Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s conversation with Theo Von covers a wide arc, from the mechanics of the universe to the biological wiring of the human brain, and the ways our ancient instincts play out in a modern, technology-saturated world. Tyson, an astrophysicist and host of StarTalk, came with a new book, Lost in Space: 5,000 Facts for Navigating the Universe, but the conversation ranged well beyond its pages into evolutionary biology, space debris, the limits of physics, and the social consequences of tribal thinking.

The brain, the universe, and the problem with curiosity

One of the first surprising facts Tyson offers is this: the human brain has about one hundred times more synaptic connections than there are stars in the Milky Way. That leads Theo to ask whether the brain is more complex than a galaxy. Tyson says yes, because the brain’s interactions are chemical and electrical, influenced by memory and emotion, whereas stars interact only through gravity. That raises a deeper puzzle: how can the universe produce something more complex than itself? Tyson notes that this has happened, and that invoking God as an answer just pushes the question back—who made God? The same pattern repeats when you push back to the Big Bang, then to a possible multiverse, then to what came before that. The point is not to offer a final answer but to show that the universe resists simple, s