Carl Sagan: A life

Fülszöveg

Carl Sagan was one of the most celebrated scientists of his time—the leading visionary of the Space Age. He was also a highly controversial figure who inspired wildly opposed opinions. His enthusiasm and eloquence about the wonders of space, the marvels of the human brain, and the mysteries of life captured the imagination of millions. Yet one scientist was so enraged by Sagan's scientific pronouncements that he compared him to the Black Plague, and William F. Buckley Jr. likened him to circus huckster P. T. Barnum.
Sagan's life was both an intellectual feast and an emotional roller coaster. Whether he was searching for life on Mars or visiting Timothy Leary in prison, prophesying exciting scientific discoveries or getting arrested for protesting nuclear weapons, debating the existence of UFOs or advocating the creative benefits of smoking marijuana, Carl Sagan was a fascinating, charismatic, and complex man full of contradictions.
A passionate debunker of pseudoscience, Sagan... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Carl Sagan was one of the most celebrated scientists of his time—the leading visionary of the Space Age. He was also a highly controversial figure who inspired wildly opposed opinions. His enthusiasm and eloquence about the wonders of space, the marvels of the human brain, and the mysteries of life captured the imagination of millions. Yet one scientist was so enraged by Sagan's scientific pronouncements that he compared him to the Black Plague, and William F. Buckley Jr. likened him to circus huckster P. T. Barnum.
Sagan's life was both an intellectual feast and an emotional roller coaster. Whether he was searching for life on Mars or visiting Timothy Leary in prison, prophesying exciting scientific discoveries or getting arrested for protesting nuclear weapons, debating the existence of UFOs or advocating the creative benefits of smoking marijuana, Carl Sagan was a fascinating, charismatic, and complex man full of contradictions.
A passionate debunker of pseudoscience, Sagan was nevertheless so enthralled by the prospects of discovering life out in space that he championed science-fiction-like ideas about communication with alien superbeings, spaceflight to the stars, and "balloon animals" floating in the skies of Jupiter. A man with a dazzling social life, who hobnobbed with everyone from Nobel laureates to the Dalai Lama, and celebrities like Johnny Carson, Jodie Foster, and Paul Newman, he was also intensely private, and even many of his closest friends felt they knew little about the real man inside.
The son of Jewish immigrants living in middle-class Brooklyn—a father who had fled Czarist Russia and a vivacious but acid-tongued mother—he became a staunch religious skeptic. Though he was doted on by his domineering mother and had a close relationship with his father, he largely neglected his first two sons, and while he avidly espoused feminist views, his sexism ruined his first marriage. An illicit affair tore apart his second. Yet in his third marriage, he found lasting love, and he learned to be a more engaged and giving father.
Certainly, Sagan was a magnificent writer and TV showman—"the greatest popularizer of the twentieth century," Science magazine called him after his untimely death at age 62 from a rare precancerous blood disease. He made science "sexy" again to a generation repelled by nuclear (continued on back flap) Vissza