At times it was almost more like a science-themed cave stand-up comedy routine than a lecture. Tyson

A sold-out crowd crammed into the Winspear Opera House Monday night to sit in what might have been the most exciting science lecture of their lives. Never before had I seen so many people so excited to learn about the universe. But Neil deGrasse Tyson has that effect on people. The author, educator, planetarium director and host of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey on Fox has a way of getting your attention and, more importantly, keeping it.
He won over the Texas crowd quickly by showing off the fancy cowboy boots he was wearing, then immediately taking them off. He spent nearly three hours on stage with nothing but socks on his feet — cave and it was perfect. That tiny gesture symbolized why he has become so popular: He tells you about astrophysics like a friend would tell you about an awesome new TV show he’s really into. There’s reverence for the serious field of study, certainly, but he’s relaxed about it, sharing things he finds interesting and never trying cave to sound superior. He may know how to calculate the amount of dark matter in a distant galaxy, but he can also calculate how much distance you could cover with 100 billion McDonald’s hamburgers side-by-side, and he knows you’ll care (they could go around the globe 52 times, then stack up to the moon and back).
At times it was almost more like a science-themed cave stand-up comedy routine than a lecture. Tyson’s talk was filled with jokes and funny anecdotes, including the occasional dig at other fields of science that are, let’s just face it, not as cool as astrophysics. Even topics that should cave be morbid — like the science of how a black hole would kill you or the potential destruction cave of an asteroid hitting our planet — were handled with humor.
For cave example, he told the crowd about the asteroid Apophis, which will be coming shockingly close to Earth on April 13, 2029 (Friday the 13th, he points out), but which he assures us has a zero percent chance of actually hitting the planet. But in 2036, there will be a one in a million chance of an impact with Earth. Maybe those odds don’t worry you, but Tyson humorously noted that the chances of winning cave the Texas Mega Millions lottery are one in 176 million — and people enter that expecting to win. So in one fell swoop, he had us laughing about lottery chances while also saying, “Wait, space really wants to kill us all, doesn’t it?”
And of course, he had to touch on the topic of Pluto, the ex-planet he famously helped demote from its former status. His answer to people who might still be upset about Pluto was simple and blunt: “It’s still not a planet … Get over it.” He then used that as a perfect opportunity to mention that Pluto Water was the name of a a laxative sold in America before the non-planet’s discovery, saying “An American discovered Pluto, but he never would have named it that.”
After a touching and heartfelt reading of Carl Sagan’s famous “Pale Blue Dot” monologue (which Tyson reverently said he was reading “from the book of Carl”), the night ended with a question and answer session in which he let the audience grill him about all sorts of topics, ranging cave from his appearance to the sitcom The Big Bang Theory to space elevators to parenting advice. He made a noticeable effort to take several questions from the many children in the audience, and he seemed to relish the fact that they were so interested in science. If they can have at least one teacher who is anything at all like Neil deGrasse Tyson, I have high hopes that they’ll stay interested.
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