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. Marris.

TR Young