CARL SAGAN
Ave Atque vale, frater
Essay in Honor of Carl Sagan
"I am in love with science, physics
and the universe ...
and when we are in love we want to tell the world"
...Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan died Friday. Saturday evening,
A&E presented his biography.
It had, obviously, been in production for some time...Carl Sagan was and will
remain a milestone in the sociology of science. It was his 13-part series on PBS which
marked both the apogee and the transform- ation of the knowledge process. For the first
time in human history, the man and the series brought the arcane knowledge of the universe
out of the dusty files of academia into the living minds of millions who had neither
degree nor honorific role in the production of science.
Sagan's life is tribute to the transformation of the knowledge process from the
province of remote scholars to the provenance of public discussion and debate. This essay
is one effort in explication of the impact of this new way to do the knowledge process; in
the public media as much as in the specialized Institute.
More than that, the life of Sagan marks a major step in the integration and
evaluation of science in the public interest.
Let us begin this tribute by a brief look at Sagan's life...again from the A&E
Biography:
- Sagan was born in 1934; he was 62 when he died.
- Sagan graduated with honors from his high school where the Year Book held that he
would win fame for his study of the stars.
- Sagan taught at Harvard for a while; until his role in the politicizing of science
worked to his disadvantage. He had been very visible in the media working on behalf of
Space Exploration and, to the dismay of more modest astro-physicists, on behalf of a lobby
for exploration of deep space.
- Sagan went to Cornell to direct its new center for the study of astro-physics. It
was there that he came to national prominence.
- Sagan became deeply involved in the politics of science in several ways most
interesting to the sociology of science:
- He insisted that we didn't know for sure whether there was intelligent life on Mars
or indeed, anywhere in the Universe other than the Earth...that neither faith nor logic
could answer such question; only research and that meant exploration of other planets and
other galaxies.
- Sagan said that not only where we not at the end of the knowledge process but that
we were only ankle-deep in a vast sea of knowledge yet to be explored. This view brought
into question the finality of the truth claims made by the current crop of scientists who,
in turn held that both method and mission of the knowledge process was in its last, final
stage of completion. If Sagan was gently arrogant in his views; those who saw the end of
science are mad. 'Tis better to be a bit arrogant than fundamentally stupid.
- Sagan held that science should be framed by and within the public sphere; that
while experts could do basic work, science had a politics which must be oriented to human
interests and humane politics.
- To that end, Sagan worked assiduously for a nuclear policy re- oriented from the
ends of war to the ends of justice. He joined those who protested and picketed. Not an act
well calculated to endear him to the American Academy of Science....an institution whose
fame and fortune depended upon the twinned sponsorship of the State and private
corporations...making billions and billions from the militarization of the knowledge
process in America.
- Sagan was married three times. He had five children by the three unions. Parenthood
brought a personal transformation. As his children grew in number and age, Sagan turned
his attention from deep space and the quest for intelligent life in other regions of the
Cosmos to the quest for humane policy in the USA and the public sphere.
- Sagan was diagnosed with a rare form of luekemia some four years ago. He needed
bone marrow transplant. His only sibling, a sister, proved a perfect match. He underwent
two such procedures...with every chance of recovery.
- Sagan died at age 62 of pneumonia in hospital. About 1 of four people who enter
hospital contact a disease there not present at admission. Hospitals are most convenient
to physicians since they can practice mass medicine and profit greatly from the
concentration of ill-health in one location.
In tribute to Sagan, I will finish continue this Series with several essays on the
knowledge process as its weaves and warps through time and space. Next week, I will send
along: Structurally Stupid Societies: Exploration in Artificial Stupidity, a lecture I
gave some years ago to the grad students at the Fielding Institute in California.
Then I will offer you a lecture entitled, A Brief History of Stephen Hawking. Then
I will pick up this Series from the University of Vermont where I will teach the Spring
Semester. The first in the new semester and the third in this Homage to Sagan is entitled,
A Brief History of Steve Pfohl...who is a leading architect in the transformation of
criminology and social problems theory from a modernist to a post- modernist perspective.
And now, I will end this tribute to Carl Sagan by giving you the full text of the
quotation in the Subject Line above. It could have come from a voyager from deep space who
had recovered and deciphered the message written by Sagan and his wife which went along
with Voyager, the deep space capsule sent by NASA in the hope that there was, indeed,
intelligent life somewhere in the Universe. But the quotation, Ave Atque Vale, Frater,
comes from Catullus who lived 21 centuries ago.
Atque in Perpetuum, Frater
From far away and over many a wave
I come my brother to your early grave,
to bring you one last offering in death
and o'er your final rest, expend this idle breath;
for Fate has turned your living mind to dust
and snatched you, cruelly, brother, from us.
Yet take this gift, brought as a brother bade,
in sorrow...to your passing shade;
A brother's tears has wet them o'er and o'er;
And so, our brother, Hail and Farewell, evermore.
...apology to the
translator, Wm. Morris.
TR Young