Carl Sagan: Humanity (page 3)

“Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane perspective of Eratosthenes had been widely adopted and applied. But this was not to be. Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and scholars and tourists, it's probably here that the word Cosmopolitan realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos. Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn't they take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not.”

Carl Sagan

28 min 30 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Who Speaks for Earth? [Episode 13]

People , World , Justice , Imagination

“Instead of wanting everyone to share and know of their discoveries the Pythagoreans suppressed the square root of two and the dodecahedron. The outside world was not to know. The Pythagoreans had discovered, in the mathematical underpinnings of nature, one of the two most powerful scientific tools, the other of course is experiment, but instead of using their insight to advance the collective voyage of human discovery they made of it little more than the hocus-pocus of a mystery cult. Science and mathematics were to be removed from the hands of the merchants and the artisans.”

Carl Sagan

38 min 10 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Backbone of Night [Episode 7]

World , Mathematics , Nature , Science

“The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Religion , Knowledge , Science

“Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 3 (p. 44)

Imagination

“For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 173

Understanding , Time

“If you take a look at science in its everyday function, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotions and personalities and character and so on. But there’s one thing that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism that is considered acceptable or even desirable. The poor graduate student at his or her Ph. D. oral exam is subjected to a withering crossfire of questions that sometimes seem hostile or contemptuous; this from the professors who have the candidate’s future in their grasp. The students naturally are nervous; who wouldn’t be? True, they’ve prepared for it for years. But they understand that at that critical moment they really have to be able to answer questions. So in preparing to defend their theses, they must anticipate questions; they have to think, “Where in my thesis is there a weakness that someone else might find — because I sure better find it before they do, because if they find it and I'm not prepared, I'm in deep trouble."”

Carl Sagan

Wonder and Skepticism
Skeptical Inquirer
19
1
1995
January-February
0194-6730
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/wonder_and_skepticism/

Hostility , Understanding , Question , Nature

“Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. …Both in classic and in medieval times, it was prominently speculated that gods or angels propelled them, gave them a twirl every now and then. The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r2… as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

God , Angels , Science , Time

“For as long as there 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 hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 193

Courage , Night , Search , Sun

“In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.”

Carl Sagan book Broca's Brain

Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 25, “The Amniotic Universe” (p. 364)

Idea , Making love

“Vigorous criticism is more constructive in science than in some other areas of human endeavor because in science there are adequate standards of validity that can be agreed upon by competent practitioners the world over. The objective of such criticism is not to suppress but rather to encourage the advance of new ideas: those that survive a firm skeptical scrutiny have a fighting chance of being right, or at least useful.”

Carl Sagan book Broca's Brain

Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 7, “Venus and Dr. Velikovsky” (p. 98)

Chance , Fight , World , Idea

“Very few scientists actually plunge into the murky waters of testing or challenging borderline or pseudo-scientific beliefs. The chance of finding out something really interesting—except about human nature—seems small, and the amount of time required seems large. I believe that scientists should spend more time in discussing these issues, but the fact that a given contention lacks vigorous scientific opposition in no way implies that scientists think it is reasonable.”

Carl Sagan book Broca's Brain

Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 5, “Night Walkers and Mystery Mongers: Sense and Nonsense at the End of Science” (p. 69)

Chance , Time , Nature , Water

“That in nonarithmetic operations the small and slow human brain can still do so much better than the large and fast electronic computer is an impressive tribute to how cleverly the brain is packaged and programmed—features brought about, of course, by natural selection. Those who possessed poorly programmed brains eventually did not live long enough to reproduce.”

Carl Sagan

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 8, “The Future Evolution of the Brain” (p. 224)

Nature

“Without these experimental tests, very few physicists would have accepted general relativity. There are many hypotheses in physics of almost comparable brilliance and elegance that have been rejected because they did not survive such a confrontation with experiment. In my view, the human condition would be greatly improved if such confrontations and willingness to reject hypotheses were a regular part of our social, political, economic, religious and cultural lives.”

Carl Sagan

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 7, “Lovers and Madmen” (p. 193)

Parting