Word: sagan
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...