I had meant to bring up this topic earlier.
This year (or what's left of it) marks the 25th Anniversary of Carl Sagan's milestone TV science series, Cosmos. I watched it when it first aired all those years ago. As a child in elementary school, I think I had already been drawn to science stuff, especially astronomy, but it was Sagan's Cosmos which really made me appreciate the beauty and the truth of science, and instilled in me a love of "the romance of science," as Sagan liked to call it. His eloquence and passionate advocacy for science made a huge impression on me, as did the show itself, of course. Cosmos was heady stuff for a kid, but it utterly enthralled me. In the course of its 13 episodes, Cosmos profoundly influenced how I viewed the world, as well as our place in the universe. This kind of science education was much more fun than the kind at school.
The music soundtrack to Cosmos deserves mention, too. It was a kaleidoscope of different types of music, and I loved it! The soundtrack introduced me to sounds and styles I would not have otherwise known about. I remember lazy summer days of lying on the living room floor with headphones on, lost in the music of Cosmos as it carried me off to the far corners of the universe and back. Ah, the days of LP.
After the epochal event of Cosmos, I went on to read a couple of books by Sagan: The Dragons of Eden (which won him the Pulitzer Prize), and Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science. I remember The Dragons of Eden being a wonderful read, even if I've forgotten much of it now
. Broca's Brain was a denser work, but also good.I'm finally working up the courage to start on Sagan's last book that he completed before his death: The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark. I've resisted reading this book before, because it looks to be a pretty depressing read, in which Sagan warns of our society's increasing slide into pseudoscience and fundamentalist zealotry.
Sagan's death in 1996 was a big shock to me. He was far too young to be taken away from us. How I wished he could've been around to celebrate the success of the twin Mars Rovers, since Mars was a planet that had always exerted a great fascination on him.
To end my spiel, I just want to quote an excerpt from a Q&A session that followed Sagan's keynote address, "Wonder and Skepticism," at the CSICOP Conference in Seattle, Washington, 1994. This Q&A session had been transcribed at the time of the talk, but was only recently rediscovered and then published in this past July's issue of The Skeptical Enquirer. I just want to quote this bit:
Question: Dr. Sagan, you've spoken about the need to, as you say, be defenders of science, or to spread the wonders of science and the value of science among those who are perhaps less well educated or have less of an appreciation of it. It seems to be quite a challenge, and I was wondering, in particular, there are many people, of course, plus the people in this room, perhaps a fairly large portion have some background in science. Amongst people who have what is called a liberal education, who may be in the arts or in the humanities, science has among many of them something of a bad name. I wonder if you have any thought on what path might be taken to remedy that situation.
Sagan: I think one, perhaps, is to present science as it is, as something dazzling, as something tremendously exciting, as something eliciting feelings of reverence and awe, as something that our lives depended on. If it isn't presented that way, if it's presented in very dull, textbook fashion, then of course people will be turned off. If the chemistry teacher is the basketball coach, if the school boards are unable to get support for the new school bond issue, if teachers' salaries, especially in science, are very low, if very little is demanded of our students in terms of homework and original class time, if virtually every newspaper in the country has a daily astrology column and hardly any of them has a weekly science column, if the Sunday morning pundit shows never discuss science, if every one of the commercial television networks has somebody designated as a science reporter but he (it's always he) never presents any science, it's all technology and medicine, if an intelligent remark on science has never been uttered in living memory by a President of the United States, if in all of television there are no action-adventure series in which the hero or heroine is someone devoted to finding out how the universe works, if spiffy jackets attractive to the opposite sex are given to students who do well in football, basketball, and baseball but none in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, if we do all of that, then it is not surprising that a lot of people come out of the American educational system turned off, or having never experienced, science. That was a very long sentence.
