Lecture by Neil deGrasse Tyson on the anatomy of science and its role in decoding nature, exploring social, cultural and political forces that shape scientific inquiry.
Neil deGrasse Tyson brings his lecture Science as a Way of Knowing to the State Theatre on Sunday, November 8, 2026. It's billed as a talk he's never presented in Minneapolis before, so if you've seen him here in the past, this is new material.
He describes the lecture as an anatomy of science: what it is, how it works, and why it works, and why it remains the most successful means of decoding nature ever devised. That's the core of it—taking science apart to see the gears turning rather than just talking about the results. From there, Tyson looks at the social, cultural, and political forces that either push that frontier forward or hold it back, and what those forces mean for the future of nations and our species. It's a wide-angle view that starts with the mechanics of the scientific method and ends with the bigger picture of where we're headed.
The talk is framed as a community- and family-friendly engagement, and it brings Tyson's approachable storytelling to Minnesota. He's known for making complex ideas easy to follow, and this one is aimed at a broad audience—it invites you to think about science literacy, the act of inquiry, and the role science plays in everyday life, even if you don't spend your days in a lab. It's less of a technical deep dive and more of a conversation about how we understand the world.
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The lecture runs from 7:30 PM to 10:30 PM at the State Theatre, 805 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55402.
