Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Who Was the Greatest Scientific Mind in History

Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talk­ing up not just sci­ence itself, but also its prac­ti­tion­ers. If asked to name the great­est sci­en­tist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it — or even to find him­self unable to choose. But that’s hard­ly Tyson’s style, as evi­denced by the clip above from his 92nd Street Y con­ver­sa­tion with Fareed Zakaria. “Who do you think is the most extra­or­di­nary sci­en­tif­ic mind that human­i­ty has pro­duced?” Zakaria asks. “There’s no con­test,” Tyson imme­di­ate­ly responds. “Isaac New­ton.”

Those famil­iar with Tyson will know he would be pre­pared for the fol­low-up. By way of expla­na­tion, he nar­rates cer­tain events of New­ton’s life: “He, work­ing alone, dis­cov­ers the laws of motion. Then he dis­cov­ers the law of grav­i­ty.” Faced with the ques­tion of why plan­ets orbit in ellipses rather than per­fect cir­cles, he first invents inte­gral and dif­fer­en­tial cal­cu­lus in order to deter­mine the answer. Then he dis­cov­ers the laws of optics. “Then he turns 26.” At this point in the sto­ry, young lis­ten­ers who aspire to sci­en­tif­ic careers of their own will be ner­vous­ly recal­cu­lat­ing their own intel­lec­tu­al and pro­fes­sion­al tra­jec­to­ries.

They must remem­ber that New­ton was a man of his place and time, specif­i­cal­ly the Eng­land of the late sev­en­teenth and ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­turies. And even there, he was an out­lier the likes of which his­to­ry has hard­ly known, whose eccen­tric ten­den­cies also inspired him to come up with pow­dered toad-vom­it lozenges and pre­dict the date of the apoc­a­lypse (not that he’s yet been proven wrong on that score). But in our time as in his, future (or cur­rent) sci­en­tists would do well to inter­nal­ize New­ton’s spir­it of inquiry, which got him pre­scient­ly won­der­ing whether, for instance, “the stars of the night sky are just like our sun, but just much, much far­ther away.”

“Great sci­en­tists are not marked by their answers, but by how great their ques­tions are.” To find such ques­tions, one needs not just curios­i­ty, but also humil­i­ty before the expanse of one’s own igno­rance. “I do not know what I may appear to the world,” New­ton once wrote, “but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy play­ing on the seashore, and divert­ing myself in now and then find­ing a smoother peb­ble or a pret­ti­er shell than ordi­nary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undis­cov­ered before me.” Near­ly three cen­turies after his death, that ocean remains for­bid­ding­ly but promis­ing­ly vast — at least to those who know how to look at it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Stag­ger­ing Genius of Isaac New­ton

Isaac New­ton Con­ceived of His Most Ground­break­ing Ideas Dur­ing the Great Plague of 1665

Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents a Brief His­to­ry of Every­thing in an 8.5 Minute Ani­ma­tion

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dict­ed That the World Will End in 2060

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Isaac New­ton Cre­ates a List of His 57 Sins (Cir­ca 1662)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.