Scientific American, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I'll read the subtitle. The Curious Theories of Modern Pseudoscientists and the Strange, Amusing, and Alarming Cults that Surround Them. A Study in Human Gullibility.

I haven't checked, but I see no reason why this book would be out of print. It should still be there. This was a Dover reprint at the time that I acquired it. And so it's an account of all the ways the public is misusing and misthinking science. And that would sort of prep me coming up through high school and in college, how I might go about bringing science to the world. because I'm in love with science. And as Carl Sagan said, when you're in love with something, you want to tell the world. So there I am in love with science. How could you not want to know about the comet and stars and the big bang and, and all of this big numbers. And so I had a lot to share, but I'm entering a world where not everyone is scientifically literate. And so part of it

is how do I do it and be effective at it? You can't just knock people on the head and say, they're all idiots because there are other human beings and they, they have a background, they have something taught them that. And so, yeah, so I was, I don't wanna say I was on a mission, but I was fully aware of where I was headed after that, that the, the cauldron, uh, tangled mental pathways that afflicts society. Well, let's keep going.

How about this one? I love this one. Got this one while I was in college, Gerald Walker. He's a physicist educator who just loves teaching everyday physics to everyday people. And he has a book called the flying circus of physics. He first came out with a book called the flying circus of physics, which is a whole book of just ponderables where you say, I wonder why that's true, but then he wouldn't give the answer. So everyone was pissed off.

He finally produced a book called The Flying Circus of Physics with Answers. And so he poses all the same questions. There's a whole section in the back. These are different colored pages here that have the answers to questions posed in the rest of the book. And, you know, there are interesting things that you might have noticed but never thought to question. Simple things like, Why is it that when it snows, the base of the tree, just within a couple of feet of the, of the main trunk, there's less snow there. Like it melts first. That's a little weird. Like, how does that happen? Why does that happen? Right? It's, it's things in our world around you that if you're alert, you'd notice it, even if you didn't have the answer.

So it was, for me, it was a litmus test. Am I still paying attention? to the world around me? Am I still the curious kid that I enjoyed being, but did I carry that into adulthood? So for me, this is a test for, are you noticing things? And even if you didn't, you'll notice them after you read these questions about the world around us. So anyhow, Flying Circus of Physics. Then it occurred to me to be educated is not only to know stuff, but also to know what we don't know. That's kind of cool. This was a highly influential book on me. The Encyclopedia of Ignorance.

Edited by Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston Smith. Everything you ever wanted to know about the unknown. It's a big fat book. But I couldn't get enough of this. It goes into all the fields of science and says, here's what we know. Here's the ledge. Here's what we don't know. I said, wow. What this did was bring the limits of human understanding of the universe into arm's reach of me.

Because think about it. When you're growing up, part of you thinks that everything is just known. We know everything. How do you know that you don't know it if you don't even know that you don't know it? And so the influence this book had on me was later on, I mean, decades later, I would create a video series for the great courses. You might've heard of them, the great courses. One of them is called The Inexplicable Universe.

Very proud of that, actually. So I'm there lecturing to you in this video format. It's got visuals and video and things, but I'm lecturing to you on things in physics and in the universe, in astrophysics, that we simply don't have an answer to. And that was fun. It was fun to diagram that, create the syllabus for it, and to deliver it to camera for all to see.

So I can say this planted the seeds in me for that. Then I found this book, Newton's Philosophy of Nature, Selections from His Writings. I said, I know Newton was a scientist. I didn't know much about him. When I read this, who is this man, Isaac Newton? I've heard of him, of course. I'd taken physics. It's Newton's laws.

I get it. But you don't learn the rest about him. The man discovers the laws of optics, the laws of gravity. He invents integral and differential calculus. All of this. Then he turns 26. What's up with that? He was also an alchemist, probably the last alchemist. Alchemists, they get a bad rap, I think. I think you couldn't really have modern chemistry without alchemists at least testing stuff out. You know, they all can't be winners, right? They bet on the wrong horse that you can transmute one element to another, but they kept a lot of good notes to birth what would ultimately become modern chemistry. And Newton also wrote quite a bit on religion. And there's a little bit of that in here. This is mostly his physics. Point is,

I read this cover to cover, and I'm sure you can find it, even though this is my original copy. And I said, I want to know much more about this person upon reading what was in it, letters, selections from his great books. And from then onward, I started acquiring basically everything he's ever done. So in my library today at home, I have like original Isaac Newton's written in the 1700s, 1600s, and it connects me to him in a way that I, hair rises up on the back of my neck when I just think about his brilliance and his genius. In fact, I think I have here, Is this it? A little Newton finger puppet. There he goes.

Isaac Newton. Anyhow, I also have Newton elsewhere in this office. Point is, this set me on a quest to understand brilliance, scientific brilliance in the history of the world. In particular, the history of civilization. and what impact he might have had on it. So that started me. A big part of what I would do in the years to follow is look for old books. The people, how they used to think about things, how they used to think about our relationship to nature and to the universe. Maybe we can save that for another session. I, as a kid, read very little fiction. I don't know that I had the imagination to embrace it and appreciate it the way others did. I read primarily nonfiction. Didn't mean I didn't

enjoy stories, fictional stories, but I would wait till the movie came out, okay? And I'd watch the movie. That was my fix of storytelling as it involved the human condition. Of the fictional stories that I've read, by far the most influential is Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Of course, as a kid, we all see the... Gulliver goes to Lilliput, and there are these Lilliputians. We've all seen that one, it's been in cartoons and some movies. He's big, he's regular, but he goes to this place where everybody's little, and he interacts with them. As kids, that's the story we all saw. But that's just one story of the entire book.

I was so influenced by it that I've had different versions of it over the years. The latest one I acquired is a big old fancy one. Gulliver's Travels. by Jonathan Swift. This one is illustrated. So it's a bigger sort of full-sized book. It's not printed in his life. It's printed in the life of the illustrator, Arthur Rackham, a well-known illustrator in the day. And this is, that's why these pages are large, because there's room for the illustrations that are there. And yeah, here we are. We have the, I just happened to come to the Lilliputian section.

There's the Lilliputians, and they're trying to sort of tie him down. And this is illustrated. So this is profusely illustrated of all the different stories. The point is, the full title of this book, Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Each of these regions was a remote nation where everything was completely different from where he came from. Of Gulliver's voyages, two stand out for me.

His voyage to Laputa. This is a place occupied by scientists, and they were members of the Legato Academy. And he describes their behavior in a way that's so comical, yet oddly plausible. that you just, you have to pause and say, wait, that can't happen that way, can it? Is it really? Is that what, huh? And so I'll just give an example.

Scientists are trying to discover a way to irrigate the soil, but do it like for free without having to actually do it yourself. Now they know pigs like to dig up apples. So they figured out a way to bury apples in the soils of what will be the garden And then they set pigs loose on the garden and the pigs dig up the apples and they eat the apples.

And while they're eating the apples going down the line, they also poop, which then is fertilizer for the, for the. So you say, yeah, wow. Okay. That's kind of brilliant. But then you realize, how'd you put the apples in the ground to begin with? You had to dig up the soil to put the apples in the ground. When you first read it's like, yeah, but then it's like, no, I'm not going to do that. It's not going to happen.

Plus the pig is not pooping everywhere. So would you want to pick up the poop later and then spread it out where you need it? Another one. They wanted to turn marble into soft pillows. They had an experiment to attempt this. Expensive marble into soft pillows. So I said, that's interesting. Do they not have soft pillows? Of course they do. They're down from ducks or birds. Of course.

So why would you take expensive marble and turn it into a pillow? It makes no sense. This was a satirical indictment. of science gone awry. And by the way, the entire book is satire. Let me make that clear. They also had a weather vane where they, this was to show the direction of the wind. But if I'm remembering this correctly, like the whole house turned under it.

And then they took that fact and used it to correct For what direction the weather vane was pointing. So that they would then know which way the wind was blowing. It was like. No. Just use the vane. Alright. And here's what's interesting. Some of them had hypotheses about. The planet Mars. And in this book. It declares that Mars has two moons. Which in fact it does. But no one knew that at the time this was written. Back in 1726. But. The most influential voyage for me that Gulliver took was to the land of the Hohenheims. Hohenheims.

Look it up. I'm not going to spell it here for you. It's got too many H's and Y's and N's and M's in it. On purpose, he made up the word. The Hohenheims was a colony of rational horses. Every decision they made was rationally based. And so that's interesting. And so this is all written through first person, through the eyes of Gulliver. Gulliver's a human. They're these rational horses. Oh, by the way, on that same island were these ape-like creatures who were smelly and they did stupid things. They were called the yahoos. That is the origin of the word yahoo in any place you've ever seen it in your life. It is that story of Gulliver, the yahoos.

I don't know if it's still used this way. They say, don't be a Yahoo. They're referencing the description of Yahoo's in Gulliver's Travels in the land of the Hohenheims. And I remembered reading this story. And as a kid, I just wanted to be one of the horses because there was something so pure, so simple, so unladen, unburdened by emotions.

They could just think about the world and solve the problems as the world needed. I would only much later, maybe we can save it for another session. come to embrace and appreciate the full range of emotions that exist just by being human. That's another conversation we'll have. So I matured out of that, but I still greatly value what role that played in my early development. What I also did over these years, so this is basically fourth grade through college, fourth grade through college. I would occasionally stumble upon a book that was outside of my field.

Here's one I especially enjoyed, The Throwing Madonna by William H. Calvin. And it's subtitled Essays on the Brain. And this intrigued me because it's not one theme running through the book, it's different themes about human behavior and our understanding of the brain as it relates to it. And so one of the essays in here is the title essay, The Throwing Madonna. And it was trying to account for why most people are right-handed. Well, that's interesting. Is there an account for that? We know that handedness can be inherited.

If you are left-handed, you're more likely to have a left-handed kid. And so here's an observation I was invited to make by this book. Go into any art gallery, anywhere in the world, especially ones that come out of the Renaissance, where it was a thing to draw, Madonna and Child, and take a look. In almost every painting, Mary is holding baby Jesus in her left hand, in her left arm, and the right arm is free. So what's up with that? Almost every painting. Okay. We later learned, since the Renaissance, that babies like the sound of a beating heart. It soothes them. And your heart is slightly louder on the left side of your chest than it is on the right side of the chest. So if you're holding your baby, the baby will be quieter held

on the left side. And if whoever is modeling for the Virgin Mary is holding an actual baby and you need the baby to shut up during the session, you hold them in the left hand and the baby is likely to be quieter. That's interesting. Okay, so why is this genetically in our species? One of the most handedness things you can do is throw. Okay, no matter what else you do, if you throw with one hand or the other, that's your handedness. If you're hunting food and you're carrying a baby and you're left-handed, your baby's on the right side of your chest and you're throwing with your left hand and the baby's screaming because it's not soothed by your heartbeat. The baby's screaming, you can't get close enough to your prey to kill it with the

stone or whatever it is you've fashioned out of the raw materials. And so you don't eat that day. You starve, you die. The women, by the way, the guys, it wouldn't matter. The guys will get whatever it is. But the women, you split the women. The women who are right-handed will hold the baby in their left hand. The baby's fast asleep. They get their prey. They live another day.

So you're selecting right-handed women relative to left-handed women in the history of our species. And we emerge with this preference for right-handed. That's an essay here. I didn't ever followed up on it to see if others agreed with it, whatever. But to speculate in that way enchanted me. And it wasn't even in my field. It was another field. And the brain might be more immense than the universe itself.

So that kept me going. Another book. Coming out of college, this was gifted to me ever since Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould. And it's the William Eileen Prize given to me here. And it's named after the person who got that prize the previous year. And it's given to the graduate. It's given by the house I was living in. Okay. The dorm.

There are 13 dorms on campus. And it's a dorm based prize. And I it's given to the person who showed the most independence of thought. Right. So I never did what other people did while I was in college. I kind of on my own, I had my own guide star, if you will. Anyhow, this is my first introduction to Steven Jay Gould. These are essays of his on.

Natural history. That's a field that's not my field. But the guy knows how to write and communicate. Later, I would end up writing a column for Natural History magazine called Universe that bookended his column for Natural History magazine called This View of Life, which is a direct quote from Darwin. Point is, This is a collection of his essays.

So is this. Both of these are collections of essays. And it occurred to me, if you can't just sit down and write a book in one sitting, if you produced essays at timely intervals, because you're required to by the publication schedule of a magazine or a newspaper, then you build material that could then later be collected into a book. Noticing Gould's writing style, his access to the history of science, greatly influenced me. And I welcomed the opportunity to write this column for Natural History Magazine. It became the source of four books that I've written. One of them, the runaway bestseller, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Lastly, hmm.

I was an athlete in high school and college. I couldn't resist sports science. Peter Brancasio was actually a professor, I think, at Brooklyn College at the time. And physical laws and optimum performance. So I used to wrestle. I used to row. A lot of technique. A lot of technique in all sports, of course. But often technique is just how well have you mastered the physics of what's going on. I greatly enjoyed this it still has places where I identified spots that I cared about so Realizing that science and physics especially applies to everything and This was a way to jumpstart that awareness of mine, especially since I was active in sports Lastly Many of you know the story I'm 17 years old in high school.

My application to college is dripping with the universe and I apply and I'm accepted at Cornell. An unknown to me, the admissions office, upon seeing my application dripping with the universe, handed it over to Carl and said, maybe you can write him a note and maybe he'll come to Cornell, help him decide. I get a personal note from Carl Sagan to go visit him at Cornell. Okay. I showed it to my parents. Is this real? Yeah, that's the same guy who was on the Tonight Show and wrote the books. It was before he did Cosmos, by the way.

And he said, yeah, let's do it. So I took a bus from New York City up to Ithaca. It's like five hours. Okay, he met me outside his building, went up to his office, and I'll never forget, he did a no-look reach. He reached back behind his desk, grabbed the book off the shelf, didn't even look. And it's one of his books. I said, wow, that's bad-ass, but signs it to me. Dear Neil future astronomer, Carl Sagan gives it to me. I still have that book of course, but we, he got a tour of the lab at the end of the day that started to snow.

And I go back to the bus station and he says, I'm worried about the snow. Here's my, my home number. If the bus can't get through, call me, spend the night with my family, leave tomorrow. It was like, who am I to even get this attention other than just a kid who's interested in the universe? And I remembered thinking in that moment, if I'm ever as remotely famous as Carl Sagan, I'm going to treat the next generation of students the way he treated me. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say I'm on the phone and it was a student out door. And I say, hello, yeah, can I talk to you? A Barack, I got to call you later. I got a student. I'm only slightly exaggerating there, but that's kind of what it's like. It's

what I feel like. And now I've written 17 books. I reach behind me and I pull out a book. Every time I do that, I think of that moment in his office. And that book is right here. And now I think about it, I said, the dude only gave me a paperback. The Cosmic Connection. One of his books that had just come out in paperback. And The Extraterrestrial Perspective. So this is, you know, he was big with searching for life. And just right here, for Neil Tyson, with all good wishes to a future astronomer. These are some of the books that influenced my life from fourth grade through college. Until next time, keep looking up. ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶

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