February 18, 2012
  • Stephen Colbert: What is the most beautiful thing that you know of in science?
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson: E = mc2.
  • Stephen Colbert: Really?
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson: Oh, it's awesome. It is.
  • Stephen Colbert: So that equation doesn't just have a great publicist? It's actually...? Because everybody knows it, but also everybody knows Coke. It's like the Coca-Cola of science.
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, you learn [it] before you even know what any of those symbols mean. You hear it in elementary school. It's a gorgeous thing.
  • Stephen Colbert: What is beautiful about [it]? First of all, tell everybody what all the pieces mean.
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson: E stands for energy. M is mass. C2 is just the speed of light squared. Ignore that for the moment. The thrust of that equation is that energy and mass are equivalent to each other. Which means you can transmute one into the other and back. What makes that extraordinary is that [that] hardly ever happens in our everyday lives, yet it's going on all the time in the rest of the universe.
  • Stephen Colbert: So we're in this little pocket where e = mc2 is not visible?
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson: Never happens. It's not visible. It's not happening in our lives, no. But if it did, the world would be really different.
  • Stephen Colbert: What is beautiful about it to you?
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson: It's simple. It's simple yet it accounts for hugely complex things. And for me that is where the beauty lies in the truth.
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