Over the past week, Cosmos host and all-round science hero Neil deGrasse Tyson was in Australia for a series of live shows. In between talks, the team from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Science Faculty interviewed him about life, the Universe and chocolate biscuits. And he revealed a whole heaps of cool insights into his life in the process. Like the fact he didn't really even see the night sky until he was nine years old, and that he was a passionate wrestler and dancer before he became an astrophysicist (seriously).
The reason deGrasse Tyson was so slow to get an appreciation for the stars is that he grew up in the Bronx, where he saw like "a dozen" stars when he looked up. It wasn't until he visited a local planetarium that he realised there were actually countless suns burning throughout the Universe, and his interest in space was piqued.
He also provides some pretty fascinating perspective on what time really is, and how we relate to it, and delivers this incredible quote: "Time makes us all a prisoner of the present, forever transitioning from our own past into an unknown future."
This is particularly disturbing to him, he explains above, because humans are able to move so freely throughout every other coordinate: up and down, forwards and backwards.
There's also a whole lot of talk in there about the potential of life on other planets (we love you, Kepler!), his passions outside astrophysics, and why he thinks people need to stop looking at social media and up to the night sky instead.
But the one thing he really wants people to know about science? "The Universe is knowable," deGrasse Tyson explains in the video above. "And one need not appeal to mystical, magical forces to account for things."
Just when you think you can't love the guy anymore, he uses trigonometry to explain Australia's famous Tim Tam Slam better than we ever could. For the uninitiated, the Tim Tam slam is where you turn an incredibly delicious chocolate biscuit into a straw by melting its centre into a liquid crack. Don't take our word for it, deGrasse Tyson agrees.
Check out the full interview above and get even more inspired by one of the most passionate science communicators of our time.