Today is Carl Sagan’s Birthday!
Thanks for teaching us we are made from Star Stuff.
I have read everyone of Carl’s books and have a collection of his videos, including Cosmos; what a brilliant mind!
Two interesting quotes of Sagan:
"It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not. — Quoted in Lily Splane's "Quantum Consciousness" (Anaphase II Publishing, 2004)
"Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact."
— Interview in the magazine Psychology Today (January 1996)
Years ago I bought my grandson a book by Sagan. I can't remember which but he bought a couple more. I bought him a telescope a little better than a toy. We looked at our moon, the moons of Venus and planets. Now he has a much bigger and better one and looks at galaxies billions of light years away. He looks at me with a grin and tells me if we got in the car and drove a hundred miles an hour how long it would take for us to arrive. He says we might have to pack a lunch.
Scruples wrote:
Today is Carl Sagan’s Birthday!
Thanks for teaching us we are made from Star Stuff.
I like this from one of his quotes about our only earth - a pale blue dot,
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Thank you for that reminder. Every fall, I design and put up posters for my spring class. This year I used Carl Sagan's quotes.
Bill
It’s my birthday today, one day and one year later than his, and I attended the University of Chicago at the same time he was there as an undergraduate - 1952 to 1955. It was a tragedy that he died so young (62).
You are so right. He was such a role model for everyone to try to learn more science.
Bill
Scruples wrote:
Today is Carl Sagan’s Birthday!
Thanks for teaching us we are made from Star Stuff.
Carl died the same day as did my mother. He certainly brought a lot of science to the public but less so to his graduate students. My brother considered him as a major professor but chose someone else as Carl was a bit too busy for his students. No one is perfect.
JohnFrim
Loc: Somewhere in the Great White North.
Thank you for that link. Carl's presentation was EXCELLENT!!!
And it was quite interesting to see the young Al Gore paying so much intense attention to the talk. I could almost see the wheels grinding inside his head as they forged his focus on climate change.
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