Neil DeGrasse Tyson

 I admire people who like science, but I especially admire those who can explain science in a understandable way to common people who don't know all the lingo and detailed scientific processes, but break it down easy. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a very marketable personality because he has a deep voice, an interesting face, and he checks off the boxes for diversity requirements as one of the few African American astrophysicists in the world, but more importantly he knows his stuff, or at least I think he does based on how he explains the Big Bang Theory, the deep recesses of the universe, and how humankind relates to everything in the else in that universe. And that's the important thing: there are probably smarter people than Neil in the world and in his field, but he explains it well to people outside the field in terms others can understand, which is a real skill in itself but also shows a deep understanding of the topic to be able to break it down. I find myself usually unable to give a detailed explanation now; I'm more of just a "remember these basic facts" about something and give one-word or one-phrase answers now. If I had someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson to learn from as a young kid, maybe I would have become more interested in science. According to Neil, kids are naturally curious about science and about how the world works, and emotional memory is the best way to encourage these curiorisities, by engraining lessons in kids' minds by making it graphic, like lighting something on fire, or turning a liquid from blue to green, making something explode, etc. I guess I was exposed to those two as a young kid, but I just never got into chemistry and physics, the hard sciences. I did like biology and animals and plants, did pretty well in meiosis, mitosis, cell reproduction, etc......

But nowadays, I'm catching up with that scientific curiosity, just in a more surface level way that keeps my attention. When astronauts saw a picture of the earth from outer space, they said that all the little quabbles on Earth just faded away, no longer significant compared to the vast universe of things. I feel like all those little things I'm fixated on every day, billing as many hours as I can, checking fantasy baseball scores, which stocks are performing well that day, those all should have very little of my attention span versus the world around me. I do feel like science is genetic, some people just have a predisposition for learning about science, just like some people are meant to be good at chess, it takes me 30 seconds to understand a move that they understood instinctively right away. It's similar to science; some people just get it, everything that happens in the world, whereas I'm just left behind trying to pick up the pieces and get little bits of the bigger picture. But it doesn't hurt to try to understand, and people like Neil with his podcast "StarTalk" and other appearances on various media allow me to do that and keep my interest so it doesn't veer into the latest thing I see on the Internet. My favorite segment has been the "Sci-fi Movies ranked" segment where I learned he really likes the Matrix (one of my favorites because it could be what our world is, a simulation- more and more I'm beginning to believe those theories) but also space movies like Gravity, the Martian, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm going to watch those movies with much less focus on the dialogue, plotline, acting, etc. that I normally do but enjoy the scientific aspects involved in them......and all the fallacies that are contained in each. Science is cool! I'm just like 30 years late in getting excited about it.