Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Beauty and Truthiness of Knowing

Is it better to know or not to know? What are the most valuable qualities of knowledge, and how does its acquisition justify the various ills it occasionally visits upon the world and its people? And what is the deal with Mars?

When these big questions are being asked by an out-of-character Stephen Colbert to jovial astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, you can expect that things will get interesting. Tyson, a recurring guest on Colbert’s show, got put in the hot seat away from television cameras at Montclair Kimberley Academy last year with the task of articulating the nature and beauty of discovery.

Even without saying so, Tyson is plainly the type that would rather know if he has five years left to live. But he doesn’t blame knowledge itself so much as the wacky and messed-up things we sometimes do with it, like fracking and strip-mining and whatnot — the actions of people “in the presence of the knowledge.” Perhaps it’s time, he suggests, to upgrade our “knowledge management” skills.

And what of those who still prefer not to know? Tyson won’t judge them. “If they are at maximum comfort in their ignorance, fine,” he says. But those same people will, by virtue of that ignorance, always be in a kind of shoddy spectator seat for the grand unraveling of the Universe’s mysteries. “Not only will they not be on that frontier making any discoveries, they’re not in a position to enhance their life for having access to those discoveries themselves.”

Even barring that, they’re missing out on an entire world of secular beauty. Be they elegantly simplistic or far-reaching discoveries — like quantum mechanics or the fact that our bodies are composed of stellar material originating from supernovae — the beautiful interconnectedness of science is not only what motivates future generations, but what drives the development of the new technologies we often take for granted.

The search for ‘truthiness’, Colbert would say, must continue.

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