David Weinberger interviews Physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson

David Weinberger interviews Physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Organizing the Universe with Physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Disclaimer: I love Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he rocks my astrophysical world.

This is actually the transcript from a conversation between David Weinberger and Neil DeGrasse Tyson on May 22, 2007

David and Neil discuss the evolution of organizing the universe. In the past we believed that there was absolute organization in Nature and that we men could put everything into neat static categories. We used to believe that the disorganization was divine intervention. No one today would say “This is how the universe is ordered. What we would say is “This is how we are ordering the universe for our own benefit.” Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Neil and David also discuss the re-categorization of Pluto. think the point is that we can organize the natural world all we want but as our knowledge grows we will have to re-arrange the categories, and I think that is okay.

If you are interested here some links to more Neil DeGrasse Tyson content

twitter account http://twitter.com/neiltyson & http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/

My thoughts on Everything is Miscellaneous:

I found EM to be a slow read. Weinberger is a very clear and concise writer but the subject matter is somewhat repetitive. I related to the section in the book about photographs. My husband is a disorganized amateur photographer so we have about 2 million photographs scattered throughout our digital world. I wish that we could have started tagging our collection from the beginning; I think it’s too late to start. I also enjoyed the part about Wikipedia. I have definitely considered net neutrality but never in the context of Wikipedia. I have always believed that history is written by the winners but, in the case of Wikipedia it is written by the most persistent. I also found the writing about the Dewey Decimal System very interesting. I agree that it is very arcane but it is probably impossible to change. I also enjoyed looking back at the card catalogue system. My most distinct memory of the card catalogue is from Kindergarten. I don’t know when the system changed from card catalogues to digital but it is fantastic. I cannot imagine doing all of this research “the old fashioned way”.