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Neil deGrasse Tyson says the moment he fell in love with astrophysics came from an embarrassing misunderstanding
(Emily Mills on Flickr)
Many years ago the world-famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was just a kid in the Bronx without even the hint of a dream to study the universe. But, as he tells Stephen Colbert, all of that changed one fateful night in Pennsylvania.
On that night, Tyson formed what was most likely one of his first thoughts about the trillions of stars in our universe — a thought that would revolutionize his life and was actually embarrassingly, as he puts it, incorrect.
Two years before, Tyson — whom we now recognize as host of the wildly popular podcast series StarTalk and the television series "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" — visited the Hayden Planetarium at New York City's American Museum of Natural History for the first time — the same Hayden Planetarium for which he now serves as director.
There he saw a projection of the night sky unlike anything he had ever seen: a sky adorned with countless stars.
"I thought, 'Well that's a nice hoax,'" Tyson told Colbert. "That can't be real."
Then, a couple of years later when he was 9 years old and trekking among the secluded mountains in Pennsylvania, he saw the night sky untainted by city lights for the first time. And it, too, had an endless expanse of stars.
That's when everything began to fall into place:
"What is an embarrassingly urban thought: I look up at the night sky from the finest mountain tops in the world and ... I say, 'It reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium,'" Tyson acknowledged with a laugh later adding: "But so strong was that imprint that I'm certain that I had no choice in the matter that in fact the universe called me."
Tyson has not only carved himself a career in astrophysics over the following dcades, but he has made it his goal to inspire the rest of us to reach for the stars and awe at the wonders of the cosmos.
Watch the full interview with Stephen Colbert:
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