Candle In The Dark

9/30/07 – 10/6/07
by C. Zaitz

Do you remember Carl Sagan? Back in the early 1980’s, Carl Sagan was the voice of science. Scientists envied him for his fame and comedians imitated him due to his juicy enunciation of words like “nucleosynthesis” and “billions.” I was an impressionable 13 year old when Cosmos: A Personal Voyage first aired. Cosmos was Sagan’s illustrated ode to science and scientific thinking. Not only did he reveal the latest findings in astronomy, he discussed everything from the origins of life to the prospect of space travel, touching on biology, chemistry and physics. He framed phenomenon on earth within the larger context of the entire universe.

Who can forget the giant “Cosmic Calendar?” Sagan fit the whole history of the universe into one year, starting with the Big Bang on New Year’s Day. Humans started walking upright around 9:30 pm on December 31st, the very last day of that same year. Recorded human history begins at 11:59:45 pm. The voyage of Christopher Columbus happened on the very last second before midnight. Sagan reminded us that everything that has ever happened, everyone we’ve ever known about, any deeds ever done, occured in the last minutes, the last seconds of the history of the universe.

Later in life Sagan wrote a book called, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. He wrote extensively about the importance of skepticism and scientific thinking in our daily lives. He rallied against the influence of pseudosciences like astrology and ufology, while being a strong proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. Sagan warned against sloppy thinking, and came up with the “Baloney Detector,” useful ideas to keep in mind when forming ideas. “Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours.” ”Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified. (Can it be tested?) Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?” And Occam's razor has been used in countless debates: “if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler.” Why go supernatural when something can be explained by natural laws of science?

Carl Sagan died in 1996 of a rare bone cancer, but his legacy lives on. This fall the Henry Ford Community College Planetarium is showing each of the 13 episodes of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage on Fridays at 11:15 am. The doors are open to anyone interested, and there is no admission fee. The episodes are updated with new graphics and commentary by Sagan and his widow Ann Druyan. The ideas and words of Carl Sagan speak to us over the decades. Who can forget his famous quotes, “We are all star stuff” and, “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” It’s hard to leave the planetarium not feeling a little richer, a little wiser for having thought about our place in the great scheme of things. Even if you don’t agree with every thing he says, Carl Sagan was nothing if not an inspirational educator and popularizer of science. He made the process of scientific inquiry interesting, and he gave us perspective by describing the grandeur and curious nature of the universe and our local part of it.