All Entries in the "Memories" Category
Gracias
No sabría expresar debidamente hasta que punto ver Cosmos fue importante para mí. Entonces era muy pequeño y pienso que me dio elementos para desarrollar muchos de los mejores aspectos de mi identidad. No me dedico al ámbito científico pero ¿quién puede pasarse de una visión del universo como la que nos explicó Sagan? ¿Quién puede pasarse de una visión crítica, honesta e informada sobre el mundo que nos rodea?
Sin duda hay miles de personas en la misma situación: la labor divulgativa de Sagan ha mejorado el mundo.
G. Centenera
Popularity: 3% [?]
Sagan
A decade
Ten years. I remember that morning ten years ago when the clock radio woke me up by telling me Carl Sagan had died. It was local news; he was here, at the Hutch; we knew he was here, and why, and we exchanged worried gossip. I knew people who knew people who said things looked grim. Then I woke up to the radio that morning – I remember the fury, the no no no no, the damn and hell.
He’s a sort of parent of B&W, Carl Sagan is. As is Dawkins. The two formed a kind of pair in my mind in the mid-90s, and I was oddly pleased to see what Dawkins said of Sagan in his tribute in Skeptical Inquirer:
My candidate for planetary ambassador, my own nominee to present our credentials in galactic chancelleries, can be none other than Carl Sagan himself. He is wise, humane, polymathic, gentle, witty, well-read, and incapable of composing a dull sentence”…I met him only once, so my feeling of desolation and loss at his death is based entirely on his writings. Carl Sagan was one of the great literary stylists of our age, and he did it by giving proper weight to the poetry of science. It is hard to think of anyone whom our planet can so ill afford to lose.
Just what I thought. Especially right now, we could and can ill afford to lose him. (Look how bad things have gotten since then! So you see what I mean. Never mind about correlation and causation; you know what I mean.)
It was The Demon-Haunted World, especially, that was a kind of parent of B&W. It got a lot of attention, and Sagan did a lot of interviews. I taped a couple of them, on ‘Fresh Air’ and ‘Science Friday’; they were small educations in skepticism by themselves. The book and the interviews coincided with various encounters with New Agey people I kept stumbling into around that time, and the result was a heightened interest in pseudoscience and woolly thinking that has stuck to me like glue ever since. (Thus it is a little dizzying to see that Little Atoms is doing a special tribute broadcast this Friday with Ann Druyan and A C Grayling and several associates of Sagan’s. I’ve been on Little Atoms, thinks I to myself. Full circle, kind of thing.)
A lot of people date the beginnings of their interest in science to a tv programme or book or magazine column of Carl Sagan’s. He got a lot done in 62 years.
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Ophelia Benson, Editor
Butterflies and Wheels
www.butterfliesandwheels.com
Demon Haunted World
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Popularity: 1% [?]
Blog-a-thon Post Style
Joel Achenbach has blog-a-thon post in his Washington Post blog today. Check it out, it also links to a post he did on Sagan earlier this year. Here’s what he posted today – his Style Section excerpt from December ’96.
Carl Sagan warmed the universe.
His cosmos was not cold and dark and impenetrable. He believed the universe was surely filled with life, intelligent life, innumerable civilizations unseen. In his younger, dreamier days, he thought advanced extraterrestrials might know how to cruise the galaxies in ramjets — spaceships with massive openings that scoop up hydrogen atoms from interstellar dust clouds and use them for fuel. In Sagan’s crowded cosmos, even empty space wasn’t empty.
He told The Washington Post earlier this year: “Organic matter, the stuff of life, is absolutely everywhere. Comets are made one-quarter of organic matter. Many worlds in the outer solar system are coated with dark organic matter. On Titan, organic matter is falling from the skies like manna from Heaven. The cold diffuse interstellar gas is loaded with organic matter. There doesn’t seem to be an impediment about the stuff of life.”
The world needed Sagan, who died yesterday of pneumonia at the age of 62. We have needed Sagan ever since Copernicus removed us from the center of the universe. It is a perplexing fact of human life that we live on a rock that orbits an ordinary star on the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy in a universe that is indescribably large. Sagan knew how to describe it, to convey our humble position without demeaning us. With Sagan we felt in the right place.
Sagan said, “Everybody starts out as a scientist.” Every child has the scientist’s sense of wonder and awe. Too often we beat it out of the kid. “The job of a science popularizer,” Sagan said, “is to penetrate through the teachings that tell people they’re too stupid to understand science.”
Popularity: 4% [?]
Carl Sagan ten years on – Contact film/book differences
Huge props to Carl Sagan, my parents, sisters, and my bro-in-law Dale for turning me on to science and critical thought back when I was a wee lad with an even worse haircut. A “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” cosmos is a wondrous and bewildering enough thing without going over the edge and looking for the invisible man in the sky.
I always found it interesting that they changed the ending of the movie Contact to diverge from the book. I wonder what Ann Druyan was thinking when she signed off on this or if Carl was aware of it too.
In the movie it seems that Ellie Arroway is made to accept that faith is the only thing that will vindicate her. She comes back from her journey to the aliens with absolutely no solid evidence. “Hope you believe me ‘cuz I got nothing here. Bupkiss. Not even a t-shirt.”
In the book she is given inside information about the creation of the universe and uses a supercomputer to prove the existence of a universal designer. Science and faith are united in a way that even an atheist like myself found very satisfying and imaginative.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Arrogancia Sin Fundemento
(En memoria de Carl Sagan)
En uno de sus interesantes libros de divulgación científica –LOS DRAGONES DEL EDÉN— el astrónomo Carl Sagan nos ofrece una figura para concebir adecuadamente nuestro “puesto” en la vida del universo:
“Para expresar la cronología cósmica nada más sugerente que comprimir los quince mil millones de años de vida que se asignan al universo (o, por lo menos, a su conformación actual desde que acaeciera el Big Bang) al intervalo de un solo año. Si tal hacemos, cada mil millones de años de la historia terrestre equivaldrían a unos veinticuatro días de este hipotético año cósmico, y un segundo del mismo correspondería a 475 revoluciones efectivas de la Tierra alrededor del sol”.
En esta imagen, el Big Bang (la “gran explosión” inicial) ocurre el 1 de enero; el origen de la galaxia de la Vía Láctea, el 1 de mayo; el origen del sistema solar, el 9 de septiembre; la formación de la Tierra, el 14 de septiembre; el origen de la vida en la Tierra, aproximadamente el 25 de septiembre; la formación de las rocas más antiguas conocidas, el 2 de octubre; la época de los fósiles más antiguos, el 9 de octubre. Los dinosaurios hacen su aparición en Nochebuena.
En toda esta evolución el ser humano no hace acto de presencia hasta las 22:30 horas de la víspera de Año Nuevo. La historia escrita ocupa los últimos 10 segundos del 31 de diciembre, y el espacio transcurrido desde el ocaso de la Edad Media hasta la época en que vivimos es de poco más de un segundo.
¿No es para pensarlo profundamente? A la vista de lo casi nada que somos los seres humanos en un mundo antiquísimo, no queda más que reconocer que debemos inclinarnos por la humildad. ¡Qué ridícula resulta nuestra soberbia manifestada cuando nos dedicamos a acumular bienes materiales, descuidando la relación con nuestros seres queridos; cuando ávidos de dominar y conseguir poder despreciamos y pisoteamos a nuestros semejantes; cuando nos dejamos vencer por los prejuicios y rechazamos a quienes tienen otra manera de comportarse; cuando nos creemos poseedores de la verdad absoluta y no toleramos a quienes piensan de modo diferente; cuando por ganar dinero destruimos el mundo sin tomar en cuenta que nos fue dado en préstamo por nuestros descendientes; cuando predicando falsos Absolutos e idolatrando dioses por nosotros mismos inventados decretamos identidades impuras y nos dedicamos a la caza de brujas; cuando nos convertimos en señores de la guerra y abrimos las puertas al terror, la violencia y el fanatismo!
El calendario cósmico de Sagan nos enseña que no hay fundamento para nuestra arrogancia. Es hora de preocuparnos de veras por cómo estamos haciendo las cosas.
Rogelio Rodríguez Muñoz
Popularity: 4% [?]
Gracias
Gracias, eso es lo que me gustaria poder decirle al Sr. Sagan si pudiera hablar con el, GRACIAS por su manera de explicar, por hacer que la ciencia parezca un juego y hacerla tan interesante y atractiva.
A partir de Cosmos para mi fue una nueva etapa, con mi padre, madre y hermana menor nos sentabamos a ver cada episodio de Cosmos y realmente quedabamos atrapados por su magnetismo. Luego lei todos sus libros y tenia la sensacion de que lo conocia, de hecho cuando el Sr. Sagan murio senti un gran dolor, fue la primera y unica vez que senti la perdida de una persona que nunca habia conocido como si fuera un familiar cercano.
Realmente se fue un GRANDE con todas las letras.
ESpero que desde donde este, seguramente en ese infinito que el tambien sabia describir, nos este mirando y se ponga contento por este tributo que todos los que lo admiramos en el mundo le estamos dedicando.
Gracias
Marcelo Suarez
Popularity: 3% [?]
A Love Affair & A Thank You
Well, today is the day. Not only does today mark the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan’s passing and the beginning of a new moon, it is the day that a certain someone returns from overseas and into my arms. Dr. Sagan is partly responsible for this lasting love affair of mine, and after thinking all week about what to write today for the blog-a-thon, this seems appropriate.
Cosmos first aired a year before I was born, and so I didn’t come to know Carl’s face until college, when my dear friend and roommate began borrowing the series from the public library on VHS. At this point, I had a couple of the doctor’s books under my belt and an amateur passion about science. My introduction to the Cosmos television series coincided with the beginning of a relationship with a certain young lady, and those late nights on the living room couch – the VCR humming, Vangelis swirling about us, and Carl’s entrancing enunciation – helped to seal a bond which continues to grow after four years. Dr. Sagan helped us share the wonder of existence with each other, and for this (among countless other things) I am immensely grateful to him.
Nine days ago, while daydreaming in my cubicle and chatting with Bryan H., we decided to start celebratingsagan.com in order to commemorate this important man’s passing. I can’t express what a fulfilling project it’s been. I want to thank everyone who has contributed; I share your sentiments whole-heartedly. I also want to give a special thanks to Joel for conceiving of today’s blog-a-thon, to Nick Sagan for helping to spread the word, to boingboing for their post yesterday (surely the biggest reason we’ve been getting so many hits), and to Ann Druyan for her encouragement.
Carl articulated something that no other scientist has managed to do. All chemistry and physics aside, WE ARE STAR STUFF. The fact of that sentence still gives me a profound sense of security. It is a timeless four word poem for all of humanity. For an atheist like myself (albeit a reluctant one some days), reading and rereading Carl’s words are akin to prayer. Feeling small, it seems to me, is the beginning of understanding the truth about who and what we are. We are star stuff. We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.
Thank you, Carl.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Agradecimiento
Los espectadores de habla hispana también disfrutamos de su serie Cosmos y de sus libros traducidos a nuestro idioma, por ello me permito enviar mi recuerdo al hombre que nos abrió la puerta a la astronomía en nuestro idioma nativo.
De su mano aprendimos sobre los misterios del universo y que las ciencia no necesariamente debe ser para unas pocas mentes elegidas, él nos enseño que las ciencias son para toda la humanidad, para cada ser viviente, se tomó el trabajo de explicarnos de manera sencilla muchos de los postulados científicos de la época, siempre creyó que podíamos entender si se nos explicaba de manera suficientemente sencilla y el hecho de que a 10 años de que nos dejara sin su presencia física miles de personas en casi todas partes del mundo lo recuerden y lo veneren.
Ojala hubiera muchos como él, aunque siempre creí que era un ser único y lamentablemente irrepetible.
Vaya este recuerdo de parte de alguien que creció de la mano de Carl en el interés por las ciencias.
Carl aún vive en nuestras mentes y en nuestros corazones y su legado alcanzara a nuestros hijos y nuestros nietos.
“Moriré el día que muera el último de mis amigos” J. L. Borges.
Tomate©
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Popularity: 3% [?]
Carl Sagan
The following excertp is from Dean W. Armstrong‘s look at Dr. Sagan’s roll as an astronomer at the University of Chicago.
He was a student here at Chicago; he was, as the picture indicates, president of the University of Chicago Astronomical Society (now known as the Ryerson Astronomical Society). After his short stay in the college he went to the Astronomy department and left a Ph.D.
I often wonder what the dismal atmosphere of a coal-smoked Chicago was like for astronomy in the early fifties–and whether the old cranky telescope (fifty-two years old then, in 1952) did anything to inspire future thoughts. His logs are short, and there never seemed to be much observing or possibility of observing. See here for a scan of a sample logbook page. Or here for the entire text of the 1952-1964 logbook.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Hello from Japan
I was watching Cosmos after a hard day’s work at J-List last night as I saw the post on Mr. Sagan’s “meinichi,” the Japanese word for the anniversary of a person’s dying — and I’d just done a post on what “meinichi” means a few days ago. I credit Mr. Sagan for installing a sense of wonder in me that I’ll have all my life.
Peter Payne
Popularity: 1% [?]
