Carl Sagan Info

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Aug 3, 2024, 1:36:18 PM8/3/24

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Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell University, where he spent most of his career. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books.[5] He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain, Pale Blue Dot and The Demon-Haunted World. He also co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television: Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries.[6] A book, also called Cosmos, was published to accompany the series. Sagan also wrote a science-fiction novel, published in 1985, called Contact, which became the basis for the 1997 film Contact. His papers, comprising 595,000 items,[7] are archived in the Library of Congress.[8]

Sagan was a popular public advocate of skeptical scientific inquiry and the scientific method; he pioneered the field of exobiology and promoted the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life (SETI). He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (for his book The Dragons of Eden), and (for Cosmos: A Personal Voyage) two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award, and the Hugo Award. He married three times and had five children. After developing myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62 on December 20, 1996.

Carl Edward Sagan was born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of New York City's Brooklyn borough on November 9, 1934.[9][10] His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York City; his father, Samuel Sagan, was a Ukrainian-born garment worker who had emigrated from Kamianets-Podilskyi (then in the Russian Empire).[11] Sagan was named in honor of his maternal grandmother, Chaiya Clara, who had died while giving birth to her second child; she was, in Sagan's words, "the mother she [Rachel] never knew."[12] Sagan's maternal grandfather later married a woman named Rose, who Sagan's sister, Carol, would later say, was "never accepted" as Rachel's mother because Rachel "knew she [Rose] wasn't her birth mother."[13] Sagan's family lived in a modest apartment in Bensonhurst. He later described his family as Reform Jews, the most liberal of Judaism's four main branches. He and his sister agreed that their father was not especially religious, but that their mother "definitely believed in God, and was active in the temple [...] and served only kosher meat."[14] During the worst years of the Depression, his father worked as a movie theater usher.[14]

According to biographer Keay Davidson, Sagan experienced a kind of "inner war" as a result of his close relationship with both his parents, who were in many ways "opposites." He traced his analytical inclinations to his mother, who had been extremely poor as a child in New York City during World War I and the 1920s,[15] and whose later intellectual ambitions were sabotaged by her poverty, status as a woman and wife, and Jewish ethnicity. Davidson suggested she "worshipped her only son, Carl" because "he would fulfill her unfulfilled dreams."[15] Sagan believed that he had inherited his sense of wonder from his father, who spent his free time giving apples to the poor or helping soothe tensions between workers and management within New York City's garment industry.[15] Although awed by his son's intellectual abilities, Sagan's father also took his inquisitiveness in stride, viewing it as part of growing up.[15] Later, during his career, Sagan would draw on his childhood memories to illustrate scientific points, as he did in his book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.[16]

Sagan also saw one of the fair's most publicized events: the burial at Flushing Meadows of a time capsule, which contained mementos from the 1930s to be recovered by Earth's descendants in a future millennium. Davidson wrote that this "thrilled Carl." As an adult, inspired by his memories of the World's Fair, Sagan and his colleagues would create similar time capsules to be sent out into the galaxy: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record prcis.[19]

During World War II, Sagan's parents worried about the fate of their European relatives, but he was generally unaware of the details of the ongoing war. He wrote, "Sure, we had relatives who were caught up in the Holocaust. Hitler was not a popular fellow in our household... but on the other hand, I was fairly insulated from the horrors of the war." His sister, Carol, said that their mother "above all wanted to protect Carl... she had an extraordinarily difficult time dealing with World War II and the Holocaust."[19] Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World (1996) included his memories of this conflicted period, when his family dealt with the realities of the war in Europe, but tried to prevent it from undermining his optimistic spirit.[17]

Sagan's parents nurtured his growing interest in science, buying him chemistry sets and reading matter. But his fascination with outer space emerged as his primary focus, especially after he had read science fiction by such writers as H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, stirring his curiosity about the possibility of life on Mars and other planets.[21] According to biographer Ray Spangenburg, Sagan's efforts in his early years to understand the mysteries of the planets became a "driving force in his life, a continual spark to his intellect, and a quest that would never be forgotten."[17] In 1947, Sagan discovered the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, which introduced him to more hard science fiction speculations than those in the Burroughs novels.[21] That same year, mass hysteria developed about the possibility that extraterrestrial visitors had arrived in flying saucers, and the young Sagan joined in the speculation that the flying "discs" people reported seeing in the sky might be alien spaceships.[22]

Before the end of high school, Sagan entered an essay writing contest in which he explored the idea that human contact with advanced life forms from another planet might be as disastrous for people on Earth as Native Americans' first contact with Europeans had been for Native Americans.[26] The subject was considered controversial, but his rhetorical skill won over the judges and they awarded him first prize.[26] When he was about to graduate from high school, his classmates voted him "most likely to succeed" and put him in line to be valedictorian.[26] He attended the University of Chicago because, despite his excellent high school grades, it was one of the very few colleges he had applied to that would consider accepting a 16-year-old. Its chancellor, Robert Maynard Hutchins, had recently retooled the undergraduate College of the University of Chicago into an "ideal meritocracy" built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations, and early entrance to college with no age requirement.[27]

As an honors-program undergraduate, Sagan worked in the laboratory of geneticist H. J. Muller and wrote a thesis on the origins of life with physical chemist Harold Urey. He also joined the Ryerson Astronomical Society.[28] In 1954, he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts with general and special honors[29] in what he quipped was "nothing."[30] In 1955, he earned a Bachelor of Science in physics. He went on to do graduate work at the University of Chicago, earning a Master of Science in physics in 1956 and a Doctor of Philosophy in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960. His doctoral thesis, submitted to the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, was entitled Physical Studies of the Planets.[31][32][33][34] During his graduate studies, he used the summer months to work with planetary scientist Gerard Kuiper, who was his dissertation director,[3] as well as physicist George Gamow and chemist Melvin Calvin. The title of Sagan's dissertation reflected interests he had in common with Kuiper, who had been president of the International Astronomical Union's commission on "Physical Studies of Planets and Satellites" throughout the 1950s.[35]

In 1958, Sagan and Kuiper worked on the classified military Project A119, a secret U.S. Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear warhead on the Moon and document its effects.[36] Sagan had a Top Secret clearance at the Air Force and a Secret clearance with NASA.[37] In 1999, an article published in the journal Nature revealed that Sagan had included the classified titles of two Project A119 papers in his 1959 application for a scholarship to University of California, Berkeley. A follow-up letter to the journal by project leader Leonard Reiffel confirmed Sagan's security leak.[38]

From 1960 to 1962 Sagan was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.[40] Meanwhile, he published an article in 1961 in the journal Science on the atmosphere of Venus, while also working with NASA's Mariner 2 team, and served as a "Planetary Sciences Consultant" to the RAND Corporation.[41]

After the publication of Sagan's Science article, in 1961 Harvard University astronomers Fred Whipple and Donald Menzel offered Sagan the opportunity to give a colloquium at Harvard and subsequently offered him a lecturer position at the institution. Sagan instead asked to be made an assistant professor, and eventually Whipple and Menzel were able to convince Harvard to offer Sagan the assistant professor position he requested.[41] Sagan lectured, performed research, and advised graduate students at the institution from 1963 until 1968, as well as working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, also located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.