During the late 1980s – when I was 11 or 12 years old – there were only two TV shows that I was allowed to stay up beyond my bedtime to watch: Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: The Next Generation and a re-broadcast of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Both were hugely inspiring and, ultimately, led me to study the sciences. (I finally settled on computer science, by the way.)
And over the last year, it was Sagan’s book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – as recommended by Brian Dunning in Here Be Dragons – that sped me down the path of skepticism (much more on this in a later blog post).
So I owe a lot to Dr. Carl Sagan and count him as one of my few heroes and people I aspire to be like.
Coming to the point of this blog post, though: Phil Plait writing on the Skepticblog just alerted us to a radio programme that physicist Brian Cox made for BBC Radio 4 called Carl Sagan – A Personal Voyage. The programme is about Sagan, the impact he had on people (indeed, a whole generation of scientists), and the messages he was trying to get across in everything that he did. It’s awesome and I highly recommend you take a listen.
Modern-Day Sagans
Following on from that, it is my opinion that both Cox and Plait – as well as a whole bunch of others, particularly those in the skeptical community – are modern-day equivalents of Carl Sagan.
Take, for example, Plait’s two books:
And two of Cox’s media appearances:
There’s more to come from these two, I’m sure, and it’s awesome to have others carrying from where Sagan left off.
More to Come…
By the way, I’ll give you many more science-education related links when I do finally write the blog post on skepticism that I’ve been meaning to write for a long time now. For now, though, check out:
(FYI: I first heard of Here be Dragons via Plait as well!)
And over the last year, it was Sagan’s book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – as recommended by Brian Dunning in Here Be Dragons – that sped me down the path of skepticism (much more on this in a later blog post).
So I owe a lot to Dr. Carl Sagan and count him as one of my few heroes and people I aspire to be like.
Coming to the point of this blog post, though: Phil Plait writing on the Skepticblog just alerted us to a radio programme that physicist Brian Cox made for BBC Radio 4 called Carl Sagan – A Personal Voyage. The programme is about Sagan, the impact he had on people (indeed, a whole generation of scientists), and the messages he was trying to get across in everything that he did. It’s awesome and I highly recommend you take a listen.
Modern-Day Sagans
Following on from that, it is my opinion that both Cox and Plait – as well as a whole bunch of others, particularly those in the skeptical community – are modern-day equivalents of Carl Sagan.
Take, for example, Plait’s two books:
- Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax”
- Death from the Skies!: These Are The Ways The World Will End
And two of Cox’s media appearances:
There’s more to come from these two, I’m sure, and it’s awesome to have others carrying from where Sagan left off.
More to Come…
By the way, I’ll give you many more science-education related links when I do finally write the blog post on skepticism that I’ve been meaning to write for a long time now. For now, though, check out:
- Brian Cox’s official website
- The Observer’s article on Cox, called ‘Putting the fizz into Physics’
- Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog
- Plait writing in his blog: ‘What I Learned from Carl Sagan’
(FYI: I first heard of Here be Dragons via Plait as well!)