If you happen to be among those people who dismiss science with a wave of a hand and a remark that science has its own specious agenda; if you believe politicians who are lacking even a glancing acquaintance with science over those people who devote their life to it, congratulations! Your lack of curiosity and your distrust in the scientific method just saved you anywhere from $45 to $150, which is the price of admission to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson speak on “Cosmic Collisions” at 7:30 p.m. March 25 at the Terrace Theater.

No one has brought the farthest reaches of science, particularly in the fields of astrophysics and quantum mechanics, down to the level of the common and moderately informed person more entertainingly and effectively than Tyson, who picked up the science-as-pop-culture ball following the death of astronomer Carl Sagan and who passed Stephen Hawking in bringing clear explanations of complicated theories to those of us whose entanglements with science might have peaked in seventh grade when we made a Styrofoam model of a paramecium with pipe-cleaner cilia.

Tyson, who studied his way up through the public schools of New York City to a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard and a doctorate in astrophysics from Columbia, has published several entertaining and lucid books on science, most recently “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.”

In his Long Beach lecture, “Cosmic Collisions,” Tyson will explain how things that run into each other is a big part of life on the planet, to creating our moon, to killing dinosaurs (thereby paving the way for human beings to succeed), to what could eventually destroy the planet. In Tyson’s hands, collisions are cool!

Tickets for Tyson’s appearance go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday. You can purchase them at the Terrace box office or at Ticketmaster.