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Tyson Master of the Universe
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Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey premieres on Fox Sun 9/8c and National
Geographic Mon 10/9c
“A Higgs boson goes into a church. …”
Neil deGrasse Tyson—America’s best-known astrophysicist, with more than
1.5 million followers on Twitter—is telling a joke to the team shooting his
photo for the cover of Parade. Standing in the American Museum of
Natural History in New York, he continues: “And the priest says, ‘We don’t
allow Higgs bosons here.’ And the Higgs boson says, ‘But without me there
is no mass.’ ” Bada bing!
He’s got another. “A photon walks into a bar and orders a drink,” Tyson
ENTERTAINMENT
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Cosmos’sMaster of the Universe
JANUARY 11, 2014 – 5:00 AM – 13 COMMENTS
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By LYNN SHERR
Tyson photographed on location at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, The Hayden
Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (Photo: MIller Mobley for
Parade; Styling: Monica Cotto; Grooming: Lindsey Williams; Suit: Banana Republic; Shirt: Vince; Tie: Zazzle; Belt: Cole Haan)
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begins, his resonant bass voice bubbling up from his 6-foot-2 frame. “The
bartender says, ‘Do you want a double?’ And the photon says, ‘No, I’m
traveling light.’ ” Bada boom!
Everyone laughs, without necessarily knowing that a photon is a tiny
particle of light, or that the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” gives
everything physical mass. Tyson’s delivery is so enticing, his playfulness so
charming, it’s no wonder Jon Stewart repeatedly features him on The Daily
Show. “It’s one thing to be a lauded astrophysicist,” Stewart says. “It’s
another to possess a gift for comedic timing. You don’t normally get both,
but that’s Neil.”
Dr. Tyson moonwalks and discusses Cosmos, Carl Sagan, and Pluto in
this exclusive video:
At 55, Tyson is a science rock star whose passion for the laws of nature is
matched by his engaging explanations of topics ranging from the mystery
of dark matter to the absurdity of zombies. Starting March 9, he will
become an even bigger cultural phenomenon as he hosts Cosmos: A
SpaceTime Odyssey, a 13-part, prime-time series airing on both Fox
(Sundays) and the National Geographic Channel (Mondays) that will, in
Tyson’s words, help you “understand your relationship to other humans, to
the rest of the tree of life on Earth, to the rest of the planets in the universe,
and to the rest of the universe itself. I want it to get inside your skin. I want
you to be so affected that the world looks completely different.”
It has been 34 years since PBS aired the original Cosmos series, subtitled A
Personal Journey and hosted by Carl Sagan, another popularizer of science
(and frequent Parade contributor) and one of Tyson’s mentors. The 1980
Cosmos riveted some 750 million viewers in more than 175 countries and
became an Emmy and Peabody award–winning megahit; its accompanying
book occupied the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year.
Sagan regularly bantered on late-night TV with Johnny Carson, who
donned a turtleneck sweater, a corduroy jacket, and a mop of a wig to
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lampoon the astronomer’s awe at
the “billions and billions” of
galaxies out there—a phrase never
actually uttered by Sagan in the
series, but one that became his
signature nevertheless. When
Sagan died in 1996 at 62, his
legacy was as infinite as the show’s
opening line: “The cosmos is all
that is or ever was or ever will be.”
“We were going for something
biblical,” says Ann Druyan, Sagan’s
widow and, along with astronomer Steven Soter, cowriter. “Something epic,
with a poetry that would catch people.” Now Druyan and Soter have written
a new version of the series for today’s world. After years of “hostility
towards science,” Druyan says, we “are beginning to look up at the stars
and dream again.”
Tyson agrees we are enjoying a “space moment,” one that goes far beyond
the buzz over recent discoveries about exoplanets (planets orbiting stars
other than our own sun) and rich tourists signing up for flights on rocket
ships. “Artists have come to embrace science in ways I’ve never seen
before,” he says. As evidence, Tyson points to the hit movie Gravity (which
he liked but took to task for some inaccuracies on Twitter), the top-rated
sitcom The Big Bang Theory (on which he has appeared), and the hit
forensic drama CSI. “That’s how you know science has become
mainstream. It’s with us and around us. That gives me great hope that
Cosmos will land on hugely fertile ground, possibly transforming how we
think about science as a driver of our future.”
Some elements of the original
series have been retained: the
Ship of the Imagination
(transporting viewers through
space and time) and the Cosmic
Calendar (compressing 13.8 billion
years into a single year-at-a-glance,
where humans arrive only in the
last few seconds). But the
adventure has been updated with
dazzling special effects, from the
heart of an atom to the promise of
deep space, including a look at a
day on the beach on Venus,
before that planet became an infernal cauldron. And heroic stories of
scientific exploration are told using animation by a team selected by Seth
Original 'Cosmos' host and Tyson's mentor
Carl Sagan in the early ’80s. (Getty Images)
Dr.Tyson has a vast collection of cosmic-
themed ties. "Last I counted," he says, "it was
rising through 100." (MIller Mobley for Parade)
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MacFarlane, who created the Fox series Family Guy and American Dad!
MacFarlane, 40, is also a Cosmos executive producer, a science enthusiast
who, after meeting Tyson through the Science & Entertainment Exchange
(a program to foster better scientific content in storytelling), invited him to
lunch and asked how he might support Tyson’s work. “I said, ‘I’m at a point
in my career where I have some disposable income,’ ” MacFarlane recalls,
“ ‘and I’d like to spend it on something worthwhile.’ ” MacFarlane says he’s
brought none of Family Guy’s visual style or edgy humor to the science
show. Rather, he brought the series to Fox, positioning it for a far broader
audience than at the cable channels the Cosmos team had been pitching.
“This would be a level of exposure for science that has never been
reached before,” Tyson says, thrilled with prime time on a commercial
network. “And that, for me, is the most important fact about this rendering
of Cosmos.”
Druyan passed Sagan’s torch to Tyson, honoring a relationship begun in
the mid-’70s, when Sagan generously showed the then high school student
around his Cornell lab. Tyson chose to attend Harvard instead but absorbed
the message. “He has both the scientific cred and the passion to
communicate,” Druyan says of Tyson. “That same indefatigable desire Carl
had to connect with the person who interrupts his dinner in a restaurant, or
to get off the elevator with someone in order to finish explaining
something.”
Tyson developed his love of
science as the second of three
children of a middle-class family
from the Bronx; his father, a civil
rights champion, served in various
social services agencies, and his
stay-at-home mom later went back
to earn her degree in gerontology.
They were his anchors, “my moral
role models for how to think about
others in a world where there’s not
enough of that going on,” says
Tyson, sitting in his comfortably
cluttered museum office filled with
rocket models, cosmology-adorned pillows, and two reproductions of Van
Gogh’s Starry Night. His parents also gave him his first telescope after a
transformative childhood trip to the Hayden Planetarium, which he now
runs. “Initially I thought it was a hoax,” he says of the space show he saw
that day. “The sky over the Bronx just didn’t have that many stars.” That
vision gave him purpose, a bold dream for a young black man at the time.
“I was an aspiring astrophysicist and that’s how I defined myself, not by my
The budding scientist puts together his firsttelescope at age 12 with his father, Cyril, in 1970.
(Courtesy of Neil deGrasse Tyson)
skin color,” Tyson says. But others did, in ways sadly familiar to many young
African-American males. “People didn’t treat me as someone with science
ambitions,” he says. “They treated me as someone they thought was going
to mug them, or who was a shoplifter. I’d be in a department store and the
security would follow me. Taxis wouldn’t stop for me. And I was just glad I
had something to think about other than how society was treating me.” In
school, he adds, “teachers would say, ‘You should join this or that team,’
not the physics club. My fuel tank had been stoked since I was 9, but it took
some energy to overcome the resistance. I wondered if there was a lost
generation of people who succumbed because their fuel tanks were a little
smaller than mine.”
Tyson’s own powerful drive propelled him through graduate school at
Columbia University, then to a research position at Princeton. He has held
his current job, as Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at
the American Museum of Natural History, since 1996, and home is
Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, Alice Young, a mathematical
physicist now retired from Bloomberg Financial Markets, and his two
children, Miranda, 17, and Travis, 13.
But Tyson sees himself as a citizen
of the entire universe, and he
believes knowledge about science
and space can help protect what
Sagan called “the pale blue dot” of
Earth. “Cosmos is not only about
updating you on what science is
but also conveying why it matters
—especially in the 21st century,
when issues related to science are
fundamental to political issues,”
Tyson says. “There are political hot
potatoes that could be settled or
informed if we became more
scientifically literate.”
Not that Tyson—or anyone—has all the answers to the mysteries of the
universe. For example, are there little green men out there? “No
astrophysicist would deny the possibility of life,” he says, smiling. “I think
we’re not creative enough to imagine what life would be like on another
planet.” And he wants proof. “Show me a dead alien. Better yet, show me a
live one!”
Tyson’s exuberance and ready wit inspire Giuseppe Lombardo, the 11-year-
old son of Parade’s photography director, who has been excused from
school to meet one of his heroes. Playing off the size of a gigabyte (1,024
megabytes), he asks, “Have you heard of the band 1020 Megabytes?” “No,”
The new 'Cosmos' series keeps some originalconcepts like the Ship of the Imagination, withnew digital effects. (Courtesy of FOX)
104
says Tyson, curious. “Of course you haven’t,” Giuseppe says. “They haven’t
got any gigs yet!”
Tyson laughs long and hard, well aware that it’s a good sign for the cosmos
when kids are telling jokes about science, too.
Lynn Sherr’s new book, Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space, will be
published in spring 2014.
Get more from Dr. Tyson—on not trying to fill Carl Sagan’s shoes, and
why “you will never find scientists leading armies into battle”—here.
Read some of Carl Sagan’s classic stories for Parade here.
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