Writing What Moves Me

The piece that I chose that moved me was a speech given by Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. His speech was actually an answer to the question “in your years as an astrophysicist, what is the most astounding fact that you have come to know”. Since this was on the spot and vocal, not much attention can be paid to rhetorical devices, because nothing was planned, but without planning, Dr. Tyson was still able to move me in a way only music has matched.

            For the first half of the speech, Dr. Tyson gave the audience a brief history of the origin of life, as defined by the big bang theory and primordial soup theory. What I really liked about his introduction was the polymerization of story-telling and scientific knowledge that he put into describing the birth of the universe as we know it. Tyson said “the atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures”. The doctor was simply describing nuclear fusion, but he was able to do so with vivid imagery. He said that “crucibles cooked light elements into heavy elements”. To an upcoming scientist, I could just picture a large bowl (which is a crucible, in chemistry) in which the nuclei of atoms were being fused together. Even though this is not what happened in the slightest, Tyson gave a clear picture of a process that produced everything we know. To someone who is not science-oriented, a crucible would assume its primary annotation, and the person would still be able to picture elements being cooked. Later on, Tyson said that the stars “went unstable in their later years” and that they “collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy”. In this sentence, the speaker created great imagery with the words “collapsed”, “exploded”, and “scattering”. The word that came to my attention in that assertion was “guts”. This man, world-renowned for astrophysics, still considered himself human enough to use as elementary a word as “guts”. This diction epitomized everything we’ve talked about in English over the past couple weeks: speaking sincerely. With as much fame as Dr. Tyson has, he still stayed humble enough to use a normal vocabulary to describe an extremely complex process. A place where the speaker used some rhetoric was toward the middle, when he said “we are part of this universe; we are in the universe”. By utilizing parallelism, Tyson was able to reinforce the face that we (humans) are in this vast universe. This reinforcement paid off when the speaker said “the universe is in us”. This created a deep feeling, because I had never thought about the myself in relation to the universe in this way. Dr. Tyson has demonstrated the type of wonder I want to have for the universe throughout my entire childhood, and through this speech, he has allowed me to appreciate the universe that much more, as well as my own life, because he made me realize that my atoms also came from stars.