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Carl Sagan was an astronomer, an astrophysicist, and a scientist, in the best sense of the word. He had a passion for knowledge, the truth, and science and became famous as a communicator, working to bring the concepts and methods of science to a wider audience.
“Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.”
Sagan wrote, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark as a tribute to that love. Here are quotes from the book, somewhat at random . . .
“Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.”
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Even 30 years ago, Sagan saw the risk of labelling, blaming, and turning away from Science as if it was “just another belief system.” He wrote:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
“I don’t want to believe. I want to know.”
― Carl Sagan
Or for a more cynical perspective . . .
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
— Albert Einstein