NEIL deGRASSE TYSON

Host of StarTalk, director of the Hayden Planetarium

Interview by Cliff Ransom

To be an expert means you are on the frontier, making discoveries, thinking thoughts never before dreamed of. I’m an expert in astrophysics.

I don’t generally share opinions. It may not feel that way because I speak passionately about what I know, but if you look at my tweets and books, I hardly ever express opinions—because I don’t care if you have them. I don’t care a rat’s ass. As an educator and as a scientist, I care only that you are scientifically literate.

The more informed you are, the more empowered you are to think for yourself, and the more representative our democracy will be.

Don’t come to me to debate whether climate change exists. If you’re coming to me in that fashion, you do not understand how and why science works. You’re expressing an opinion, and I’m expressing a fact.

Successful people are driven without regard to their social life, love life, or the opinions of others. Every one of them has a story saying, “Here’s a list of people who said I should do something safe.”

To be genius is to be misunderstood, but to be misunderstood is not necessarily to be genius.

I am the consequence of my life experience. Everything that has happened to me has summed to be what I am. If I jumped back in time, I would derail that learning curve, so I don’t have any urge to go to my younger self and say, “Do this, not that.” What would that mean? Making mistakes contributes to your wisdom.

It’s not that we fear technology, it’s that we occasionally take it for granted, and when we do, we discount the brilliance and work that went into it. You’ll say, “Oh, we don’t need to increase the funding on science; I’ve got my smartphone. We don’t need to go into space; I’ve got weather.com.” Well, where the hell do you think you got the image of the hurricane that just tore up Galveston, Texas?

If you want a career in science and technology, well, you better hang out with some geeks. Go ahead. They are a friendly people. They’re not talking about the clothing you are wearing. They’re not talking about your waistline. It’s just, “Who are you, and do you have interesting things to say?”

One of my
favorite lines comes from poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”

No matter what you do, you need to be able to fail and know how to recover from it in order to one day succeed. There is no successful person who has never failed. Think of the lessons you learn every time you fail. It’s the people who ignore those lessons who basically check out of that contest permanently.

The fastest way to end a career in science and technology is if you’re guilty of fraud. No one will listen to anything you publish thereafter. The greatest statement you can make to a scientist is to pay no attention to his or her science.

When you are first in the world to know something, there’s nothing like it. There is no salary, there’s no car you can drive to substitute for that feeling.

LIMOR FRIED

Founder of electronics-hobbyist company Adafruit

Interview by Sophie Bushwick

When I was about 7 or 8, I saw a bunch of balloons stuck to the ceiling at a local mall. No one could reach them, so I went home and constructed a mechanical arm. It was then, after going back and retrieving all the balloons, that I realized engineering was for me.

I decided early on that it’s only work if you’d rather be doing something else. I really didn’t want to wake up early and go to an office with a bunch of people telling me what to do. So I started selling the kits I made with a simple PayPal button on a website I built.

You can create a good business and a good cause, but only if you’re willing and able to contribute something. For instance, I publish hundreds of free open-source repositories that help people make their electronics dreams come true. They also become customers. They become contributors. By making and sharing open-source hardware and software, we’re putting value back into the system.

Tinkering, building, and sharing make a lot of great connections for people. There are tons of friends I’ve met because we were both tinkering on something and we found each other. I like bringing together as many different people as possible, solving interesting problems, and using technology to make the world a better place.

A DIY project teaches something more important than a skill like soldering or coding—it teaches problem solving. With electronics, you might need to rethink assumptions on how something physically works, or some code that needs rewriting. It’s more than physical. It’s more than digital.

Purchasing something isn’t the same as making something—you have a more intimate relationship when you make something and share it. The physical things don’t matter as much as the experience and the time you spend learning something or sharing that time with others.

My advice for aspiring DIYers who love tinkering but know nothing about electronics: Pick up an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and dive in—we have about 800 tutorials to get you started.

If you want to create
something amazing There are people out there to help you. We’re all interconnected, via the internet. We’re not solo acts isolated in workshops.

I don’t really take vacations, but I do take days off. On Sunday, I took the day off and made a cellphone and GPS data logger that publishes my location to a new service we’re working on called adafruit.io. I rode my bike 10 or so miles, and it worked out great. This week, I’ll send the files off to the PCB (printed circuit board) house, and soon this will be a new product.

If I want to motivate a teenager to put down a smartphone and create something, I usually ask what’s annoying to them. And they’ll say that their parents or friends watch TV shows they don’t like. So I’ll suggest they build a TV-B-Gone kit—it’s a fun and mostly harmless kit that, once built, turns off TVs. Nothing motivates a teenager like mischief.

People ask why I chose this hair color. It’s apex predator pink. It chose me.

DEAN KAMEN

Inventor and entrepreneur, founder of FIRST Robotics Competition

Interview by Jennifer Bogo

People used to say to me, I can’t believe you quit school and risked everything to start a company. And I answer them: I risked everything I had because I had nothing.

Very early in my teens I decided to educate myself. I realized I was never going to be a very good student because I didn’t like teachers judging me by what I thought were arbitrary standards. I decided I’d let the world judge me by whether I could do something of value—solve a problem or build something. And if people wanted it, they’d pay for it. And that’s when I decided I’d be an inventor and entrepreneur.

I’d rather fail at trying to do something really big than succeed at being mediocre.

Start inventing as early as you can because, compared with most things, it’s more likely to take you to places you can’t predict and that you can’t schedule and you can’t budget for. Do all that when you can tolerate the insecurity.

Kids are full of imagination and much more willing to fail. Just watch a 3-year-old. They poke everything, and if it hurts they don’t poke it again. They learn how to stand up and walk and talk, all at a breathtaking rate. Try to teach an adult a foreign language.

School frequently isn’t testing whether you understand something but whether you’re familiar with it. What’s Newton’s second law? You say F=ma, and you get an A. That does not reflect a deep understanding of Newtonian mechanics, or electrodynamics if it’s Maxwell’s equations, or thermodynamics if it’s the first or second law. That the integral of dQ over T is entropy is a nontrivial thing to understand.

FIRST is an unabashed success: about 40,000 teams, in 80 countries, competing in engineering contests, including an extremely popular robot-building challenge. It has 125,000 volunteers and 3,500 corporate sponsors. Everybody is hugely proud of it. But by the standards of our culture, compared with the Super Bowl or a big rock concert, I’m dismally disappointed. I always believe that by next year it’ll be so obvious what a great thing this is that it will be available to every kid on the planet.

The Bible said the meek shall inherit the earth; I personally think it’s the geek who shall inherit the earth.

When’s the right age to become an inventor? I’d say in the womb. seriously, Kids don’t have bred-in anxieties about trying to avoid failure.the younger, the better.

We should embrace all those people who don’t get geeks and make them part of our culture. Because a world that has only a few geeks, and those geeks are not leading the rest of the world in the right direction, is going to be an ugly world.

I would say to all these kids, “Keep it up, and although it’s tough work and sometimes you fail, and sometimes people might take shots at you when you do fail, don’t let it bother you.”

If you’re lucky enough to understand and appreciate tech, you’ve got to spread that wealth. You’ve got to get more kids capable of being part of a future in which the world will be prepared to solve its ever more complex problems.