Word: sagan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...better scientifically informed public would be far more capable of dealing with the scientific questions which now confront us--like nuclear energy." He has immense sympathy for the efforts of popularization made by those like his ex-brother-in-law ("It's all very incestuous, you know") Carl Sagan...
...Broca's Brain, Sagan...
...possibility of extraterrestrial life is the cause to which Sagan has dedicated much of his life. His earlier book The Cosmic Connection, treats this exclusively. When scientists examining the samples brought back to earth by Apollo found no signs of life, Sagan proclaimed to their collective infuriation that the moon was "dull." This polemic grates in the course of Broca's Brain. It pops up in almost every chapter, tied tortuously to whichever theme is central at the time. Sagan ought to have called his first book "Why I Think There's Life on Other Planets" and been done with...
...Since Sagan clearly wrote the book for a general public, he should have trodden gingerly when he encountered political and religious issues. His consistent bumbling in these spheres is the unintentional leit-motif of Broca's Brain. When in doubt. Sagan shies away from the secular implications of his lofty ideas. In the course of declaring, for example, that we will one day have robots for garbagemen (at current prices, the human version are "expendable"). Sagan mentions hastily that "the effective re-employment of those human beings must, of course be arranged; but...that should not be too difficult." Such...
...future of science in general, and of astronomy in particular, has not tickled the public fancy quite the way Sagan and others thought it would. Broca's Brain constitutes an effort to revive interest. But in blundering as he does. Sagan suffocates his own cause. "Science," he writes, "is not a body of knowledge, but a way of looking at the world." Ironically, while Sagan touches dramatically on this body of knowledge, he never approaches, save in the lonely chapter on Velikovsky, that elusive point of view