Tyson Attended the Bronx High School

For this assignment, I chose to use Neil deGrasse Tyson. I felt the best way to write a dictionary entry of this sort would be to present the four causes in reverse order (i.e. final, effective, formal, material). [1] Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author, and science communicator/popularizer. Tyson is also the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. Tyson has written several books for the general public, including Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries and The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet. He also hosted the science series Nova ScienceNow (2006-2011) and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

Tyson attended the Bronx High School of Science from 1972-1976, where he was allowed to take astronomy courses offered by the Hayden Planetarium. There, Tyson met Dr. Mark Chartrand III, director of the planetarium at the time, who served as his first intellectual role model. After graduating, Tyson attended Harvard University, where he majored in physics and earned a B.A. in 1980. Tyson received an M.A. in astronomy from University of Texas at Austin in 1983, and a PhD in astrophysics from Columbia University in 1991. Tyson was born to human parents Cyril deGrasse Tyson and Sunchita Maria Tyson. As a human, he has an erect posture and bipedal locomotion. Tyson also possesses a brain that allows for abstract reasoning, problem solving, and sociability. Like his fellow humans, Tyson is capable of using tools and technologies to better understand the world.

As a human, Tyson is mostly made up of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, as well as other elements in smaller amounts. His body composition in terms of types of material primarily consists of fat, muscle, nervous tissue, hormones, bones, connective tissue, and bodily fluids (blood, urine, etc.). At the micro-level, he is made up of trillions of cells, which are the basic structures for all living organisms, providing structure for the body, taking in nutrients from food, and carrying out important functions. [2] The final cause segment provides a pretty nice brief introduction, but what follows gets stilted as the format of the four causes makes it difficult to add details that don't fit the mold. Moreover, the material and formal causes are self-evident in the final and effective causes (i.e. there are no non-human astrophysicists or authors).

One important thing that becomes clear in this assignment is that getting a good sense of who someone is depends on emphasizing their unique traits, not the ways in which they are the same as everybody else. [3]I think Aristotle's theory of four causes is useful, but more for inanimate objects. Living things (especially humans) are far too complicated to break down into these four fairly delineated causes. In the case of living organisms, we need to look at other ways of knowing outside of causal links.

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