“Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it.Let there be cosmology.”

Let There Be Light, Natural History Magazine, October 2003, 2010-12-07 http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2003/10/01/let-there-be-light,
2000s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the univ…" by Neil deGrasse Tyson?
Neil deGrasse Tyson photo
Neil deGrasse Tyson 89
American astrophysicist and science communicator 1958

Related quotes

Willem de Sitter photo
Guy Consolmagno photo

“Science books go out of date. We throw the old one away when a newer one comes out, when we have new theories. But we don't throw away our old data; we merely interpret them differently. New theories try to account for old data (and new data) in new ways.”

Guy Consolmagno (1952) American Jesuit, Catholic Priest, research astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory.

[Consolmagno, Guy, Mueller, Paul, https://www.google.com/books?id=lf5vDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA16, 9780804136952, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?: And Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-Box at the Vatican Observatory, 16, 2014, Image]

Jay Samit photo

“Data has no ego and makes an excellent copilot.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.119

Willem de Sitter photo
Kaoru Ishikawa photo
Guy Consolmagno photo

“Science doesn't stop when it comes up with a nice answer. It looks for more data. It comes up with new ideas. It's willing to admit it's wrong.”

Guy Consolmagno (1952) American Jesuit, Catholic Priest, research astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory.

[From MIT to Specola Vaticana: Guy Consolmagno at TEDxViadellaConcialiazione, April 24, 2013, TEDx Talks, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmU2gDbP_Tk] (quote at 6:38 of 17:52)

Ward Cunningham photo

“When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

Geek Noise (2004)

Vernon L. Smith photo
Kim Stanley Robinson photo

“If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change.”

Source: Green Mars (1993), Chapter 8, “Social Engineering” (p. 410)

Related topics