Science: The Cosmic Explainer

Heeere’s Carl, bringing you nothing less than the universe

Scene: A living room in Brooklyn, circa 1946

Grandfather: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Boy: An astronomer.

Grandfather: Yes, but how will you make a living?

Flashing through the heavens like an extraterrestrial Tinker Bell, the spacecraft looks like something by H.G. Wells out of Walt Disney. At the helm is none other than the boy from Brooklyn, now fully grown and, among several other things, a real astronomer. With a nonchalant gesture over his magical controls, he guides the ship on a voyage made possible only by the imagination, with the help of a Hollywood special-effects crew. Into the arms of giant galaxies he goes, through halos of stars, past a blinking pulsar, skirting the edge of a black hole, even reconnoitering a distant planet that seems to be inhabited.

It is an extraordinary journey, surmounting all barriers of space and time. The pilot-guide does not pause to question such miracles. Nor does he stint on bold speculation. Passing one planet, he muses, “Intelligent beings may have evolved and reworked this planetary surface in some massive engineering enterprise.” Finally returning to the vicinity of home, he talks of “a single, ordinary, yellow dwarf star surrounded by a system of nine planets, dozens of moons, thousands of asteroids and billions of comets—the family of our sun.” He fantasizes about large, tenuous life forms in the stormy atmosphere of Jupiter and about small, microbial ones in the reddish volcanic soil of Mars. To the space traveler, the earth is the shore of a cosmic ocean: “Recently, we have waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting.”

So it goes when Carl Sagan, creator, chief writer and host-narrator of the new public television series Cosmos takes the controls of his fantasy spaceship. Sagan’s grandfather can rest easy now. His grandson is not only making a living, thank you, he has also become a star—indeed, a supernova of sorts—in the scientific firmament. Sagan’s books, ranging from speculations about life beyond the earth (The Cosmic Connection) to ruminations about the reptilian ancestry of the human brain (The Dragons of Eden) have sold millions of copies and have been translated into a dozen languages. His lectures, on campus as well as off, attract overflow crowds. He is at home on late-night TV bantering with Johnny Carson about heavenly bodies, both human and astronomical. He has also talked with Jimmy Carter about such esoteric matters as black holes and exobiology (the study of possible extraterrestrial life).

Now, at 45, the Cornell-based scientist is displaying his didactic gifts in his largest classroom yet. The first two of Cosmos’ 13 weekly episodes may have attracted more viewers (perhaps as many as 10 million each) than any regular series in PBS history. With a budget of $8.5 million, Cosmos was three years in the making, involved a production staff of 150 people and was filmed at 40 locations in twelve countries. It features special effects rivaling those in Star Wars: computer animation, scale models and painted backdrops as dazzling as anything ever attempted on television.

The series’ name comes from the Greek word for the ordered universe, the antithesis of chaos. It is an apt choice. Cosmos is nothing less than Sagan’s attempt to make sense out of what is for many people the hopelessly baffling world of 20th century science. To unfold his story he roves through two millennia of scientific progress, often shuttling back and forth over the centuries like some Wellsian time traveler. He travels the earth as well. One moment he is seated in a café on the Aegean island of Samos, home of Pythagoras and Aristarchus, explaining the first stirrings of Greek scientific prowess. At another moment, he is strolling through the venerable Cavendish Laboratories of England’s Cambridge University, recounting the birth of modern atomic physics. At still another, he is standing in the bleak wastes of Death Valley, discussing the efforts of the Viking landers to find living things on Mars. Alas, concedes Sagan, they have found no sure trace of life—yet.

In the casualness of turtleneck jersey and chino pants, his butcher-boy haircut tousled by the wind, Sagan sends out an exuberant message: science is not only vital for humanity’s future wellbeing, but it is rousing good fun as well. Even the most scientifically untutored person can—indeed, must—grasp its essentials. As Sagan insists, “There is nothing about science that cannot be explained to the layman.”

Purists among his colleagues shudder at such popularization and simplification. After all, science has a long tradition, often violated to be sure, of modesty and understatement, even of calculated obfuscation, so that only an elite priesthood will be privy to its secrets. Other than the irrepressible Sagan, how many scientists would buzz a simulated Martian volcano, as he does in one Cosmos sequence; or rummage through a re-creation of the famed library of Alexandria, pretending to read long-lost papyrus scrolls; or attempt to explain the paradoxes of special relativity while bicycling through the hills of Tuscany, where the young Einstein once wandered? Sagan also issues some open challenges. To creationists, who argue for a biblical interpretation of life’s beginnings, he states that evolution is not a theory, it is a fact. As for reports that creatures from other worlds have landed on earth, he dismisses them with a shrug. Astrology, Sagan insists, is a fraud.

There are more than a few milligrams of arrogance in all this. The camera lingers too often on the Sagan profile. His lyrical language sometimes lapses into flowery excess, and occasionally Cosmos’ galloping pace straggles to a crawl. But without a doubt, Sagan makes science as palatable as the apple pie he lovingly cuts up in a Cambridge University dining room in order to make a point about matter. He is the quintessential schoolmaster; he makes such a classical experiment as Christiaan Huygens’ determination of the distance of the stars with only a perforated brass disc seem as vivid today as when it was performed three centuries ago. In the words of one admiring reviewer, he is the prince of popularizers, the nation’s scientific mentor to the masses.

Since the beginnings of science, every age has had its tradition of explainers, often scientists themselves, who clarified new and difficult ideas. In the 19th century, T.H. Huxley served as the spokesman of Darwinian evolution. Later such skilled popularizers as Arthur Eddington and Bertrand Russell helped interpret the startling new worlds of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Today more and more scientists seem to be matching their talent for experimentation with a surprising gift for exposition. One of them is a Harvard paleontologist named Stephen Jay Gould, 39, author of two pellucid collections of essays on evolution (Ever Since Darwin, The Panda’s Thumb). Another is Dr. Lewis Thomas, 66, whose humane writings on biology and medicine in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine became the basis for two bestsellers (The Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail). Others include Physicists Jeremy Bernstein, 50, a regular contributor to The New Yorker; Robert Jastrow, 55, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and Princeton’s Gerard O’Neill, 53, the leading apostle of space colonization. There is also the British physician Jonathan Miller, whose medical series The Body in Question is running on PBS and is the basis of a current book. Most prolific of all is Isaac Asimov, 60 (with 218 books to his credit at last count), a chemistry Ph.D. and onetime medical-school instructor.

A decade or so ago, much of the public would have turned a deaf ear to these voices of science, eloquent as they are. The subject was unpopular, even in disrepute. Science, or more accurately its offshoot technology, was being blamed for much that was wrong with the world: the growing despoliation of the environment, the chemical devastation of the Vietnamese countryside, the spread of nuclear weaponry. Even the first flush of excitement about landing men on the moon quickly turned into boredom after repeated video exposure of the dusty, lifeless lunar surface. Many people pressed loudly and insistently for more attention to earthly problems. NASA is still suffering budgetary blues from this outcry. Indeed, only last week the space agency’s beleaguered boss, Robert Frosch, announced he was quitting, reportedly because of lack of financial support.

But even when science was attracting little popular interest, plenty was going on. Investigators were making enormous strides, especially those involved in basic research—inquiries with no immediate practical payoff. Some researchers were probing the inner secrets of the atomic nucleus; others, like Sagan himself, looked out to the mysteries of the planets and the stars. Still others discovered how the earth’s surface, found to be unexpectedly mobile, has been shaped and reshaped over the ages. Perhaps most startling of all were the explorations on the very frontiers of life. For the first time, scientists were beginning to understand and manipulate DNA, the basic stuff of heredity.

Eventually, the awe of science overcame the indifference toward it. As Lewis Thomas explains, “The more that is learned about nature, particularly the puzzling aspects—the queernesses being uncovered by the physicists, for example—the more engrossing it becomes.” Adds Asimov: “We feel that if we do not understand science and the changes science makes possible, we may find ourselves overwhelmed.”

In a turnabout as sudden as some of the scene shifts in Cosmos, ennui has turned into enthusiasm. Public curiosity about science, if not financial support of it, seems to be rocketing upward. Some signs: the New York Times has created a special weekly section to report the news of science, and other newspapers have expanded their science staffs and coverage. Some half a dozen new mass-market science magazines have been launched within the past few years, the most recent being Time Inc.’s new monthly DISCOVER. There is a growing readership for books on scientific topics, as opposed to those on such pseudoscientific hokum as UFOs, astrology and parapsychology.

Television’s interest grew too. In the early 1970s, PBS began importing BBC science specials, like Nigel Calder’s programs on astronomy, physics, the new biology. In 1974, one of the PBS stations, WGBH in Boston, took the plunge with its own Nova series. Now, counting Nova, Sagan’s Cosmos, and Miller’s Body, PBS is running seven separate science series.

The commercial networks long gave science short shrift, except when it came to moon landings or Mr. Wizard-like kiddie shows. Now they too are moving into expanded coverage. ABC has a possible science series for next year, an offshoot of 20/20 tentatively titled Quest. At CBS, programmers are considering whether to give Walter Cronkite’s Universe, an occasional half-hour science news show that has got a moderately good reception, a regular evening time slot. One factor that will surely affect the decision: the response of viewers to Sagan’s Cosmos.

Playing the part of pacesetter is nothing new to Sagan. While growing up in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst section, the son of a U.S.-born mother and a Russian-immigrant father—a garment cutter who rose to factory manager—he was already thinking of the heavens while other children were preoccupied with stickball and marbles. He recalls: “I remember seeing the stars and asking my friends what they were. They told me that they were lights in the sky.’ ”

Unsatisfied, Sagan went off to the library and asked for a book on the stars. The librarian gave him one on the Hollywood variety: Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. When he finally got the right book, he learned that the stars were enormously distant suns. “This just blew my mind. Until then, my universe had been my neighborhood. Now I tried to imagine how far away I’d have to move the sun to make it as faint as a star. I got my first sense of the immensity of the universe. I was hooked.”

The hook worked its way in deeper when Carl also stumbled into science fiction. He was especially taken with the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote of sensuous princesses, six-legged beasts of burden, evil warlords and a Virginia gentleman named John Carter, who miraculously transported himself to the Red Planet simply by gazing at it. The dark-eyed youngster, looking up at the night sky from a Brooklyn lot, tried vainly to follow his hero into space. It was a dream that Sagan has never forgotten. Phobos, the name of one of the moons of Mars, now appears on the license plates of Sagan’s bright orange Porsche.

It was not until the Sagan family,moved to Rahway, N.J., that Carl realized he actually could become a professional astronomer. All along he had felt he might have to go into the clothing business with his father, perhaps as a salesman. But his high school biology teacher assured him that astronomers, like the famous Harlow Shapley, were really paid for their work. In 1951, at 16, he entered the University of Chicago on a scholarship. Nine years later, he left with a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics.

During his undergraduate years at Chicago, Sagan spent some summers breeding fruit flies in the Indiana University laboratory of the famed geneticist Hermann Muller, who won a Nobel Prize for showing that X rays could cause mutations. It was ideal training for an astronomer who would become the premier spokesman for exobiology. He also showed early gifts as a popularizer. He organized a highly successful campus lecture series on science, characteristically including himself as one of the speakers; some faculty members dismissed it as “Sagan’s circus,” but it drew S.R.O. crowds.

Even at that stage of Sagan’s career, some of his professors detected rebelliousness in him, a penchant for shunning the work at hand in order to explore other interests. Recalls Physicist Peter Meyer, who is now director of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute: “He told me he would rather spend time with problems in astronomy than go through the hardships of classical physics.” Today Meyer concedes that it is precisely this restlessness of intellect that enables Sagan to see the broader picture, letting him point out, for example, where biology and chemistry converge with astronomy. Says another scientist: “Sagan can separate the momentous from the minute. He can tell the story without cluttering detail.”

Still, for all his extracurricular interests, including a young biologist named Lynn Alexander whom he would shortly marry, Sagan was a highly productive researcher. As always, he was iconoclastic. Although most astronomers were studying the more distant realms of the stars and galaxies, Sagan opted for the nearby planets, under the tutelage of the late Gerard Kuiper. He realized that planets were the most likely places for extraterrestrial life to be found in his lifetime. He also anticipated that the U.S. would soon embark on an ambitious program of planetary exploration. At a party just before Sputnik I spurred American space activity, Sagan made a perspicacious wager: he bet a case of chocolate bars that the U.S. would reach the moon by 1970. He won with five months to spare.

Sagan published his first paper at 22. Its title was an echo from his days with Muller and a sign of his growing interest in exobiology: “Radiation and the Origin of the Gene.” A key point was that radiation may have been the trigger for the combination of the first DNA molecules. Eventually some 300 more papers would follow, including a particularly brilliant bit of deduction about the planet Venus. At the time, many scientists still regarded Venus as a kind of sister planet of the earth with a benign climate. But radio emissions from the planet were hinting at puzzlingly high temperatures. Sagan pointed out that a Venusian atmosphere of carbon dioxide and water vapor would trap solar heat, create a “greenhouse effect” and raise surface temperatures far above those of the earth. His prediction was soon confirmed by Soviet landers. The planet’s surface temperature proved to be about 480° C (900° F), high enough to melt lead.

In 1960, Sagan headed for the University of California at Berkeley, where he spent two years as a research fellow; he insisted on taking a turn at teaching a class, even though the terms of his contract did not require it. At the Stanford University School of Medicine he delved into the origins of life. Then he went off to teach and do research at Harvard and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

Collaborating with his first graduate student, James Pollack, he offered a novel explanation for the periodic lightening and darkening of parts of Mars’ surface. Some scientists had suggested that the changes were due to seasonal variations in plant life. Sagan and Pollack argued that the fluctuations were varying dust patterns kicked up by winds of ferocious force. Years later, closeup photos of Mars confirmed their thesis.

At Harvard, Sagan was a highly popular lecturer, talking about such things as UFOs (he debunked them) and the idea of extraterrestrial life (he promoted it). He was divorced from Lynn (after two children, Dorian, now 21, and Jeremy, 19) and married to Linda Salzman, an artist. His career appeared to be taking off. But in spite of his professional flair, Harvard never offered him tenure. So, in 1968, when Cornell University beckoned with an offer to set up a laboratory of planetary studies, he promptly accepted it and moved to rural Ithaca, N. Y.

Even Sagan’s scientific friends acknowledge that he does not have the patience or persistence for the slow, painstaking experimentation and data collection that is at the heart of the scientific process. Nor has he come close to the kind of breakthrough work that wins Nobel Prizes. But he more than compensates with other significant talents. He has a penchant for asking provocative questions. Sometimes, as Sagan fully concedes, this can rile others. But such prodding can inspire students and colleagues, lead to brilliant new insights and generally create a mood of intellectual excitement.

At Sagan’s Cornell laboratory, one of the main objectives was to try to unravel the mystery of how the building blocks of life—amino acids, proteins and DNA—could have evolved on the primordial earth. Although he and the Russian astrophysicist I.S. Shklovskii lived half a world apart, they collaborated in writing Intelligent Life in the Universe, still probably the best treatise on the prospects for extraterrestrial life. As a planetary expert, Sagan was called upon by NASA to act as an adviser and scientific investigator on unmanned space missions. He did not always endear himself to the space agency. One irritant was his outspoken opposition to the moon landings. Robots, he argued, could do the job better and cheaper and with no risk to life.

In 1973, during a brief appearance on the Tonight show to promote Cosmic Connection, his first really popular book, he so impressed Host (and astronomy buff) Johnny Carson that he was soon invited back, for a choicer spot on the show. That second appearance gave Sagan a chance to tell the story of the evolution of the universe and the beginnings of life in his inimitable cadences: “Fifteen billion years ago, the universe was without form. There were no galaxies, stars or planets. There was no life. There was darkness everywhere.” When Sagan’s soliloquy ended, said a reviewer, 100,000 teen-age listeners must have vowed on the spot to become astronomers. One thing is certain: Sagan captivated Carson, who kept inviting him back for further appearances. Indeed he became such a frequent guest that students would greet his return to the Ithaca lecture halls with a mock Tonight show-type introduction: “Heeere’s Carl!”

Yet even without Carson’s patronage, Sagan’s public star would surely have risen. Just before NASA sent off its twin Pioneers 10 and 11 to Saturn and Jupiter, he had persuaded the space agency to attach plaques identifying the ships’ origins on the remote chance that they might be intercepted when they finally passed out of the solar system. The idea was a triumph over bureaucratic caution. The plaques, drawn by Linda, depicted nude male and female earthlings, and provoked worldwide comment.

For Sagan these overtures to anyone out there were equally important as signals to earth. They are part of what he calls cosmic consciousness-raising, his attempt to alert earthlings to the excitement and wonder of the universe. It was just such consciousness-raising that first stirred thoughts in Sagan’s mind of doing a television program on space exploration.

Back in 1971, the Mariner 9 spacecraft had just become the first ship from earth to orbit another planet. The target was Sagan’s old favorite, Mars. In less than a year of reconnaissance, the robot accumulated more information about the Red Planet than had been gathered in three centuries of earlier observation from earth. Yet to Sagan’s chagrin, the feat was virtually ignored by American television. Four years later, the even more spectacular Viking landings on Mars were again all but ignored. Sagan decided something had to be done. Joining up with an equally dismayed colleague at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, B. Gentry Lee, Sagan sought sponsors for a TV film on space exploration. What they ended up with was an agreement with KCET, the Los Angeles PBS station, for an even bigger project: a full science series somewhat like Jacob Bronowski’s acclaimed The Ascent of Man, with Sagan as guide and principal author. Ascent’s British producer, Adrian Malone, was even recruited to ride herd on the enterprise.

That was no easy job. Inevitably, there were disagreements, some over scientific accuracy, others involving personality. Sagan, a novice at TV production, admits that he ruffled feelings among the TV staff with his constant questioning. There were logistical problems. A severe snowstorm hit Death Valley just before the Cosmos team was scheduled to re-enact a Viking landing. A few miles away, the U.S. Air Force was conducting bomb runs. In addition, word came that Sagan’s father had developed lung cancer. Over the ten months of illness that led up to his father’s death, Carl frequently had to be away from the filming for days at a time.

There were other changes in Sagan’s life during this period. He separated from his wife Linda, leaving her and their son Nicholas, 10, behind in Ithaca. He moved to Los Angeles with a New York novelist named Ann Druyan, 31, who had been collaborating with him on a record of terrestrial photographs and sounds (Murmurs of Earth) for placement aboard the Voyager spacecraft, as well as helping him with the Cosmos script. After Sagan’s divorce, they hope to marry.

Having discovered the excitement of show business, Sagan is eager to continue in it. Says he: “Television is one of the greatest teaching tools ever invented, particularly for teaching science.” One project on tap is a feature film with a scenario by Sagan (but no acting role for him), about an encounter with extraterrestrial life. The tentative title: Contact. It may be a while, however, before that adventure goes before the cameras. After a two-year absence, Sagan is due to resume teaching and research at Cornell in January. He must also straighten out his divorce proceeding, which now threatens to become a court battle over the division of property (Sagan has retained flamboyant “palimony” Lawyer Marvin Mitchelson). Finally, he professes a desire to go back to research, at least part time, something that he has found virtually impossible to pursue with his multiplying interests.

Watching with wonder—and no doubt a little envy—the whirling star named Sagan, some of his colleagues feel that he has stepped beyond the bounds of science. They complain that he is driven by ego. They also say he tends to overstate his case, often fails to give proper credit to other scientists for their work and blurs the line between fact and speculation. But they probably represent a minority view. Most scientists, increasingly sensitive to the need for public support and understanding of research, appreciate what Sagan has become: America’s most effective salesman of science. His pitch in Cosmos—and indeed in all his popularizing—is classic Sagan. Says he: “Science is a joy. It is not just something for an isolated, remote elite. It is our birthright.” What scientist could disagree? —By Frederic Golden. Reported by Peter Stoler/Venice, Calif.