Tyson lecture on YouTube

Ask and yea shall receive. A kindly tech wizard did stop by and post Neil deGrasse Tyson’s lecture on YouTube (part 1, part 2), so now you can watch it without any tedious downloading. Virtually all of the lecture is there, the last few seconds seem to have been cut off.

The original thread has become yet another holy war thread (my fault, I acknowledge), so I will focus here simply on why Tyson’s lecture turned me into a fawning Tyson fanboy. Highlights:

* The potential importance of the humanities to a scientist (spaces between the pumpkins). * The similarities between a religious pilgrimage to a mountaintop, and an astrophysicist’s similar pilgrimage. * The real problem isn’t the feeling of one’s size in the universe, it’s the prior size of one’s ego. * “I don’t so much care whether they abandon previous [religious] feelings. I’ve got an offering [science], that keeps going, that keeps getting more majestic.”