Skip to main content

Cosmos – Carl Sagan *****

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is one of the best popular scientific books that I have read. It was written in parallel with developing a TV series with the same name, first broadcast in 1980. Although both astronomy and the world in general have developed since then, the book is still a fascinating journey through the universe and our place in it. Cosmos has a wider span than most popular scientific books and gives a vivid introduction to astronomy as well as to evolutionary biology, geology, and the history of science.
The book starts, as did all of the episodes of the TV series, with a journey through the universe. Beginning on the grand scale of the universe as a whole, the journey converges towards its final destination – our Earth. Putting our small planet, and our existence on it, into this stupefying perspective, Sagan continues to ask if ours is the only world in the universe that has life on it. To be able to at least speculate about life elsewhere he explains the prerequisites for life on Earth and how it evolved. He also describes the geological development of our sister planets in the solar system, explaining why they do not have life. The chemistry of life is described, and how life’s building blocks are known to spontaneously form in different parts of the universe.
The question about life on other worlds remains unanswered, but exploring the problem is a fascinating journey in itself. Throughout the book are scattered pieces of science history, relating how we came to know the world around us and how we expanded our horizon further and further into the cosmos. The book is an inspiring mix of objective accounts of science and personal speculations. It is filled with beautiful artwork from observatories and museums, as well as of imaginary distant worlds. Sagan concludes the book with his personal view: We are a part of the development of the universe and, intriguingly, a way for the universe to know itself. We have, he says, a moral responsibility to continue our exploration of the grand world we live in so long as we can. This book is pure inspiration for anyone who wonders about the universe and our place in it.
The original TV series is also available as a DVD boxed set. I bought it out of nostalgia and found that, although video technology has moved forward during the last decades, the inspiration is still very much there. After each episode there are updates explaining how science has developed since the production of the series. Still, in most places, it is surprisingly up to date. For example, when Sagan explains how Venus is a dead world because its atmosphere makes it too hot to sustain life, he continues to explain the threat that our emissions of carbon dioxide is to our planet. It is difficult to imagine that this was produced in the late 1970’s! I have read the book at least three times in my life, beginning in my early teens, and it has had something new to offer every time I have read it. I will certainly share both the book and the DVD-box with my son when he is old enough read or to understand English. If I am to choose one episode to represent the spirit of this production it would be “the backbone of night” that explores the dawn of scientific thought in ancient Greece. I have used it as discussion material with my Ph.D. students and it still raises relevant questions, not only about what scientific thinking is, but also about the fragility of the fruits of rational thought.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you   
Review by Oivind Andersson
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more