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| Carl Sagan (left) and Frank Drake (right), one of the founders of the SETI Institute and former director of the Carl Sagan Center. Photo by David Morrison. |
David Morrison, director of the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, has written a biographical memoir of Carl Sagan (1934-1996), founder of the modern disciplines of planetary science and exobiology.
Morrison’s piece has been published in Biographical Memoirs, an online collection of the National Academy of Sciences that includes more than 1,500 biographies of deceased academy members.
Carl Sagan, you of course know.
Frank Drake: astrophysicist; author of the "Drake Equation" used to estimate the likelihood of extraterrestrial life.
We start the adventure again tonight...COSMOS premieres!
"The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."
The U.S. Library of Congress has recently designated Cosmos one of the eighty-eight books "that shaped America." It's a roster that includes such earth-shaking works as Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. They're listed in chronological order and the very first one, published in 1751 (decades before the concept of a constitutional government by, for and of the people, crystallized), is also a science book...The list begins with Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity. That book and this one are passionate acts of citizenship by two scientists who wanted science to belong to all of us.
Ann Druyan, creative director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message, co-writer of Cosmos, co-creator of the motion picture Contact; executive producer and writer of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, 2014 (Fox and National Geographic). She was married to Dr. Sagan until his death. The asteroids named after them are in perpetual wedding-ring orbit around the Sun. (From the Foreword)
SETI Institute:
The SETI Institute's David Morrison Publishes Carl Sagan Memoir
National Academy of Sciences Online: Carl Sagan Memoir
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