Welcome to our collection of quotes by Bill Nye. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Bill Nye
William Sanford Nye (born November 27, 1955), popularly known as Bill Nye the Science Guy, is an American mechanical engineer, science communicator, and television presenter. He is best known as the host of the science television show Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993–1998), the Netflix show Bill Nye Saves the World (2017–2018), and for his many appearances in popular media as a science educator.
Born in Washington, D.C., Nye began his career as a mechanical engineer for Boeing in Seattle, where he invented a hydraulic resonance suppressor tube used on 747 airplanes. In 1986, he left Boeing to pursue comedy—writing and performing for the local sketch television show Almost Live!, where he regularly conducted wacky science experiments.
Aspiring to become the next Mr. Wizard, Nye successfully pitched the children's television program Bill Nye the Science Guy to Seattle's public television station, KCTS-TV. The show—which proudly proclaimed in its theme song that "science rules!"—ran from 1993 to 1998 in national TV syndication. Known for its "high-energy presentation and MTV-paced segments", the program became a hit among kids and adults, was critically acclaimed, and was nominated for 23 Emmy Awards, winning 19, including Outstanding Performer in Children's Programming for Nye himself.
Nye continued to advocate for science, becoming the CEO of The Planetary Society. He has written two bestselling books on science: Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation (2014) and Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World (2015). He has appeared frequently on other TV shows, including Dancing with the Stars, The Big Bang Theory, and Inside Amy Schumer. He starred in a documentary about his life and science advocacy, Bill Nye: Science Guy, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2017; and, in October 2017, was named a NYT Critic's Pick. In 2017, the Netflix series Bill Nye Saves the World debuted.
There really is for humankind there's really no such thing as race. There's different tribes but not different races. We're all one species.
Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There's something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym.
Hard to find anything lovelier than a tree. They grow at right angles to a tangent of the nominal sphere of the Earth.
Despite being more connected than ever before, we're not particularly generous toward, or understanding of, one another, preferring to hide behind denial and personal bias.
It is my mission to change the world. I'm not kidding: Make no small plans, dream mighty things. I feel if we get enough people engaged in climate change, we will get enough people to change the world. We will revolutionize the way we produce electricity and provide clean water to people.
We cannot predict the behaviour of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt.
There are just two people entitled to refer to themselves as we; one is the editor and the other is the fellow with a tapeworm.
The future of commerce is going to be all electronic. The gold standard was a fine idea, but electronic changes of funds and credits will be the future.
The US Navy has several people on every ship that can navigate by the stars. They don't fool with that.
The thing about a theory in science is it allows you make predictions. Evolutionary theory allows us to predict what apples will taste good next harvest.
Every question leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions.
Anybody who grew up with the space program is a fan of science fiction.
I try to speak plainly and be sympathetic to the idea of religions where people gather in community. They get a sense of people looking out for each other. My claim is that we have a tendency to look out for each other whether or not there is a religion involved.
To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people's trash.
I just want to remind us all there are billions of people in the world who are deeply religious, who get enriched by the wonderful sense of community by their religion. But these same people do not embrace the extraordinary view that the Earth is somehow only 6,000 years old.
In another couple centuries I'm sure that worldview won't even exist. There's no evidence for it.
When or if answers are found, you can be assured those answers will lead to more questions. Is the troubling or wonderful? It depends on your view of your place in nature, your place among the stars; I suppose.
The Big Bang banged, and for some reason we're here. And that's astonishing. And that we can understand that, that's the most astonishing.
America has had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others.
Incidentally, the creationists that I've encountered diligently deny that our Earth's climate is being altered by people. This point of view and teaching is in absolutely no one's best interest. Here's hoping we can work together and preserve the Earth, for us -- us humans.
Altruism is not a moral or religious ideal, no matter what some people might tell you. It is an essential, biological part of who or what we are as a species.
I don't perceive an anti-religious agenda, especially with regard to Christians and Christianity.
I am so old, I entered engineering school with a slide rule. And I left engineering school with a calculator. I can still use a slide rule but it's not a skill you especially need anymore.
If you meet somebody who says he or she has never dreamed of flying, I don't believe you. I mean, they're lying.
For me, the meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future.
I understand that you take the Bible, as written in English, translated many many times over the last three millennia as to be a more accurate, more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us than what I and everybody in here can observe. That, to me, is unsettling.
How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society?
The philosophy of science is inherent in the process. This is to say, you think critically, you draw a conclusion based on evidence, but we all pursue discovery based on our observations. That's where science starts.
If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you're a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else.
Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge.
The debate in Undeniable was nominally about creationism as a viable explanation for what we observe around us. For my side, the debate went very well; I'm not sure what I would change, although I can imagine shortening my answers during the rebuttals, perhaps.
I always liked show biz and got to make a few training films at Boeing.
The theory of evolution was not formally published until shortly before Faraday's death. Evolution was yet to be discovered during Faraday's life. Also, I don't think that Michael Faraday would claim that the Earth is extraordinarily young.
There are two ways to be rich: to have more or need less. It's estimated that we squander about 30 percent of our energy leaving the lights on, the refrigerator door open, and so on. Then there is the enormous amount of food that we expend huge amounts of energy to raise and then throw away.
Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. If one's faith requires one to abandon or ignore natural laws, well, that person is going to have trouble reconciling religion and science. Otherwise, there is no any conflict.
Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.
Not wasting any water bottles is good. Not leaving the lights on is good. Turning the thermostat down in the winter, up in the summer, is good. But the best thing any of us in the developed world, especially in the United States, can be doing is talking about it.
If you decide to become a dancer on Broadway, never say who your favorite dance partner is, because members of the media will presume you never want to dance with anybody else.
Recommending or insisting on abstinence has been completely ineffective.
The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion.
In our evolutionary world, good enough is as good as it gets. There is no reason for nature to work any other way. There is no evolutionary pressure to produce designs that are better than they need to be.
I don't perceive an anti-religious agenda, especially with regard to Christians and Christianity. The issue being debated was creationism, the idea that the Earth is 6,000 years old. As I understand it, this involves the Bible's Old Testament exclusively.
I tell personal stories associated with aspects of the theory, and I hope they are interesting and compelling. I don't feel you're going to change a grownup's mind in one reading. People have to be exposed to scientific ideas over and over again for years. It's also not a textbook.
Along with the evidence of common sense, researchers have proven scientifically that humans are all one people. We're a lot like dogs in that regard. If a Great Dane interacts (can we say interact?) with a Chihuahua, you get a dog.
Researchers have proven that scientifically, that all humans are one people.
The world's going to change climatically. We just want to control the change. We want to have a high quality of life for billions of people as we pass through this era.
Promoting a religious agenda that is to apply to every citizen is inconsistent with our laws in the US. It seems to me that your community and mine can live and work together without conflict.
The natural world is a package deal; you don't get to select which facts you like and which you don't.
When we explore the cosmos, we come to believe and prove that we can solve problems that have never been solved. It brings out the best in us. Space exploration imbues everyone with an optimistic view of the future.
The strange thing about grinding that might surprise many people is that you can grind things and shape them using materials that are generally somewhat softer than the thing you're grinding and shaping.
We are just a speck, on a speck, orbiting a speck, in the corner of a speck, in the middle of nowhere.
You and I are made of stardust. We are the stuff of exploded stars. We are therefore, at least 1 way that the Universe knows itself. That, to me, is astonishing.
Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That's just crazy.
If you just take a single human and put him or her in the forest he or she might not do very well without some sort of education which he got or she got from some tribe.
There really is no such thing as race. We all came from Africa. We are all of the same stardust. We are all going to live and die on the same planet, a Pale Blue Dot in the vastness of space. We have to work together.
I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that's because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me.
From an evolutionary standpoint you can't just wipe everything out and start over, and I don't think you can do it in the school system either.
Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.
People get a lot out of being religious. They have strong senses of community and mutual support. So, what's not to love there?
Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There's something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym.
To try to really land a spacecraft really on another world is really difficult, and if we lose that ability, it's going to be heartbreaking.
A two-and-a-half-year-old is pretty experienced at making a mess, anyway.
I've got no problem with anybody's religion. But if you go claiming the Earth is only 10,000 years old, that's just wrong.
As a kid at the World's Fair in 1965, I missed seeing the big global population clock roll over from 2,999,999,999 to 3 billion -- I was really disappointed.
I always liked show biz and got to make a few training films at Boeing. Soon after, I got the idea of a science show geared toward kids, around ages 8 through 12.
We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.
What makes the United States great, the reason people wanted to live in the United States, move here still, is because of our ability to innovate.
Tax dollars intended for science education must not be used to teach creationism as any sort of real explanation of nature, because any observation or process of inference about our origin and the nature of the universe disproves creationism in every respect.
It's important that our children are raised to be educated, well-rounded tax-paying citizens that understand the importance of technology and science.
When one shows up in jeans and a T-shirt, I strongly feel that the audience reacts in a very different way than when you show up in a sport coat and a tie.
You're dressed in a tuxedo, you wear a bow tie. A bow tie with a tuxedo is more formal than a straight tie with a tuxedo.
Winter lingered so long in the lap of Spring that it occasioned a great deal of talk.
I like to regard myself as someone who's capable of critical thought, that is to say, who can evaluate claims.
If you have this idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, you are denying, if you will, everything that you can touch and see. You're not paying attention to what's happening in the universe around you.
Unlike science, creationism cannot predict anything, and it cannot provide satisfactory answers about the past.
If you're an adult and you choose not to believe in science, fine, but please don't prevent your children from learning about it and letting them draw their own conclusions.
If you look back on all the teachers that you liked, I am sure you will find they were very entertaining.
One of the drawbacks of English is you can't spell things by hearing them.
My father was a very good Boy Scout. He was very skilled with knots, and he showed me how to tie a bow tie.
There's nothing I believe in more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering, for a better tomorrow, for all humankind.
Evolution is a theory, and it's a theory that you can test. We've tested evolution in many ways. You can't present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.
