Comfort Astrophysics

In my last year of high school and my first year of college, I learned something interesting about myself: I suck at math way too bad to ever consider becoming an astronomer. Thus I joined the ranks of thousands upon thousands of people inspired by role models to attempt careers for which they were ill-suited. For most folks this experience probably involves a popular athlete or actor. For me, the famous inspiration was Carl Sagan.

Even setting the math aside, he wasn’t always the easiest guy to be inspired by. Somewhere in the 1960s – once the Sputnik scare wore off and the United States regained the upper hand in the technological side of the arms race – scientists went back to being highly uncool. And in the realm of the nerds, Sagan was royalty. Those suits. That haircut. And oh that oft-parodied voice. Even for those of us who admired and respected the guy had to accept that listening to him was a little like learning about astrophysics from Kermit the Frog.

Nor did Sagan meet us halfway. His evangelical agnosticism was sometimes off-putting; often he pitted science against religion in arenas where conflict didn’t really need to exist. And though he wasn’t completely humorless – he was a good sport about it when Johnny Carson and others mocked him over the whole “billions and billions” thing – he could be excessively strident about his views. He could also be a bit of a jerk (witness the “BHA” flap with Apple).

His shortcomings tarnish his most famous work, the PBS TV series Cosmos. More than three decades after the series originally aired, his feverish fears about the arms race and other typically left wing concerns seem quaint if not completely dated. It wasn’t that he wasn’t right. It wasn’t fun living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Further, we still live with a lot of this mess. We should quit dropping garbage on the whales. Scientific research and education should get more funding than it does. It was just that he was so damn sincere about everything.

On the other hand, it was this very sincerity that made his discussion of astronomy so compelling. His love of the subject was obvious. It was contagious. I found it impossible not to be fascinated by star classifications and the like simply because Sagan put so much fascination into the way he explained them.

He also had a gift for finding clever ways to clarify complex concepts. I was particularly taken with his “cosmic calendar,” a visual representation of the entire history of the universe represented as a single Earth year. Such simplifications helped make the immense scales much easier to grasp.

I also loved the visual representation of the library at Alexandria. Sure, it’s unsophisticated compared to what could have been done with 21st century CGI. But even today it gets me to thinking how wonderful it would have been to actually stand where Sagan appears to be.

Most of all, I loved his sense of wonder. By selecting themes such as “The shores of the cosmic ocean,” he embodied both the adventurous spirit of past exploration and the potential for future quests for knowledge. It made me feel good to imagine earthbound humanity merely standing on a shore, looking out across a currently trackless sea that someday in the near or distant future we might learn to cross.

To be sure, a lot of my affection for Cosmos may be pure nostalgia. I was 14 when the series first ran, the perfect age to become fascinated by the universe. When I recently tried to watch a similar set of shows from Stephen Hawking, it did nothing for me. Still, what Sagan managed to create is a significant moment in the unending struggle to explain to people why they should give a crap about the world, the cosmos around them. It certainly worked for me.