A Gift for Vividness

Carl Sagan, says one of his colleagues at Cornell, "is very often right and always interesting. That is in contrast to most academics, who are always right and not very interesting. " In his books or off the cuff, on the lecture platform or sitting across from Johnny Carson, Sagan has a distinctive gift for expressing scientific notions vividly and with infectious enthusiasm. A sampler of the sayings of Sagan:

On Scientific Method. In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data.

On Materialism. I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we.

On Skepticism. Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

On Public Ignorance of Science. We have a society which is built on science and technology and which uses science in every one of the interstices of national life, and in which the public, the executive, the legislative and the judiciary have very little understanding of what science is about. That is a clear disaster signal. It has to be suicidal.

On Science Fiction. [It] does very well in attracting youngsters to science but not in sustaining that attraction. Over the years, science fiction has become less and less intriguing to me. It turns out that science itself is much more subtle and intricate, with the added virtue of being true.

On the Impact of Space Photos. Many of the leaders of the ecological movement in the U.S. were originally stimulated to action by photographs of earth taken from space--pictures revealing a tiny, delicate and fragile world, exquisitely sensitive to the depredations of man, a meadow in the middle of the sky.

On Natural Selection. Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today.

On the Right to Life. [This] is an excellent example of a "buzz word," designed to inflame rather than illuminate. There is no right to life in any society on earth today, nor has there been at any former time (with a few rare exceptions, such as among the Jains of India). We raise farm animals for slaughter; destroy forests; pollute rivers and lakes until no fish can live there; hunt deer and elk for sport . . . All these beasts and vegetables are as alive as we.

On Funding for Research. Without vigorous, farsighted and continuing encouragement of scientific research, we are in the position of eating our seed corn: we may fend off starvation for one more winter, but we have removed the last hope of surviving the following winter.

On the Planet Mars. I remember being transfixed by the first lander image to show the horizon of Mars. This was not an alien world, I thought. I knew places like it in Colorado and Arizona and Nevada. There were rocks and sand drifts and a distant eminence, as natural and unselfconscious as any landscape on earth. Mars was a place. I would, of course, have been surprised to see a grizzled prospector emerge from behind a dune leading his mule, but at the same time the idea seemed appropriate. Nothing remotely like it ever entered my mind in all the hours I spent examining the [Soviet] Venera 9 and 10 images of the Venus surface. One way or another, I knew, this was a world to which we would return.

On Black Holes. [They] are beasts akin to the smile on the Cheshire Cat. They are enormous stars that have winked out, but are still there, peppering the galaxy like the holes in an Emmenthaler cheese.

On Extraterrestrial Life. There is an old story about the Biology I examination in which the students were asked: "Suppose you could take to Mars any of the laboratory equipment used in this course. How would you determine if there were life on Mars?" One famous response: "Ask the inhabitants. Even a negative answer would be significant." The student got an A.

On the Significance of Man. As long as there have been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

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