Why Carl?

As the title of the blog hints, a lot of the design inspiration for this rag came from Carl Sagan, the famous popularizer of astronomy and astrophysics, yes, but also of science in general. He is perhaps most famous for Cosmos, the TV miniseries from 1980 with a lot of entertaining graphics and set designs, but its greatest virtue was Sagan himself and his voice, that bizarrely ethereal tone he had that made every word seem slightly poetic, even spiritual.

Carl Sagan died in December of 1996 after an arduous battle with myelodysplasia and something like three bone marrow transplants in an attempt to cure it. He was 62. Sagan's professional associations were mostly with Cornell University (he is buried in Ithaca), but he did his undergraduate work here at the University of Chicago, walking many of the very same halls that I walk now. I was five when Sagan died, but this year my room here at the U of C is the first room Sagan had in his undergraduate career; this box I live in currently was his box, for a while.

I'm taking astronomy/astrophysics for two quarters here for my physical sciences requirement. It's a class designed for nonmajors, aka people like me, but the subject matter is really interesting, and there's a happy kind of harmony in reading my astro textbook in a room where Sagan probably first started seriously studying astronomy himself. I like to think sometimes that he went through the same core curriculum, maybe read some Marx and Smith and Weber in this room, just the same as I currently do.

Carl Sagan was no god and no prophet and no priest; he was much humbler and more honest than that. He was, however, profoundly intelligent, profoundly entertaining, and profoundly able to communicate both science and practical philosophy in a way that conveys both the wonder and the humility entangled in our universe. For that, Carl Sagan has earned my immense respect and has helped to shape how I view the cosmos and my own tiny life within it, how much more beautiful the universe is when stripped of supernatural mysticism and left to its own natural glory.

"We are connected, not in the trivial ways that astrology promises but in the deepest of ways."