Why Neil deGrasse Tyson says we're falling into science illiteracy

In October 1995, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hadn't yet become the pop culture science star he is today. Tyson was newly appointed as the interim director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where as a 9-year-old from the Bronx, he'd first seen the stars and glimpsed his future career.

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Then the first exoplanet was discovered, and NBC Nightly News sent a camera crew to interview him as an expert on the discovery and what it meant to have finally found a distant planet around a far-off star. "I have my best professorial answer," Tyson says in a recent interview on the patio of a West Hollywood hotel while in Southern California for a few days. "I said, 'A planet does not orbit the star; they both orbit their common centre of gravity.'

"Which means the star does a little jiggle"-he demonstrates with an Elvis-like hip swivel - "while the planet goes around."

Tyson gave them more scientific explanations of how that led to the discovery and then called friends and family to let them know he'd be making his national news debut that night. "And that evening, all that ended up on the screen was me jiggling my body," he says. "I said, 'Oh, they visited me. They don't want my professorial reply. They want a reply that will work in their world."

An insight hit him like an apple to Sir Isaac Newton's head. Tyson got right to work. "I went home, I stared at the mirror," he says. "I had my wife just scream out - not scream, but chant out topics, places, things in science and in the universe, and I would deliver a three-sentence reply.

"The sentence has to be informative, ideally humorous, and tasty so that you want to tell someone else," Tyson says. "I worked at it.

"We can test it now," he offers, turning to his book publicist and asking her to pick a person, place or thing.

"Taylor Swift," she replies-it's just hours before the release of Swift's "The Life of a Showgirl" album.

"No!" Tyson laughs. "No. About the universe."

"She is my universe," his publicist replies to more laughter. "OK, let's go black holes."