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11,100 | Another way to measure the speed of light is to independently measure the frequency "f" and wavelength "λ" of an electromagnetic wave in vacuum. The value of "c" can then be found by using the relation "c" = "fλ". One option is to measure the resonance frequency of a cavity resonator. If the dimensions of the resonance... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,101 | The Essen–Gordon-Smith result, , was substantially more precise than those found by optical techniques. By 1950, repeated measurements by Essen established a result of . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,102 | A household demonstration of this technique is possible, using a microwave oven and food such as marshmallows or margarine: if the turntable is removed so that the food does not move, it will cook the fastest at the antinodes (the points at which the wave amplitude is the greatest), where it will begin to melt. The dis... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,103 | Interferometry is another method to find the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation for determining the speed of light. A coherent beam of light (e.g. from a laser), with a known frequency ("f"), is split to follow two paths and then recombined. By adjusting the path length while observing the interference pattern and... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,104 | Before the advent of laser technology, coherent radio sources were used for interferometry measurements of the speed of light. However interferometric determination of wavelength becomes less precise with wavelength and the experiments were thus limited in precision by the long wavelength (~) of the radiowaves. The pre... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,105 | Until the early modern period, it was not known whether light travelled instantaneously or at a very fast finite speed. The first extant recorded examination of this subject was in ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks, Arabic scholars, and classical European scientists long debated this until Rømer provided the first cal... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,106 | Empedocles (c. 490–430 BCE) was the first to propose a theory of light and claimed that light has a finite speed. He maintained that light was something in motion, and therefore must take some time to travel. Aristotle argued, to the contrary, that "light is due to the presence of something, but it is not a movement". ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,107 | Early Islamic philosophers initially agreed with the Aristotelian view that light had no speed of travel. In 1021, Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) published the "Book of Optics", in which he presented a series of arguments dismissing the emission theory of vision in favour of the now accepted intromission theory, in which lig... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,108 | In the 13th century, Roger Bacon argued that the speed of light in air was not infinite, using philosophical arguments backed by the writing of Alhazen and Aristotle. In the 1270s, Witelo considered the possibility of light travelling at infinite speed in vacuum, but slowing down in denser bodies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,109 | In the early 17th century, Johannes Kepler believed that the speed of light was infinite since empty space presents no obstacle to it. René Descartes argued that if the speed of light were to be finite, the Sun, Earth, and Moon would be noticeably out of alignment during a lunar eclipse. (Although this argument fails w... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,110 | In 1629, Isaac Beeckman proposed an experiment in which a person observes the flash of a cannon reflecting off a mirror about one mile (1.6 km) away. In 1638, Galileo Galilei proposed an experiment, with an apparent claim to having performed it some years earlier, to measure the speed of light by observing the delay be... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,111 | The first quantitative estimate of the speed of light was made in 1676 by Ole Rømer. From the observation that the periods of Jupiter's innermost moon Io appeared to be shorter when the Earth was approaching Jupiter than when receding from it, he concluded that light travels at a finite speed, and estimated that it tak... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,112 | In his 1704 book "Opticks", Isaac Newton reported Rømer's calculations of the finite speed of light and gave a value of "seven or eight minutes" for the time taken for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (the modern value is 8 minutes 19 seconds). Newton queried whether Rømer's eclipse shadows were coloured; hear... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,113 | In the 19th century Hippolyte Fizeau developed a method to determine the speed of light based on time-of-flight measurements on Earth and reported a value of . His method was improved upon by Léon Foucault who obtained a value of in 1862. In the year 1856, Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch measured the ratio o... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,114 | It was thought at the time that empty space was filled with a background medium called the luminiferous aether in which the electromagnetic field existed. Some physicists thought that this aether acted as a preferred frame of reference for the propagation of light and therefore it should be possible to measure the moti... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,115 | Because of this experiment Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the motion of the apparatus through the aether may cause the apparatus to contract along its length in the direction of motion, and he further assumed that the time variable for moving systems must also be changed accordingly ("local time"), which led to the form... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,116 | In 1905 Einstein postulated from the outset that the speed of light in vacuum, measured by a non-accelerating observer, is independent of the motion of the source or observer. Using this and the principle of relativity as a basis he derived the special theory of relativity, in which the speed of light in vacuum "c" fea... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,117 | In the second half of the 20th century, much progress was made in increasing the accuracy of measurements of the speed of light, first by cavity resonance techniques and later by laser interferometer techniques. These were aided by new, more precise, definitions of the metre and second. In 1950, Louis Essen determined ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,118 | In 1972, using the laser interferometer method and the new definitions, a group at the US National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado determined the speed of light in vacuum to be "c" = . This was 100 times less uncertain than the previously accepted value. The remaining uncertainty was mainly related to the defi... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,119 | In 1983 the 17th meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) found that wavelengths from frequency measurements and a given value for the speed of light are more reproducible than the previous standard. They kept the 1967 definition of second, so the caesium hyperfine frequency would now determine ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,120 | In 2011, the CGPM stated its intention to redefine all seven SI base units using what it calls "the explicit-constant formulation", where each "unit is defined indirectly by specifying explicitly an exact value for a well-recognized fundamental constant", as was done for the speed of light. It proposed a new, but compl... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
11,121 | Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,122 | Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell where he would spend the majority of his career. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He wrote many popular science books, such as "The Dragons of Eden", "Broca's ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,123 | Sagan advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (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 recei... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,124 | Sagan was born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, on November 9, 1934. His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then in the Russian Empire, in today's Ukraine. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. Carl was named in honor of Rachel... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,125 | The family lived in a modest apartment near the Atlantic Ocean, in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood. According to Sagan, they were Reform Jews, the most liberal of North American Judaism's four main groups. Carl and his sister agreed that their father was not especially religious, but that their mother "definitely ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,126 | According to biographer Keay Davidson, Sagan's "inner war" was a result of his close relationship with both of his parents, who were in many ways "opposites". Sagan traced his later analytical urges to his mother, a woman who had been extremely poor as a child in New York City during World War I and the 1920s. As a you... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,127 | However, he claimed that his sense of wonder came from his father, who in his free time gave apples to the poor or helped soothe labor-management tensions within New York's garment industry. Although he was awed by Carl's intellectual abilities, he took his son's inquisitiveness in stride and saw it as part of his grow... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,128 | Sagan recalls that one of his most defining moments was when his parents took him to the 1939 New York World's Fair when he was four years old. The exhibits became a turning point in his life. He later recalled the moving map of the "America of Tomorrow" exhibit: "It showed beautiful highways and cloverleaves and littl... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,129 | He also saw one of the Fair's most publicized events, the burial of a time capsule at Flushing Meadows, which contained mementos of the 1930s to be recovered by Earth's descendants in a future millennium. "The time capsule thrilled Carl", writes Davidson. As an adult, Sagan and his colleagues would create similar time ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,130 | During World War II Sagan's family worried about the fate of their European relatives. Sagan, however, 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 i... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,131 | Soon after entering elementary school he began to express a strong inquisitiveness about nature. Sagan recalled taking his first trips to the public library alone, at the age of five, when his mother got him a library card. He wanted to learn what stars were, since none of his friends or their parents could give him a ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,132 | At about age six or seven, he and a close friend took trips to the American Museum of Natural History across the East River in Manhattan. While there, they went to the Hayden Planetarium and walked around the museum's exhibits of space objects, such as meteorites, and displays of dinosaurs and animals in natural settin... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,133 | His parents helped nurture his growing interest in science by buying him chemistry sets and reading materials. His interest in space, however, was his primary focus, especially after reading science fiction stories by writers such as H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, which stirred his imagination about life on othe... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,134 | In 1947 he discovered "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine, which introduced him to more hard science fiction speculations than those in Burroughs's novels. That same year inaugurated the "flying saucer" mass hysteria with the young Carl suspecting that the "discs" might be alien spaceships. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,135 | Sagan had lived in Bensonhurst, where he went to David A. Boody Junior High School. He had his bar mitzvah in Bensonhurst when he turned 13. The following year, 1948, his family moved to the town of Rahway, New Jersey, for his father's work, where Sagan then entered Rahway High School. He graduated in 1951. Rahway was ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,136 | Sagan was a straight-A student but was bored due to unchallenging classes and uninspiring teachers. His teachers realized this and tried to convince his parents to send him to a private school, the administrator telling them, "This kid ought to go to a school for gifted children, he has something really remarkable." Ho... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,137 | Sagan was made president of the school's chemistry club, and at home he set up his own laboratory. He taught himself about molecules by making cardboard cutouts to help him visualize how molecules were formed: "I found that about as interesting as doing [chemical] experiments," he said. Sagan remained mostly interested... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,138 | Before the end of high school, he entered an essay contest in which he posed the question of whether human contact with advanced life forms from another planet might be as disastrous for people on Earth as it was for Native Americans when they first had contact with Europeans. The subject was considered controversial, ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,139 | Sagan attended the University of Chicago, which was one of the few colleges he applied to that would, despite his excellent high-school grades, consider admitting a 16-year-old. Its chancellor, Robert Maynard Hutchins, had recently retooled the undergraduate College of the University of Chicago into an "ideal meritocra... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,140 | During his time as an honors program undergraduate, Sagan worked in the laboratory of the geneticist H. J. Muller and wrote a thesis on the origins of life with physical chemist Harold Urey. Sagan joined the Ryerson Astronomical Society, received a B.A. degree in laughingly self-proclaimed "nothing" with general and sp... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,141 | He used the summer months of his graduate studies to work with his dissertation director, planetary scientist Gerard Kuiper, as well as physicist George Gamow and chemist Melvin Calvin. The title of Sagan's dissertation reflects his shared interests with Kuiper, who throughout the 1950s had been president of the Intern... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,142 | Sagan had a Top Secret clearance at the U.S. Air Force and a Secret clearance with NASA. While working on his doctoral dissertation, Sagan revealed US Government classified titles of two Project A119 papers when he applied for a University of California, Berkeley scholarship in 1959. The leak was not publicly revealed ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,143 | From 1960 to 1962 Sagan was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. 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. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,144 | 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 eventual... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,145 | In 1968, Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard. He later indicated that the decision was very much unexpected. The tenure denial has been blamed on several factors, including that he focused his interests too broadly across a number of areas (while the norm in academia is to become a renowned expert in a narrow specialty)... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,146 | Long before the ill-fated tenure process, Cornell University astronomer Thomas Gold had courted Sagan to move to Ithaca, New York, and join the faculty at Cornell. Following the denial of tenure from Harvard, Sagan accepted Gold's offer and remained a faculty member at Cornell for nearly 30 years until his death in 199... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,147 | Sagan was associated with the U.S. space program from its inception. From the 1950s onward, he worked as an advisor to NASA, where one of his duties included briefing the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon. Sagan contributed to many of the robotic spacecraft missions that explored the Solar System, arra... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,148 | Former student David Morrison described Sagan as "an 'idea person' and a master of intuitive physical arguments and 'back of the envelope' calculations", and Gerard Kuiper said that "Some persons work best in specializing on a major program in the laboratory; others are best in liaison between sciences. Dr. Sagan belon... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,149 | Sagan's contributions were central to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of the planet Venus. In the early 1960s no one knew for certain the basic conditions of Venus' surface, and Sagan listed the possibilities in a report later depicted for popularization in a Time Life book "Planets". His own view was th... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,150 | Sagan was among the first to hypothesize that Saturn's moon Titan might possess oceans of liquid compounds on its surface and that Jupiter's moon Europa might possess subsurface oceans of water. This would make Europa potentially habitable. Europa's subsurface ocean of water was later indirectly confirmed by the spacec... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,151 | Sagan further contributed insights regarding the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter, as well as seasonal changes on Mars. He also perceived global warming as a growing, man-made danger and likened it to the natural development of Venus into a hot, life-hostile planet through a kind of runaway greenhouse effect. He testif... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,152 | Sagan is also known for his research on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,153 | He is also the 1994 recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare". He was denied membership in the academy, reportedly because his media activities made him unpopular with many other scie... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,154 | In 1980 Sagan co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 13-part PBS television series "", which became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until 1990. The show has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 countries. The book, "Cosmos", written by Sagan, was published to a... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,155 | Because of his earlier popularity as a science writer from his best-selling books, including "The Dragons of Eden", which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1977, he was asked to write and narrate the show. It was targeted to a general audience of viewers, whom Sagan felt had lost interest in science, partly due to a stifled ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,156 | Each of the 13 episodes was created to focus on a particular subject or person, thereby demonstrating the synergy of the universe. They covered a wide range of scientific subjects including the origin of life and a perspective of humans' place on Earth. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,157 | The show won an Emmy, along with a Peabody Award, and transformed Sagan from an obscure astronomer into a pop-culture icon. "Time" magazine ran a cover story about Sagan soon after the show broadcast, referring to him as "creator, chief writer and host-narrator of the show". In 2000, "Cosmos" was released on a remaster... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,158 | After "Cosmos" aired, Sagan became associated with the catchphrase "billions and billions," although he never actually used the phrase in the "Cosmos" series. He rather used the term "billions "upon" billions." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,159 | Richard Feynman, a precursor to Sagan, was observed to have used the phrase "billions and billions" many times in his "red books". However, Sagan's frequent use of the word "billions" and distinctive delivery emphasizing the "b" (which he did intentionally, in place of more cumbersome alternatives such as "billions wit... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,160 | As a humorous tribute to Sagan and his association with the catchphrase "billions and billions", a "sagan" has been defined as a unit of measurement equivalent to a very large number – technically at least four billion (two billion plus two billion) – of anything. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,161 | Sagan's number is the number of stars in the observable universe. This number is reasonably well defined, because it is known what stars are and what the observable universe is, but its value is highly uncertain. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,162 | Sagan's ability to convey his ideas allowed many people to understand the cosmos better—simultaneously emphasizing the value and worthiness of the human race, and the relative insignificance of the Earth in comparison to the Universe. He delivered the 1977 series of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in London. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,163 | Sagan was a proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to listen with radio telescopes for signals from potential intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms. Sagan was so persuasive that by 1982 he was able to get a petition advocating SETI published in the journal "Science", sign... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,164 | Sagan was chief technology officer of the professional planetary research journal "Icarus" for 12 years. He co-founded The Planetary Society and was a member of the SETI Institute Board of Trustees. Sagan served as Chairman of the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society, as President of the ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,165 | At the height of the Cold War, Sagan became involved in nuclear disarmament efforts by promoting hypotheses on the effects of nuclear war, when Paul Crutzen's "Twilight at Noon" concept suggested that a substantial nuclear exchange could trigger a nuclear twilight and upset the delicate balance of life on Earth by cool... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,166 | The adult Sagan remained a fan of science fiction, although disliking stories that were not realistic (such as ignoring the inverse-square law) or, he said, did not include "thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures". He wrote books to popularize science, such as "Cosmos", which reflected and expanded upon some of the ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,167 | Sagan wrote a sequel to "Cosmos", "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space", which was selected as a notable book of 1995 by "The New York Times". He appeared on PBS's "Charlie Rose" program in January 1995. Sagan also wrote the introduction for Stephen Hawking's bestseller "A Brief History of Time". Sagan... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,168 | Following Saddam Hussein's threats to light Kuwait's oil wells on fire in response to any physical challenge to Iraqi control of the oil assets, Sagan together with his "TTAPS" colleagues and Paul Crutzen, warned in January 1991 in "The Baltimore Sun" and "Wilmington Morning Star" newspapers that if the fires were left... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,169 | In his later years Sagan advocated the creation of an organized search for asteroids/near-Earth objects (NEOs) that might impact the Earth but to forestall or postpone developing the technological methods that would be needed to defend against them. He argued that all of the numerous methods proposed to alter the orbit... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,170 | Sagan remained hopeful that the natural NEO impact threat and the intrinsically double-edged essence of the methods to prevent these threats would serve as a "new and potent motivation to maturing international relations". Later acknowledging that, with sufficient international oversight, in the future a "work our way ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,171 | Sagan was a critic of Plato, having said of the ancient Greek philosopher: "Science and mathematics were to be removed from the hands of the merchants and the artisans. This tendency found its most effective advocate in a follower of Pythagoras named Plato" and | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,172 | In 1995 (as part of his book "The Demon-Haunted World") Sagan popularized a set of tools for skeptical thinking called the "baloney detection kit", a phrase first coined by Arthur Felberbaum, a friend of his wife Ann Druyan. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,173 | Speaking about his activities in popularizing science, Sagan said that there were at least two reasons for scientists to share the purposes of science and its contemporary state. Simple self-interest was one: much of the funding for science came from the public, and the public therefore had the right to know how the mo... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,174 | Following the success of "Cosmos", Sagan set up his own publishing firm, Cosmos Store, to publish science books for the general public. It was not successful. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,175 | While Sagan was widely adored by the general public, his reputation in the scientific community was more polarized. Critics sometimes characterized his work as fanciful, non-rigorous, and self-aggrandizing, and others complained in his later years that he neglected his role as a faculty member to foster his celebrity s... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,176 | One of Sagan's harshest critics, Harold Urey, felt that Sagan was getting too much publicity for a scientist and was treating some scientific theories too casually. Urey and Sagan were said to have different philosophies of science, according to Davidson. While Urey was an "old-time empiricist" who avoided theorizing a... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,177 | Sagan's Harvard friend Lester Grinspoon also stated: "I know Harvard well enough to know there are people there who certainly do not like people who are outspoken." Grinspoon added: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,178 | Some, like Urey, later came to realize that Sagan's popular brand of scientific advocacy was beneficial to the science as a whole. Urey especially liked Sagan's 1977 book "The Dragons of Eden" and wrote Sagan with his opinion: "I like it very much and am amazed that someone like you has such an intimate knowledge of th... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,179 | Sagan was accused of borrowing some ideas of others for his own benefit and countered these claims by explaining that the misappropriation was an unfortunate side effect of his role as a science communicator and explainer, and that he attempted to give proper credit whenever possible. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,180 | Sagan believed that the Drake equation, on substitution of reasonable estimates, suggested that a large number of extraterrestrial civilizations would form, but that the lack of evidence of such civilizations highlighted by the Fermi paradox suggests technological civilizations tend to self-destruct. This stimulated hi... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,181 | In March 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative—a multibillion-dollar project to develop a comprehensive defense against attack by nuclear missiles, which was quickly dubbed the "Star Wars" program. Sagan spoke out against the project, arguing that it was technically impossible to develop a system with... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,182 | When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared a unilateral moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons, which would begin on August 6, 1985—the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—the Reagan administration dismissed the dramatic move as nothing more than propaganda and refused to follow suit. In respon... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,183 | Sagan was also a vocal advocate of the controversial notion of testosterone poisoning, arguing in 1992 that human males could become gripped by an "unusually severe [case of] testosterone poisoning" and this could compel them to become genocidal. In his review of Moondance magazine writer Daniela Gioseffi's 1990 book "... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,184 | In 1989, Carl Sagan was interviewed by Ted Turner whether he believed in socialism and responded that: "I'm not sure what a socialist is. But I believe the government has a responsibility to care for the people... I'm talking about making the people self-reliant." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,185 | Sagan was married three times. In 1957, he married biologist Lynn Margulis. The couple had two children, Jeremy and Dorion Sagan; their marriage ended in 1964. Sagan married artist Linda Salzman in 1968 and they had a child together, Nick Sagan, and divorced in 1981. During these marriages, Carl Sagan focused heavily o... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,186 | While teaching at Cornell, he lived in an Egyptian revival house in Ithaca perched on the edge of a cliff that had formerly been the headquarters of a Cornell secret society. While there he drove a red Porsche 911 Targa and an orange 1970 Porsche 914 with the license plate PHOBOS. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,187 | In 1994, engineers at Apple Computer code-named the Power Macintosh 7100 "Carl Sagan" in the hope that Apple would make "billions and billions" with the sale of the PowerMac 7100. The name was only used internally, but Sagan was concerned that it would become a product endorsement and sent Apple a cease-and-desist lett... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,188 | In 2019, Carl Sagan's daughter Sasha Sagan released "For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in our Unlikely World", which depicts life with her parents and her father's death when she was fourteen. Building on a theme in her father's work, Sasha Sagan argues in "For Small Creatures Such as We" that... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,189 | Sagan was acquainted with the science fiction fandom through his friendship with Isaac Asimov, and he spoke at the Nebula Awards ceremony in 1969. Asimov described Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own, the other being computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,190 | Sagan wrote frequently about religion and the relationship between religion and science, expressing his skepticism about the conventional conceptualization of God as a sapient being. For example: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,191 | Sagan also commented on Christianity and the Jefferson Bible, stating "My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts, the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much l... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,192 | An environmental appeal, "Preserving and Cherishing the Earth", primarily written and signed by Sagan, with other noted scientists and religious leaders in January 1990, stated that "The historical record makes clear that religious teaching, example, and leadership are powerfully able to influence personal conduct and ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,193 | In reply to a question in 1996 about his religious beliefs, Sagan answered, "I'm agnostic." Sagan maintained that the idea of a creator God of the Universe was difficult to prove or disprove and that the only conceivable scientific discovery that could challenge it would be an infinitely old universe. Sagan's views on ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,194 | In 2006, Ann Druyan edited Sagan's 1985 Glasgow "Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology" into a book, "", in which he elaborates on his views of divinity in the natural world. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,195 | Sagan is also widely regarded as a freethinker or skeptic; one of his most famous quotations, in "Cosmos", was, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (called the "Sagan standard" by some). This was based on a nearly identical statement by fellow founder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,196 | Late in his life, Sagan's books elaborated on his naturalistic view of the world. In "The Demon-Haunted World", he presented tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent ones, essentially advocating wide use of critical thinking and the scientific method. The compilation "Billions and Billions: Th... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,197 | Sagan warned against humans' tendency towards anthropocentrism. He was the faculty adviser for the Cornell Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In the "Cosmos" chapter "Blues For a Red Planet", Sagan wrote, "If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians,... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,198 | Sagan was a user and advocate of marijuana. Under the pseudonym "Mr. X", he contributed an essay about smoking cannabis to the 1971 book "Marihuana Reconsidered". The essay explained that marijuana use had helped to inspire some of Sagan's works and enhance sensual and intellectual experiences. After Sagan's death, his... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
11,199 | In 1947, the year that inaugurated the "flying saucer" craze, the young Sagan suspected the "discs" might be alien spaceships. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6824 |
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