BLOGS

In junior high, Tyson took to using his telescope on the roof of his apartment building. At the sight of a teenager fumbling with a mysterious object in the night, neighbors often thought they saw a thief and called the police, whom he would placate by offering a look through the lens.

In high school, Tyson won summer scholarships to study astrophysics in Africa, Utah, and Scotland. He rubbed elbows with astronaut Neil Armstrong and biochemist and sci-fi writer Isaac Asmiov. At 15 he was invited to give his first lecture, to an extension class at the City University of New York.

“It was as natural as breathing,” Tyson recalls. “I was just talking about what I knew, the way other boys talked about baseball cards.”

Frank Bash, professor emeritus of astronomy and former director of UT’s McDonald Observatory, supervised Tyson as a teaching assistant for Intro to Astronomy. “Neil had a natural gift for teaching,” Bash says. “After he taught, the students would beg for him back. He did crazy stuff—moonwalking in class.”

Doing the moonwalk for his students wasn’t a gag, Tyson says—it was a strategy. “If you’re only using words to communicate as a teacher, why show up?” he says. “Why not just type your notes? Teaching is a full-body performance. The moonwalk was all the rage in 1983, and the students loved it. It made the material work for them.”

Back in the lab, though, things weren’t going as well. Tyson wasn’t making progress on his dissertation, and professors encouraged him to consider alternate careers. He took the criticism hard, and he also faced racial discrimination on campus.

“I was stopped and questioned seven times by University police on my way into the physics building,” he says. “Seven times. Zero times was I stopped going into the gym—and I went to the gym a lot. That says all you need to know about how welcome I felt at Texas.”

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."