Carl Sagan

Presents an interview with Carl Sagan the author. His book 'The Demon-Haunted World'; Contents of book.

By PT Staff, published on January 01, 1996

But, at the same time, I'm a citizen, a parent, a grandparent. I'm concerned about the future for all sorts of readily understandable mammalian reasons, and I would much rather work hard to make a better future, even if I fail, than to make no attempt.

PT: Do you spend half your time doing research and the other half doing soldier's duty as one of the world's most famous scientists?

CS: I don't try to budget my time from one to the other. They sort of naturally flow into one another. For example, I did my doctoral thesis on the Venus greenhouse effect, never imagining that the greenhouse effect would be a major global policy issue 30 years later.

There are several other cases--nuclear winter is one--in which the science and the public policy effortlessly flowed into each other. And the most natural thing in the world, if you find a science that you're to some degree expert in, is speaking out about a danger to the global civilization of the human species. If you won't, who's going to speak out? I just don't see it as two hermetically sealed compartments that you hop from one to the other. It often just flows in the most natural way.

I do have an opportunity that, unfortunately, others who are equally or more capable sometimes don't have, of communicating to the general public. And it's an opportunity that ought to be used carefully, not squandered. And used responsibly. But if I have opportunities to speak to the public, then certainly I'm not going to say no if I have something to speak for.

PT: Do you still have the same sense of wonder over science as you did 25 years ago?

CS: Last week, a planet seems to have been discovered around a nearby star called 51 Pegasus. And it's a planet very close to the star, much closer than Mercury is to our Sun. But it's not a little rocky world like Mercury or Venus or the earth. It's a giant world, presumably like Jupiter.

What is such a massive planet doing so dose to that star? Does it have other terrestrial-type planets further out? Is that planet a gas giant the way Jupiter is, or is it a monster Earthlike planet? And what does it say about the abundance of planetary systems elsewhere? Maybe they're all like that, and ours is anomalous. If that's true, what implications does that have for the origins of solar systems? I don't know. My wonder button got pushed hard when that discovery was announced. And it happens regularly. It certainly happens in my own research, such as in the laboratory work that we do on organic chemistry and the outer solar system, the origin of life on earth. My wonder button is being pushed all the time.

PT: When you look at fellow scientists who are not, say, 25 or 30 anymore, do they still have the ability to wonder?

CS: Some do, some don't. Some lose it.

PT: What makes it go?

CS: One thing is a kind of Peter Principle. Good scientists are eventually offered opportunities to be administrators. That takes them away from science. To be the department chairman, the president of a professional society, or a presidential science advisor, or whatever--those are all responsible and important positions, even ones that can aid the advancement of science. But not by you doing the science yourself. It's very hard to continue doing the science in some of those positions. They are very time consuming. So that's one danger. Another thing is, the wonder is almost instinctive--you can see it in children--but the skepticism has to be learned. And you learn it sometimes by painful experience. You have experience with baloney, so your baloney-detection ability improves. If you never encounter baloney, then there you are, with all wonder and no skepticism.

So as time goes on there's a tendency to become more and more skeptical and to mistrust wonder. Very dangerous, because it's the balance between the two that's needed. So in a lot of scientists, the ratio of wonder to skepticism declines in time. That may be connected with the fact that in some fields--mathematics, physics, some others-the great discoveries are almost entirely made by youngsters.

PT: Was Einstein at the end of his life a man who had the capacity to wonder?

CS: No question about it, absolutely full of wonder.

PT: You've said that when you were growing up you didn't realize somebody could do science for a living. You envisioned being a salesman or something and doing science on weekends and evenings. It's all too rare that someone as young as you were at the time becomes so enthralled with science. Are we essentially killing off the wonder in children?

CS: Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact. PT: Why did yours stay intact?

CS: The main thing was that my parents, who knew nothing about science, encouraged it. They never said, "All in all, wouldn't it be better to be a lawyer or a doctor?" I never once heard that from my parents. They said, "If you're passionate about that, we'll back you to the best of our ability." In school, while there were very few teachers who excited me about science, there was no systematic effort to discourage me.

So it wasn't that hard to maintain my interest. Science fiction sustained me in my earliest years. I got a keen sense of the excitement of science from science fiction.

PT: What is the dumbest thing you've ever done? I mean that affectionately.