All Entries Tagged With: "excerpt"

Three Bedrooms – A Tribute to Carl Sagan

Scott Thompson emailed us the link to his blog-a-thon post, which is a worthwhile read. Here’s a excerpt:

When I was a young teen in 1980 there were three televisions in the house: One was in the small family room, and was typically shared by my parents. Another was in their bedroom – used primarily by my father to watch Kansas City Chiefs football games on crisp fall weekends. In my own inner sanctum – my bedroom, I had a little 13-inch GE black-and-white set, which I mostly used for watching PBS and Star Trek. It was on my little television that I learned about the coming premiere of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

Cosmos so intrigued me that I was motivated to leave the electronics and Lego and book-strewn confines of my own bedroom in search of a color television. I knew I needed to see stars and galaxies, nebulae and molecules in vivid color. I persuaded my parents to let me use their bedroom color television to watch the series, no small task given their dubious view of science-fiction, their abhorrence of evolution and general mystification regarding science. I eventually won the argument with assurances of the series’ educational value and reassurance of “non-sinful” content. Every week, I’d find myself plopped on my parents white king-sized comforter, propped-chin-in-hands, waiting for the next astonishing (my favorite Cosmos word) installment to propel my mind far from my pedestrian Ozarks home.

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Sagan’s Rationale for Human Spaceflight

Alex Michael Bonnici brings to our attention an article in The Space Review called Sagan’s rationale for human spaceflight by Michael Huang. Here’s a short excerpt:

In medieval times, some people kept a human skull in their home to remind themselves of mortality, and to view their priorities against the big picture of life and death. A modern equivalent is the dinosaur fossil. The fossilized remains of a once great and dominant species reminds the human species of our eventual choice: survival or extinction, or as Sagan put it, “spaceflight or extinction”.

It’s a quick and interesting read and a great launch point for discussing our future in space. Thanks, Alex.

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Carl Sagan, gone for "ten trips around the Sun"

Tom Moore emailed us with the link to his blog-a-thon post. Here it is in full:

Carl Sagan was one of the strongest and most enduring influences on my choice to pursue teaching and then science. His view of humans as “a way for the universe to know itself” echoed and extended themes I’d read in Alan Watts. Carl’s many books and shorter articles guided and inspired me up through his untimely death. They shaped my interests and led me to specialize in the science of the solar system. Many were critical of what they saw as Carl’s excessive participation in the cult of personality through the media. But from my perspective, Carl was the ultimate modern renaissance man, with interests that spanned the universe in a way that few others came close to expressing. He excelled not only in communicating the excitement of science to the general public, but also led a generation of scientists in seeing the broader relevance and impact of their work, helping us to get beyond the mentality of the cold war. He is deeply missed.

There is a detectable web competition for the title of “Next Carl Sagan”. It’s a very tough act to follow on the world stage. But we do need others to tell us how wonderful is the world as revealed by science, how little we really need our illusions and superstitions, and how much more sound is a simple reverence for life and all the forces that have created it.

- Tom Moore

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Nick’s Memories

Nick Sagan wrote an outstanding post yesterday – if you haven’t read it, you ought to. From Carl’s dictaphone habits to his distate for Beavis & Butthead and the movie Aliens, Nick lets us in on a little secret; his father was, it’s true, a human being.

Sagan was so clearly a hero to countless people across the globe, and for those of us who can’t help but do a bit of worshiping, Nick’s portrait helps ground that awe without diminishing our hero’s stature. Here’s a choice picture and excerpt:

He had a knack for pinball, knowing just how hard to bump a machine without tilting it. We’d go to arcades together and he’d win bonus games like mad. Videogames were never his thing, though he could appreciate the better ones. I remember the day I showed him Computer Baseball, a strategy game for the Apple IIe. You could pit some of the greatest teams in MLB history against each other. We played Babe Ruth’s 1927 Yankees against Jackie Robinson’s 1955 Dodgers for about an hour, and then he turned to me and said, “Never show this to me again. I like it too much, and I don’t want to lose time. Link.

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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.”

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Blog-a-thon Post

river2sea72 writes:
I have huge respect and admiration for popularizers of science, and Carl Sagan was one of the premier examples of such a person. Although they risk their reputations immenseley by reaching out to the public and taking on controversial issues, they inspire unknown multitudes of children to pursue careers in science or at least to appreciate its role in society.

Who will do for my child what this man did for me? There remains a huge void.

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NY Times Obit

From the New York Times obituary, by William Dicke, first published on December 21st, 1996:

A persistent theme in his work was one practically guaranteed to capture public interest: the possibility that life exists elsewhere in the universe. He became an expert on the subject at a time when it was considered highly speculative, and prodded other scientists to consider it seriously. Civilized life must be common in the universe, he said, because stars are so abundant and the Sun is a fairly typical star.

Dr. Sagan (pronounced SAY-gun) was probably best known as the host of ”Cosmos,” a 13-part series on public television in 1980 that explored everything from the world of the atom to the vastness of the universe, and showed him looking awestruck as he contemplated the heavens. With an audience of 400 million people in 60 countries, it was considered the most widely viewed short-term public television series in history until it was eclipsed in 1990 by a series on the Civil War.

He received critical acclaim as well as substantial financial awards for the series, which made him an international celebrity. The book he wrote to accompany it, also called ”Cosmos,” was on the best-seller list for more than a year, and a company he formed, Carl Sagan Productions, promoted such things as ”The Music of the Cosmos” with RCA Records.

Dr. Sagan was also familiar to television viewers from 26 appearances in the 1970′s and 80′s on ”The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, who was known to don a black wig and perform a Sagan impersonation. He and other comics delighted in parodying Dr. Sagan’s references to ”billions and billions” of stars in the universe.

In an interview in 1977, Dr. Sagan said he turned down several hundred requests to give lectures every year but always tried to accept invitations to appear on ”The Tonight Show.”

”The show has an audience of 10 million people,” he said. ”That’s an awful lot of people, and those aren’t people who subscribe to Scientific American.”

Defending his activities in popularizing science, Dr. Sagan said in another interview: ”There are at least two reasons why scientists have an obligation to explain what science is all about. One is naked self-interest. Much of the funding for science comes from the public, and the public has a right to know how their money is being spent. If we scientists increase the public excitement about science, there is a good chance of having more public supporters. The other is that it’s tremendously exciting to communicate your own excitement to others.”

While his leap from the scientific ivory tower into the television studio may have irritated some of his colleagues, there can be no doubt that Dr. Sagan was a serious and productive scientist.

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Falling Hard for Sagan.

Lauren at Liquid Logic sent us a link to her blog-a-thon entry, and we just couldn’t help but excerpting this passage:

I remember liking him and finding his stuff cool. But it was later in life, in my late twenties, in fact, that I fell hard for the guy. I’m not sure if it was The Demon Haunted World or The Dragons of Eden that hooked me. But I do know that it had something to do with his rigorous devotion to truth and his improbable optimism about human nature.

Please read the whole entry here.

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Honoring Carl.

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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.

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