Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey premieres on Fox Sun 9/8c and National

Geographic Mon 10/9c

“A Higgs boson goes into a church. …”

Neil deGrasse Tyson—America’s best-known astrophysicist, with more than

1.5 million followers on Twitter—is telling a joke to the team shooting his

photo for the cover of Parade. Standing in the American Museum of

Natural History in New York, he continues: “And the priest says, ‘We don’t

allow Higgs bosons here.’ And the Higgs boson says, ‘But without me there

is no mass.’ ” Bada bing!

He’s got another. “A photon walks into a bar and orders a drink,” Tyson

ENTERTAINMENT

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Cosmos’sMaster of the Universe

JANUARY 11, 2014 – 5:00 AM – 13 COMMENTS

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By LYNN SHERR

Tyson photographed on location at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, The Hayden

Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (Photo: MIller Mobley for

Parade; Styling: Monica Cotto; Grooming: Lindsey Williams; Suit: Banana Republic; Shirt: Vince; Tie: Zazzle; Belt: Cole Haan)

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begins, his resonant bass voice bubbling up from his 6-foot-2 frame. “The

bartender says, ‘Do you want a double?’ And the photon says, ‘No, I’m

traveling light.’ ” Bada boom!

Everyone laughs, without necessarily knowing that a photon is a tiny

particle of light, or that the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” gives

everything physical mass. Tyson’s delivery is so enticing, his playfulness so

charming, it’s no wonder Jon Stewart repeatedly features him on The Daily

Show. “It’s one thing to be a lauded astrophysicist,” Stewart says. “It’s

another to possess a gift for comedic timing. You don’t normally get both,

but that’s Neil.”

Dr. Tyson moonwalks and discusses Cosmos, Carl Sagan, and Pluto in

this exclusive video:

At 55, Tyson is a science rock star whose passion for the laws of nature is

matched by his engaging explanations of topics ranging from the mystery

of dark matter to the absurdity of zombies. Starting March 9, he will

become an even bigger cultural phenomenon as he hosts Cosmos: A

SpaceTime Odyssey, a 13-part, prime-time series airing on both Fox

(Sundays) and the National Geographic Channel (Mondays) that will, in

Tyson’s words, help you “understand your relationship to other humans, to

the rest of the tree of life on Earth, to the rest of the planets in the universe,

and to the rest of the universe itself. I want it to get inside your skin. I want

you to be so affected that the world looks completely different.”

It has been 34 years since PBS aired the original Cosmos series, subtitled A

Personal Journey and hosted by Carl Sagan, another popularizer of science

(and frequent Parade contributor) and one of Tyson’s mentors. The 1980

Cosmos riveted some 750 million viewers in more than 175 countries and

became an Emmy and Peabody award–winning megahit; its accompanying

book occupied the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year.

Sagan regularly bantered on late-night TV with Johnny Carson, who

donned a turtleneck sweater, a corduroy jacket, and a mop of a wig to

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lampoon the astronomer’s awe at

the “billions and billions” of

galaxies out there—a phrase never

actually uttered by Sagan in the

series, but one that became his

signature nevertheless. When

Sagan died in 1996 at 62, his

legacy was as infinite as the show’s

opening line: “The cosmos is all

that is or ever was or ever will be.”

“We were going for something

biblical,” says Ann Druyan, Sagan’s

widow and, along with astronomer Steven Soter, cowriter. “Something epic,

with a poetry that would catch people.” Now Druyan and Soter have written

a new version of the series for today’s world. After years of “hostility

towards science,” Druyan says, we “are beginning to look up at the stars

and dream again.”

Tyson agrees we are enjoying a “space moment,” one that goes far beyond

the buzz over recent discoveries about exoplanets (planets orbiting stars

other than our own sun) and rich tourists signing up for flights on rocket

ships. “Artists have come to embrace science in ways I’ve never seen

before,” he says. As evidence, Tyson points to the hit movie Gravity (which

he liked but took to task for some inaccuracies on Twitter), the top-rated

sitcom The Big Bang Theory (on which he has appeared), and the hit

forensic drama CSI. “That’s how you know science has become

mainstream. It’s with us and around us. That gives me great hope that

Cosmos will land on hugely fertile ground, possibly transforming how we

think about science as a driver of our future.”

Some elements of the original

series have been retained: the

Ship of the Imagination

(transporting viewers through

space and time) and the Cosmic

Calendar (compressing 13.8 billion

years into a single year-at-a-glance,

where humans arrive only in the

last few seconds). But the

adventure has been updated with

dazzling special effects, from the

heart of an atom to the promise of

deep space, including a look at a

day on the beach on Venus,

before that planet became an infernal cauldron. And heroic stories of

scientific exploration are told using animation by a team selected by Seth

Original 'Cosmos' host and Tyson's mentor

Carl Sagan in the early ’80s. (Getty Images)

Dr.Tyson has a vast collection of cosmic-

themed ties. "Last I counted," he says, "it was

rising through 100." (MIller Mobley for Parade)

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MacFarlane, who created the Fox series Family Guy and American Dad!

MacFarlane, 40, is also a Cosmos executive producer, a science enthusiast

who, after meeting Tyson through the Science & Entertainment Exchange

(a program to foster better scientific content in storytelling), invited him to

lunch and asked how he might support Tyson’s work. “I said, ‘I’m at a point

in my career where I have some disposable income,’ ” MacFarlane recalls,

“ ‘and I’d like to spend it on something worthwhile.’ ” MacFarlane says he’s

brought none of Family Guy’s visual style or edgy humor to the science

show. Rather, he brought the series to Fox, positioning it for a far broader

audience than at the cable channels the Cosmos team had been pitching.

“This would be a level of exposure for science that has never been

reached before,” Tyson says, thrilled with prime time on a commercial

network. “And that, for me, is the most important fact about this rendering

of Cosmos.”

Druyan passed Sagan’s torch to Tyson, honoring a relationship begun in

the mid-’70s, when Sagan generously showed the then high school student

around his Cornell lab. Tyson chose to attend Harvard instead but absorbed

the message. “He has both the scientific cred and the passion to

communicate,” Druyan says of Tyson. “That same indefatigable desire Carl

had to connect with the person who interrupts his dinner in a restaurant, or

to get off the elevator with someone in order to finish explaining

something.”

Tyson developed his love of

science as the second of three

children of a middle-class family

from the Bronx; his father, a civil

rights champion, served in various

social services agencies, and his

stay-at-home mom later went back

to earn her degree in gerontology.

They were his anchors, “my moral

role models for how to think about

others in a world where there’s not

enough of that going on,” says

Tyson, sitting in his comfortably

cluttered museum office filled with

rocket models, cosmology-adorned pillows, and two reproductions of Van

Gogh’s Starry Night. His parents also gave him his first telescope after a

transformative childhood trip to the Hayden Planetarium, which he now

runs. “Initially I thought it was a hoax,” he says of the space show he saw

that day. “The sky over the Bronx just didn’t have that many stars.” That

vision gave him purpose, a bold dream for a young black man at the time.

“I was an aspiring astrophysicist and that’s how I defined myself, not by my

The budding scientist puts together his firsttelescope at age 12 with his father, Cyril, in 1970.

(Courtesy of Neil deGrasse Tyson)

skin color,” Tyson says. But others did, in ways sadly familiar to many young

African-American males. “People didn’t treat me as someone with science

ambitions,” he says. “They treated me as someone they thought was going

to mug them, or who was a shoplifter. I’d be in a department store and the

security would follow me. Taxis wouldn’t stop for me. And I was just glad I

had something to think about other than how society was treating me.” In

school, he adds, “teachers would say, ‘You should join this or that team,’

not the physics club. My fuel tank had been stoked since I was 9, but it took

some energy to overcome the resistance. I wondered if there was a lost

generation of people who succumbed because their fuel tanks were a little

smaller than mine.”

Tyson’s own powerful drive propelled him through graduate school at

Columbia University, then to a research position at Princeton. He has held

his current job, as Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at

the American Museum of Natural History, since 1996, and home is

Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, Alice Young, a mathematical

physicist now retired from Bloomberg Financial Markets, and his two

children, Miranda, 17, and Travis, 13.

But Tyson sees himself as a citizen

of the entire universe, and he

believes knowledge about science

and space can help protect what

Sagan called “the pale blue dot” of

Earth. “Cosmos is not only about

updating you on what science is

but also conveying why it matters

—especially in the 21st century,

when issues related to science are

fundamental to political issues,”

Tyson says. “There are political hot

potatoes that could be settled or

informed if we became more

scientifically literate.”

Not that Tyson—or anyone—has all the answers to the mysteries of the

universe. For example, are there little green men out there? “No

astrophysicist would deny the possibility of life,” he says, smiling. “I think

we’re not creative enough to imagine what life would be like on another

planet.” And he wants proof. “Show me a dead alien. Better yet, show me a

live one!”

Tyson’s exuberance and ready wit inspire Giuseppe Lombardo, the 11-year-

old son of Parade’s photography director, who has been excused from

school to meet one of his heroes. Playing off the size of a gigabyte (1,024

megabytes), he asks, “Have you heard of the band 1020 Megabytes?” “No,”

The new 'Cosmos' series keeps some originalconcepts like the Ship of the Imagination, withnew digital effects. (Courtesy of FOX)

104

says Tyson, curious. “Of course you haven’t,” Giuseppe says. “They haven’t

got any gigs yet!”

Tyson laughs long and hard, well aware that it’s a good sign for the cosmos

when kids are telling jokes about science, too.

Lynn Sherr’s new book, Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space, will be

published in spring 2014.

Get more from Dr. Tyson—on not trying to fill Carl Sagan’s shoes, and

why “you will never find scientists leading armies into battle”—here.

Read some of Carl Sagan’s classic stories for Parade here.

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