Star Power

"We used New York City as a learning lab," says Sunchita Tyson, his mother, who worked for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services before she retired. "My older son would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My daughter would spend time riding horses" -- a surprising number of parks keep stables -- "and Neil was always interested in science."

She and her husband, a sociologist by training who has worked in New York City government and taught at Harvard, scoured bookstores for remaindered volumes for Neil. His younger sister was enlisted to help haul telescope parts to the roof.

"I was his Sherpa," says Lynn Tyson, an executive with Dell Computers. She was also, it seems, his first student. "Everything was an experiment when you were around him. He'd be making dinner and he'd ask you a question like, 'Why is the sky that color? Why is algebra the way it is?' "

Did he ever just, you know, give you a noogie? Like a normal big brother?

"Oh, there were noogies. And spiders in my bed. I think I'm still afraid of insects because of that."

At 14, Tyson won a week-long trip to Senegal on a boat filled with scientists, all seeking the perfect view of a solar eclipse. As soon as he returned, he left for the Mojave Desert, home to what was billed as the only astronomy summer camp in the country, to which he'd won a scholarship. He showed up sporting an outfit you'd expect on a colonial British explorer, circa 1850.

"It was very 'Dr. Livingston, I presume,' " recalls Joe Patterson, now a professor of astronomy at Columbia, then a counselor at Camp Uraniborg. "What I remember is that he seemed to be curious about everything. My brother was at this camp, fixing cars, and Neil hadn't spent a lot of time studying cars, so he just asked one question after another about them."

Tyson attended Bronx High School of Science, one of New York's magnet schools, where he was the captain of the wrestling team. This was the mid-'70s, and virtually all of his friends were at least dabbling in drugs. Tyson was never tempted. His head was filled with enough mind-blowing facts -- Saturn can float! Some sunspots are larger than Earth! -- that mind-blowing drugs seemed redundant.

"It was never a choice," he says. "I never stood in judgment of anyone else, but I just never saw the value in altering my perception of the world."

He takes a break from the interview to spend 25 minutes on the phone, offering career advice to a student at Ohio University whom he's never met and who recently got in touch via e-mail. ("Arizona is kind of a party school," he says at one point, surveying the student's options for a PhD. "But the sky is really clear there.") When it's noted that 25 minutes is a rather generous helping of time, Tyson goes back to his own senior year in high school. He was visiting Cornell as a prospective student, and Carl Sagan gave him a lengthy tour of his lab. When it was time for the young Tyson to head back to the Bronx, it had started to snow.

"He gave me his phone number and he said, 'If the bus doesn't get through, call me and you can stay with us,' " Tyson remembers. "I'll always remember that hospitality. That's the benchmark when I deal with students."

Despite that hospitality, Tyson chose Harvard instead of Cornell because he had carefully determined that it was home to a brighter cluster of astrophysicists. "I had a stack of Scientific American magazines and I looked at the author's notes of every physicist and astrophysicist, to see where they were undergraduates, graduate students, where they taught. When I got done with that list, Harvard was at the top. But I assure you, if it had been Toogalooga State, that's where I would have gone."