“much of what was in it…” makes it sound like a significant fraction of the material was flawed. I have the DVDs and they made about a half dozen or so pretty obvious voice-over corrections in places where some of the information needed to be corrected or updated. Considering it was a total of 13 hours of material, that’s a pretty good error rate.
Completely agreed. Cosmos is still a regular on my playlist and I’m quite fond of introducing people to it. Sagan and Feynman are the two go-to scientists to really let people taste the true wonder some of us experience in the simple existence of the universe.
While many of the quantum-level explanation are, indeed, straight-up wrong, it’s still a fantastic descriptive account of the mindboggling beauties of ourselves and what we inhabit.
An often underestimated skill held, IRL, by a very few. Sagan, Gould, maybe Hawking? The funny thing is that in his day Newton sold a metric assload of books - Principia Mathematica was probably the contemporary A Brief History of Time (often bought, rarely read) but his Optics, written in the vernacular, excited a lot of people in the same way that modern popular science authors do.
Some of his discussion about natural selection involving the Heikea japonica, his enthusiasm for several proposed interstellar spacecraft were somewhat misguided, and there are a few areas where our knowledge of astrophysics and planetology has invalidated some of the more involved discussions, but his explanations of many phenomena in physics and astronomy were cogent and accessible. To understand the enthusiasm for the program you need to understand the context in which it was produced; while the WGHB program Nova and the BBC2 program Horizon presented scientific information, both were mostly of the talking head style of documentary, which were fairly dry. Cosmos was remarkable for its use of state-of-the-art special effects (which look a little dated but still quite good today), location shooting, and an ethereal soundtrack; it was the first astronomical and physical science documentary series that I’m aware of that reached the same level of general interest and entertainment as, say, the Cousteau documentaries about sea life. It was also a remarkably expensive program for its time, and Sagan’s narration (based upon his book of the same name) was pitch perfect.
As a scientist, Sagan’s contributions have been more modest, though I don’t think it is far to discount him completely. Although the predictions of the TTAPS report and later climatological modeling were not very realistic, he did a lot of basic planetological research on Venus and the Jovian moons that was first rate and ended up being largely accurate. Although his later years were more devoted to popularization rather than fundamental research, he certainly brought a lot of attention to the value of unmanned space exploration at a time in which NASA was slashing budgets to support the Space Transportation System (Shuttle) program, and was probably instrumental in obtaining consensus and agreement to support the expanded Voyager program that ultimately accomplished nearly all of the goals of the original Grand Tour proposal. As a writer of nonfiction he was gifted in his ability to break complex concepts down into ideas accessible by the layman to an extent only matched (in my opinion) by Brian Greene and Steven J. Gould. Isaac Asimov, himself a polymath and popularizer of science, described Sagan as being one of the few people that Asimov regarded as being smarter than himself. I’d say, given Asimov’s general propensity for arrogance, that this was no mean complement.
Sagan was also a public and ardent (but always rational) atheist at a time in which it was difficult to admit that in public. I hesitate to call him brave for expressing his opinions, but I’d say that he led the current movement of scientist popularizers who present make public arguments for rationalism and atheism.
Trivia note: Sagan’s first wife, Lynn Margulis, is pretty much the sole originator of endosymbiotic theory, the idea that mitochondria and some other eukaryotic organelles within the cell originated as separate symbiotic prokaryotic organisms. This idea is now almost universally accepted and has significantly modified our understanding of evolutionary processes and selection, particularly the idea that the influence of genes may extend outside the carrier organism. For this, she should probably be due the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics and/or the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and is arguably more influential and accomplished in her specific field than Carl Sagan was in astronomy and planetology.
Stranger
I was wondering about this question myself a while back, and decided to elicit the opinions of some faculty members in my college (a college of business) by asking this question:
“How would a Carl-Sagan-like person be regarded by the academic community? Would he/she get tenure for doing the equivalent of what Carl Sagan did to subjects like marketing, management, finance, information systems, etc.?”
The answer I got was a resounding “no,” with the added explanation, “because people like him don’t actually create knowledge; they just explain it to other people. They’re knowledge parasites.”
He was a hero of mine from my childhood and played a big role in my decision to become a scientist. I can still vividly recall the sense of wonderment I felt when I watched Cosmos during its original run when I was an elementary school student. I’m really glad I had a chance to hear him speak before he died. During the question and answer session after his talk, someone in the audience asked if he would ever remake Cosmos, and he said that it was 2 1/2 years (or something close to that) of 12 hour days—basically he gave it his all and didn’t think he could ever go through all that again. His death was one of the few celebrity deaths that actually brought me to tears.
That’s consistent with what the chairman of my old Physics department said. (Said chairman was also an astronomer, BTW.) He said that Sagan was a good popularizer of science, and that this was certainly valuable. He also emphasized that Sagan was also regarded as being overly optimistic about SETI, and that this tarnished his reputation somewhat.
There are two good in depth biographies of Sagan.
Carl Sagan A life by Keay Davidson which stresses his personal life.
Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos by William Poundstone, this one concentrates more on his science.
That is an incredibly narrow-minded perspective. Setting aside that Sagan, at least in his earlier years, did perform basic research in planetology, the ability to translate knowledge into a widely accessible form is a valuable and surprisingly rare skill. A “knowledge parasite” would be someone who accrued knowledge strictly for his own sake.
Also, I find it ironic when anyone involved in marketing or brand management refers to anyone else as a “parasite”, insofar as the entire goal of marketing and advertising is to influence the subject into believing there is some kind of unfulfilled void in his or her life, and then “put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.”
Stranger
I think its mostly because business researchers feel they have to justify their work as legitimate research on par with that of the sciences, so they’re wary of anyone who might endanger that PR campaign. Business administration, as an academic pursuit, is relatively new compared to the hard sciences, and faculty members often get paid much more than those in the sciences. I know someone who graduated from the marketing department here and on her first job was making over $100K/year. I think there might be some cognitive dissonance going on with these people.
He left us with some pretty kick-ass quotes:
“If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?”
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.”
“Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.”
“In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”
“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion.”
“Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”
That guy was top shelf.
I have no memory of Sagan getting condemned for being an atheist when Cosmos was first shown (and I was in my twenties at the time). He wasn’t being that all-fired brave by saying that he was an atheist. He wasn’t in any danger of being hung for his heresy. He wasn’t even in any danger of his show being cancelled.
He was a good scientist but not a great one. He certainly deserved to be given tenure at a good university. As someone has pointed out, his first wife Lynn Margulis was a better scientist than he was. He was a better science popularizer than a scientist. He wasn’t quite as good as people here are saying though. There were times in Cosmos when his egotism and pothead goofiness overwhelmed what he was trying to explain.
For what it’s worth, he was no perfect person personally. He always expected someone else to do the work at home. He never changed a diaper or washed a dish. He always expected to be the center of attention. By his third marriage this didn’t matter much, since he was rich and could afford to hire people to do things for him. His self-centerness was what broke up his first marriage though.
I have a difficulty with saying that Margulis was a “better scientist”; she was arguably more accomplished in her own field, but her methodology was often somewhat suspect, and her contentious relations with colleagues probably did more to retard acceptance of endosymbiotic theory than the general inertia to scientific change. She has gone on to promote a Gaia-esque hypothesis of evolutionary change that is about as about as substantial as interpretations of quantum mechanics that invoke dancing monkeys. Sagan did do some essential basic research as the principal investigator on Venus and the Jovian system, and collaborated on other studies of Mars, the Saturnian system, and Uranus. If you aren’t aware of his actual body of scientific work I don’t know how you can make the claim that “he was a better popularizer than a scientist.”
I’m not clear with what any of this has to do with the price of rice in China in regard to Sagan’s professional reputation. Dick Feynman, whose popular image was the jovial jester of physics was actually a cranky s.o.b. (as can be seen from his correspondence), a somewhat jealous and often mean-spirited colleague (his energetic and sometimes profane hallway shouting matches with Murray Gell-Mann are still legend), and in inveterate letch (the secretaries knew better than to be caught in the coffee nook alone with him, although to be fair the nearly entire Caltech physics department used to be notorious in this regard). This doesn’t take away from the fact that he invented a novel approach to solving one of the basic hurdles to a complete theory of quantum electrodynamics that complemented the approach of Schwinger and Tomonaga.
Stranger
I stumbled on Cosmos on Netflix instant watch earlier this week. I’ve watched episode 1 so far… pretty good stuff.
I also had the good fortune to see Carl Sagan guest lecture a class. He was very nice, even with some asshole in the back of the auditorium heckling him.
100,000% pure, unadulterated bullshit, spoken by people who probably aren’t worthy of sniffing Carl’s dead butt. Sorry, but that’s a fact. Earn a PhD, publish a few articles, then publish a couple even relatively successful popular press books = golden track to tenure at pretty much any university. Sagan did so much more than that it’s not even funny.
Regardless of how great a scientist he was (I happen to think he was pretty good, though there were some pretty questionable things written in The Dragons of Eden at least), the OP asks how well-regarded he is, and the answer to that is: like a god.
A co-worker of mine took a Sagan class at Cornell. He said Sagan undoubtedly knew a lot more than any textbook and was a good teacher, despite his habit of wandering into class late and taking off on fascinating but totally off-topic tangents.
He respected Sagan for actually teaching lower-level classes, rather than shoving them off on teaching assistants and instructors.
Well, Cosmos first aired September-December 1980. The 1980 US presidential campaign featured a surge of religious fundamentalism in politics, culminating in the November election of Ronald Reagan. It’s arguable that all that happened after Cosmos was already in production, I suppose. And 1980 fundamentalists did not yet feel the bravery they feel today in calling for the deaths of their political opponents, so maybe you have something there.
Speaking of kick-ass quotes, an example of what he brought to the public’s experience of science occurred to me last night. I was watching a science program about the universe, and the narrator said something like, “Many of the elements that make up our bodies were formed in supernova explosions.” What a far cry, I thought, from Sagan’s famous “We are star-stuff.”
Me too, although it wasn’t an astronomy class. I can’t say I’m objective about the guy, but I echo what others have said. He was a fine scientist but not one at the most elite level. His work in explaining and popularzing science was indispensable but was often not well-regarded in the scientific community. But as time passes and the anti-scientific, anti-intellectual current in our society grows, his ability to impart scientific wonder to laymen is more appreciated than it was during his life.
–Cliffy
So did my father as a grad student in the late 1960’s at the start of Sagan’s career there and he was of the same opinion. My father has respected him a great deal ever since.
Stranger on a Train writes:
> I’m not clear with what any of this has to do with the price of rice in China in
> regard to Sagan’s professional reputation.
A lot of the posts in this thread aren’t about his professional reputation. They are about what a nice guy he was when they took a course from him and about quotations from his works which have nothing strictly to do with his professional work but are about his attitudes toward science and religion. If we’re not going to talk just about his professional reputation, then we have to consider other aspects of his personality.
Again, for what it’s worth, I think a lot of guys who are now considered great men also got away with what he tried to do in his first marriage. They accomplished a lot in life because they always had little wifey at home who took care of all the mundane details of life. Lynn Margulis, who didn’t deserve to be treated that way, eventually had enough of him and divorced him.