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In his mere 62 years on the planet, Carl Sagan proved himself an irreplaceable advocate of science and space exploration. His legacy lives on today in his beloved series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” as well as in everything from obnoxious t-shirts to action comics and Auto-Tune tracks. He remains something of a scientific saint. One of more famous nuggets of wisdom is probably this one, related to star stuff:
Physicist Postulates Dimensions Added as Universe Expands
by Josh Clark | April 21, 2011
I remember many years ago in the mid-90s — during the zenith of paranoia in the alien abduction phenomenon — the whole affair being offhandedly dismissed by Car Sagan, I believe it was. Sagan (I think) mentioned that every description of aliens who were visiting Earth and carting off country folk for probing and the like all shared a suspicious similarity to humans. Despite the differences — like communicating telepathically — the alien abductors bore a real resemblance to people in that they had a roundish head atop a neck, a face that featured a mouth and eyes, used, ostensibly, to engage in sensing the world. They walked on two legs and were capable of and driven by malicious intent or callous indifference to the suffering of their captives. They were pretty much a rough sketch of how humanity saw itself.
Amazing, terrible and heartbreaking things can happen when scientists fall in love. In this episode, Robert and Julie discuss the cosmic courtship of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan before diving into the atomic affairs of Marie and Pierre Curie. Whether you love tales of love and heartbreak or ruminations on the evolution of science, then Lauren Rednis’ “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout” may be the book for you. Julie and Robert discuss the book’s fascinating real-life characters and the beautiful, terrifying science they obsessed over.
I’m a nerd who loves music, which means “A Glorious Dawn,” the video created with pitch-corrected clips from Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos,” is one of those things on the Internet that seems to have been made just for me. So when I saw that the video had blossomed into a whole project called The Symphony of Science, I jumped at the chance to ask Boswell for an interview. He graciously agreed.
Today would have been Sagan’s 75th birthday — a perfect time take a look at how this project came to be and what’s coming up in the Symphony’s future. If you haven’t seen “A Glorious Dawn” or “We Are All Connected,” I highly recommend them — they’re embedded in this post as well.
It’s been a busy week at HowStuffWorks.com. On top of the normal schedule of podcasting, live shows, blog posts and articles, we’ve also experienced the joy of upgrading the software on our computers. Immediately following that came the traditional 45-minute where-the-heck-did-they-put-copy-and-paste ritual. Then there was a building-wide fire drill that disrupted us for an hour or so. Oh, and there’s the guest appearances.
On Tuesday, Randall Bennett invited me on TechVi to discuss the new line of Apple products that hit stores this week. Yesterday, Chris and I sat down for a phone interview with Chuck from Galactic Watercooler. We talked about Carl Sagan, Cosmos, the Voyager program and science fiction. The episode should be up later this weekend — definitely check it out. They run a fun show and have had some really interesting guests on in the past.
On top of all that, we also published two new episodes of TechStuff! You remember TechStuff — it’s the show with electrolytes (it’s what plants crave). This week, our shows focused on two related topics: touch-screen technology and the Zune personal media player.
Space Music: Carl Sagan – “A Glorious Dawn”
by Robert Lamb | October 19, 2009
In another installment of space music, I have to help spread the word about this marvelous audiovisual creation by John Boswell, AKA melodysheep of Color Pulse Music. What he’s done here is take samples and footage from Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and Stephen Hawking’s “Universe” and mixed it all into a musical tribute. What might have come off as parody in the hands of a lesser artist really conveys a sense of cosmological awe and wonder.
There’s a lot of renewed pride and awe going around regarding the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, but what if we’d explored an alternate method of collecting lunar samples and bringing them back home? What if we’d just lobbed an atomic bomb at the old ball of cheese and simply scooped up the debris with a net?
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