“Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.”

American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. He studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University, and has been director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City since 1996. He was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University from 1991 to 1994, then joined the planetarium as a staff scientist and also taught at Princeton as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. At the American Museum of Natural History, he founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate there since 2003.