Карл Саган цитаты

страница 5

«Мир, полный демонов: Наука - как свеча во тьме»
Источник: Ричард Докинз, «Бог как иллюзия» — гл. 10.

«Мир, полный демонов: Наука — как свеча во тьме»

«Мир, полный демонов: Наука — как свеча во тьме»

цивилизация
Источник: Контакт

мышление
Источник: Контакт

демон
Источник: Мир, полный демонов. Наука - как свеча во тьме

мир
Источник: Мир, полный демонов. Наука - как свеча во тьме

Карл Саган. Космос, 1980

Карл Саган. Космос, 1980

дух
Источник: Мир, полный демонов. Наука - как свеча во тьме

демон
Источник: «Мир, полный демонов: Наука - как свеча во тьме»

природа
Источник: Человек и его символы

ум
Источник: Контакт

планету
Источник: Контакт

земля
Источник: Контакт

религия
Источник: Контакт

«Мир, полный демонов: Наука — как свеча во тьме»

Мир, полный демонов: Наука — как свеча во тьме, 1997

книга
Источник: Контакт

раса
Источник: Контакт

голова
Источник: Контакт

37 min 45 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Backbone of Night [Episode 7]
Контексте: There can be an infinite number of polygons, but only five regular solids. Four of the solids were associated with earth, fire, air and water. The cube for example represented earth. These four elements, they thought, make up terrestrial matter. So the fifth solid they mystically associated with the Cosmos. Perhaps it was the substance of the heavens. This fifth solid was called the dodecahedron. Its faces are pentagons, twelve of them. Knowledge of the dodecahedron was considered too dangerous for the public. Ordinary people were to be kept ignorant of the dodecahedron. In love with whole numbers, the Pythagoreans believed that all things could be derived from them. Certainly all other numbers.
So a crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: the square root of two could not be represented as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how big they were. "Irrational" originally meant only that. That you can't express a number as a ratio. But for the Pythagoreans it came to mean something else, something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense, the other meaning of "irrational".

37 min 45 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Backbone of Night [Episode 7]
Контексте: There can be an infinite number of polygons, but only five regular solids. Four of the solids were associated with earth, fire, air and water. The cube for example represented earth. These four elements, they thought, make up terrestrial matter. So the fifth solid they mystically associated with the Cosmos. Perhaps it was the substance of the heavens. This fifth solid was called the dodecahedron. Its faces are pentagons, twelve of them. Knowledge of the dodecahedron was considered too dangerous for the public. Ordinary people were to be kept ignorant of the dodecahedron. In love with whole numbers, the Pythagoreans believed that all things could be derived from them. Certainly all other numbers.
So a crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: the square root of two could not be represented as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how big they were. "Irrational" originally meant only that. That you can't express a number as a ratio. But for the Pythagoreans it came to mean something else, something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense, the other meaning of "irrational".

Remarks on the nuclear arms race, on ABC News Viewpoint — "The Day After" (20 November 1983) http://www.fuzzymemories.tv/screen.php?c=1817&m=xxdayafterxx&p=3
Контексте: Imagine, a room, awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger. Well, that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable.

Источник: Cosmos

44 min 50 sec
Источник: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Blues For a Red Planet [Episode 5]
Контексте: The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.

Источник: Cosmos

Источник: Cosmos (1980), p. 250

"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990)
Контексте: Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.

Источник: The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

"That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be." — P. C. Hodgell, in her 1994 novel Seeker's Mask.
Misattributed

Источник: Cosmos

Источник: Cosmos (1980), p. 193
Контексте: For as long as there been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night.

42 min 33 sec
Вариант: A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Источник: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Persistence of Memory [Episode 11]
Контексте: What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Источник: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Вариант: We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.

Источник: Contact (1985), Chapter 14 (p. 244)

Источник: Cosmos

Источник: Cosmos

Источник: Cosmos (1980), p. 218

0 min 40 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Backbone of Night [Episode 7]

Bringing Science Down to Earth (1994), co-authored with Anne Kalosh, in Hemispheres (October 1994), p. 99 http://books.google.com/books?id=gJ1rDj2nR3EC&lpg=PA99&pg=PA99; this is similar to statements either mentioned in earlier interviews or published later in the book The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
Variants:
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990) http://www.csicop.org/si/show/why_we_need_to_understand_science
Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.
"With Science on Our Side" https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1994/01/09/with-science-on-our-side/9e5d2141-9d53-4b4b-aa0f-7a6a0faff845/, Washington Post (9 January 1994)
We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?
Charlie Rose: An Interview with Carl Sagan http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/4553, May 27, 1996.
I know that science and technology are not just cornucopias pouring good deeds out into the world. Scientists not only conceived nuclear weapons; they also took political leaders by the lapels, arguing that their nation — whichever it happened to be — had to have one first. … There’s a reason people are nervous about science and technology.
And so the image of the mad scientist haunts our world—from Dr. Faust to Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Strangelove to the white-coated loonies of Saturday morning children’s television. (All this doesn’t inspire budding scientists.) But there’s no way back. We can’t just conclude that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, power-crazed politicians and decide to get rid of it. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. Advances in transportation, communication, and entertainment have transformed the world. The sword of science is double-edged. Rather, its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility — more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.
"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990)
Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.
"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990)
Science is [...] a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.
Charlie Rose: An Interview with Carl Sagan http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/4553 (27 May 1996)

Источник: Cosmos