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People are rarely grateful for a demonstration of their credulity. - Carl Sagan
" "People are rarely grateful for a demonstration of their credulity.
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About Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to, and calculated using, the greenhouse effect. He testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect will change the earth's climate system.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Native Name:
Carl Edward Sagan
Alternative Names:
Sagan
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Carl E. Sagan
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Carl E Sagan
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C. E. Sagan
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C.E. Sagan
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C E Sagan
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C. Sagan
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C Sagan
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Sagan C
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Sagan C.
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Sagan C. E.
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Sagan CE
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Additional quotes by Carl Sagan
U.S. launch vehicles are these days too feeble to get such a spacecraft to Jupiter and beyond in only a few years by rocket propulsion alone. But if we’re clever (and lucky), there’s something else we can do: We can (as Galileo also did, years later) fly close to one world, and have its gravity fling us on to the next. A gravity assist, it’s called. It costs us almost nothing but ingenuity. It’s something like grabbing hold of a post on a moving merry-go-round as it passes — to speed you up and fling you in some new direction. The spacecraft’s acceleration is compensated for by a deceleration in the planet’s orbital motion around the Sun. But because the planet is so massive compared to the spacecraft, it slows down hardly at all. Each Voyager spacecraft picked up a velocity boost of nearly 40,000 miles per hour from Jupiter’s gravity. Jupiter in turn was slowed down in its motion around the Sun. By how much? Five billion years from now, when our Sun becomes a swollen red giant, Jupiter will be one millimeter short of where it would have been had Voyager not flown by it in the late twentieth century.
It came about because Kepler wrote one of the first works of science fiction, intended to explain and popularize science. It was called the Somnium, “The Dream.” He imagined a journey to the Moon, the space travelers standing on the lunar surface and observing the lovely planet Earth rotating slowly in the sky above them. By changing our perspective we can figure out how worlds work. In Kepler’s time one of the chief objections to the idea that the Earth turns was the fact that people do not feel the motion. In the Somnium he tried to make the rotation of the Earth plausible, dramatic, comprehensible: “As long as the multitude does not err,… I want to be on the side of the many. Therefore, I take great pains to explain to as many people as possible.” (On another occasion he wrote in a letter, “Do not sentence me completely to the treadmill of mathematical calculations — leave me time for philosophical speculations, my sole delight.
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