Crawford delineate being a cathartic student when Cosmos aired , and then what it was like to be in the same section as Carl Sagan as a grad student :
I started college around that time , toiling off as a physics major in a hothouse tech school that would presently be fictionally immortalized in the geek cinema classic Real Genius ( look it up , kids ) . We journeyman nerds were aware of “ Cosmos ” as a sort of cultural phenomenon but did n’t really appreciate the fact that science was starting to become a pop culture item . We could see that Sagan was a skilful fibber and that the special outcome were cool ( for the time ) , but as far as the message went , we knew all that stuff already . We entirely missed the fact that Sagan was getting midway America to spend an hour every week guess about tangible scientific discipline topics . And they seemed to like it .
In graduate schoolhouse , I had the adept lot to put down at Cornell University , where Sagan taught , and I would see him from time to time at seminar . In that setting he was your distinctive workings scientist , involve questions , challenging assumptions , trying out new ideas . If anything , he was less voluble than some of the other faculty , and not an obvious “ personality . ” He had an overlooked office in the astronomy construction so he would n’t be swamped by star - struck students . And yet some of the Cornell faculty in camera disparaged Sagan ’s skill popularisation project because they were not “ genuine scientific discipline . ”
Interestingly , today ’s Cosmos host , Neil deGrasse Tyson , is assort with a skill popularizing institution , the American Museum of Natural History , rather than a stringently academic institution like Cornell .
study more atSymmetry Magazine
cosmosPhysicsScience
Daily Newsletter
Get the best technical school , scientific discipline , and culture news show in your inbox daily .
News from the time to come , fork out to your present .
You May Also Like
