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Are you at least 26 years-old? If so, you are older than Isaac Newton was when he invented calculus… on a dare! (If you’re younger than 26, better hurry up.) Big Think expert and overall cool guy Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why Newton is the greatest physicist who ever and likely will ever live.
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NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
Neil deGrasse Tyson was born and raised in New York City where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson went on to earn his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia. He is the first occupant of the Frederick P. Rose Directorship of the Hayden Planetarium. His professional research interests are broad, but include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our Milky Way. Tyson obtains his data from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as from telescopes in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and in the Andes Mountains of Chile.Tyson is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. His contributions to the public appreciation of the cosmos have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of asteroid “13123 Tyson”.Tyson’s new book is Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017).
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: Who’s the greatest physicist in history?
DeGrasse Tyson: Isaac Newton. I mean, just look… You read his writings. Hair stands up… I don’t have hair there but if I did, it would stand up on the back of my neck. You read his writings, the man was connected to the universe in ways that I never seen another human being connected. It’s kind of spooky actually. He discovers the laws of optics, figured out that white light is composed of colors. That’s kind of freaky right there. You take your colors of the rainbow, put them back together, you have white light again. That freaked out the artist of the day. How does that work? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet gives you white. The laws of optics. He discovers the laws of motion and the universal law of gravitation. Then, a friend of his says, “Well, why do these orbits of the planets… Why are they in a shape of an ellipse, sort of flattened circle? Why aren’t… some other shape?” He said, you know, “I can’t… I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.” So he goes… goes home, comes back couple of months later, “Here’s why. They’re actually conic sections, sections of a cone that you cut.” And… And he said, “Well, how did find this out? How did you determine this?” “Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to determine this.” Then, he turned 26. Then, he turned 26. We got people slogging through calculus in college just to learn what it is that Isaac Newtown invented on a dare, practically. So that’s my man, Isaac Newton.
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