Sagan
SaganThe New Education
There is a bed in Seattle which is nestled in North America on the spinning Earth led by the Sun around the Milky Way, a speck of cosmic dust floating in the Universe. On this bed Carl Sagan died of an obscure disease for which there is no cure. Carl Sagan is a celebrated writer and astronomer, but most remembered for his writings. Like Galileo he brought the beauty of science to the people. He is the writer of �Cosmos', an award winning television mini-series that brought the wonders of astronomy into the home. His last and final work was a collection of his essays; Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death on the Brink of the Millennium. . Sagan wrote with a sense of awe, humility and reverence of nature. This book is an expression of Sagan's passions for the things around. The book is so varied in topic that it is difficult at times to find a unifying factor. Nor does the book reach any sort of conclusion as to the direction of man and things around him. In this we can understand the true sadness of Sagan's death, he was a child who was overwhelmed by the beauty of the universe around him and had not the time needed to express all of it in words.
The book is split into three parts; "The Power and Beauty of Quantification", "What are the Conservatives Conserving?" and "Where Hearts and Minds Collide". In the first section Sagan begins by teaches the reader about large numbers and what innovations in the past allowed us to use them. Sagan moves slowly and tactfully building the readers understanding of these basic concepts of large numbers and exponents, then applies them to such problems as exponential growth of populations, radioactive decay and nuclear chain reactions. . He exposes scientific concepts like a traditional narrative. Building �the story' to the questions he would most like answered concerning the nature of the universe and extraterrestrial (intelligent or otherwise) life. There is only a slight deviation coherence of this section where Sagan-or the editors- decide to delve into the nature of man's war instinct and whether or not it is good to suppress it or nurture it. Sagan feels that thousands of years of a hunter/gatherer society will not be offset by relatively few years of a sedentary existence. Despite this Sagan maintains an optimistic outlook on humanities destiny, a trend that runs the course of the book. Overall this section is fairly light and enjoyable to read, the concepts early in the section will not overwhelm the reader. Upon finishing the section one is left with a sense of satisfaction, not the confusion associated by the jargon riddled books that plague this genre.
In our day, that is today, there are more scientists than there ever was in...
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