Cosmos - A Celebration of the Life of Carl Sagan and Other Scientific Connections

By Stephen Portz

I was invited to attend the Library of Congress Dedication of the Carl Sagan Collection in November 2013. The collection was being donated to the Library for the enjoyment of future generations who dare to dream. Many of the prominent astrophysicists and scientists of the day were there due to their association with Sagan and to honor his legacy as a scientist. 

His widow, Ann Druyan presided over the meeting as many of the artifacts came from her collection as well as from Hollywood star Seth MacFarlane. Sagan had remarried and Ann was his third wife.  She evidently was much younger than Carl as her father is still alive and was also in attendance.  She, along with Carl developed and produced the original hit TV series “Cosmos.” She was very kind, I bumped into her afterwards quite unexpectantly and had one of the most genuine conversations. She asked who I was and what I was doing in DC and gave such a wonderfully kind wish to me for the educating of our nation’s children.

Early drawing of ideas for space exploration by a youthful Carl Sagan

The astrophysicists are a harden lot.  They marched up several who were students of Sagan back in the day.  They reviewed his pale blue earth montage but this time with a twist. The presenter who was his former student and had worked on the Cassini probe, showed the audience for the first time the footage from behind Saturn looking at our earth through its rings.  It was spectacular:

Photo of Earth taken from behind Saturn by the Cassini Probe

Since the technology is so advanced from Pioneer and Voyager days, the image is super high resolution and they could keep zooming in on it until you could see our earth and its moon. It was stunning! 

Earth and her moon photo taken from the Cassini Probe

Perhaps Carl Sagan’s greatest legacy was the time that he devoted to touching individual lives – students, youngsters, colleagues, anyone who reached out to him, was cherished and appreciated and usually rewarded with personal letters and time with him – with which he appeared to have been very generous. Considering this was before email and computerized everything, and most correspondence was by typewriter through the mail, it was a significant devotion of time.

Unfortunately, the day was also quite politicized.  Beware when people start talking about how politicized science has become, because they are then about to start politicizing it themselves.  Talking about how our ancestors climbed down from trees, how people who don't think like they do are superstitious, uneducated, and “sitting on the other side of the aisle.”   I didn't know this, but apparently the theories of evolution and anthropogenic global warming are now to be treated with the same veracity as the Law of Gravity, because the scientists mocked people who believed one and not the other.  The president of the United States was once again quoted to the great amusement of the audience that we didn’t have time to convene a meeting of the “Flat Earth Society.” Many of the scientists presumed to put words in Sagan’s mouth how, if Carl were here, he would be putting all the anthropogenic global warming naysayers in their place.  The meeting took a very interesting turn into almost a funeral-like quality and the scientist that spoke about our ancestors climbing down from a tree (Carolyn Porco), then spoke to Carl Sagan “wherever he was” and told him “we love him and miss him” - as if his intelligence is still prowling around the cosmos.  It seemed rather ironic to me that an educated person would be trying to talk to someone that has been dead for 17 years.

In dealing with mortality and the concepts of a hereafter, Ann has gone on record about losing Carl and the reconciliation process for her:

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me—it still sometimes happens—and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl.”

Her sentiments reflect such a “tragedy” of thought and expression. It makes me think of the scientific mind and the juxtaposition of having such intelligence in dealing with corporeal matters, but being so limited in dealing with the spiritual ones. With no intention to demean scientists, like the ones paraded out during the dedication, in the same way that they in fact demeaned people of faith, I would submit the following ideas to consider.

With recent discoveries in dark energy, dark matter, and the Higgs Boson Carrier Particle there is so much

Meeting Dr Harrison Proctor - On the Higgs Boson discovery team from CERN

that we do not know or understand and scientists in their greatest capacities are still at a loss to explain about our universe; Even when they do, and usually with such dogmatic confidence, it is sometimes difficult to accept it all because of their poor track record. I was priviledged to meet Dr Harrison Proctor from the CERN Lab that discovered the Higgs Boson Particle.  The comment that he made referring to Dark Matter and Dark Energy which presumably fills the universe was that "scientists call things that they don't understand "dark".

I often view many scientific pronouncements of geological time and things that must have occurred millions of years ago with some amusement as we do not have the ability to describe exactly what may have occurred at a crime scene only a few hours before or know for sure what the weather is going to be tomorrow much less be able to make these definitive declarations. Throw in metaphysical concepts of inter dimensional existences, space/time relationships, and singularities in the universe, I would say that one could make a pretty good case that there is room even SCIENTIFICALLY, for the existence  intelligent designer/first cause.

It is almost as if some of these good scientist friends are missing the ability to perceive the world around them in any other way which cannot be measured and quantified, much as an individual on the autism scale has difficulty discerning social queues. Or a person with color blindness not being able to differentiate between colors. Using a scientific metaphor for these scientists that struggle with spiritual concepts that seem so difficult for many of them to grasp seems apropos here.

Albert Einstein once famously compared the understanding of his theory of relativity with having a walk with a blind friend:

Not long after his arrival in Princeton he was invited, by the wife of one of the professors of mathematics at Princeton, to be guest of honor at a tea.-Reluctantly, Einstein consented. After the tea had progressed for a time, the excited hostess, thrilled to have such an eminent guest of honor, fluttered out into the center of activity and with raised arms silenced the group. Bubbling out some words expressing her thrill and pleasure, she turned to Einstein and said: "I wonder, Dr. Einstein, if you would be so kind as to explain to my guests in a few words, just what is relativity theory?"

Without any hesitation Einstein rose to his feet and told a story. He said he was reminded of a walk he had one day with his blind friend. The day was hot and he turned to the blind friend and said, "I wish I had a glass of milk."

"Glass," replied the blind friend, "I know what that is. But what do you mean by milk?"

"Why, milk is a white fluid," explained Einstein.

"Now fluid, I know what that is," said the blind man. "But what is white? "

"Oh, white is the color of a swan's feathers."

"Feathers, now I know what they are, but what is a swan?"

"A swan is a bird with a crooked neck."

"Neck, I know what that is, but what do you mean by crooked?"

At this point Einstein said he lost his patience. He seized his blind friend's arm and pulled it straight. "There, now your arm is straight," he said. Then he bent the blind friend's arm at the elbow. "Now it is crooked."

"Ah," said the blind friend. "Now I know what milk is."

And Einstein, at the tea, sat down.

The problem with things spiritual is that if we do not have comparisons in the corporeal world to relate them to, the person of intellect will often view them as foolish superstitions. This story of Einstein is instructive, because he was teaching on many levels here. He was using tongue in cheek humor to relate the difficulty of the task at hand in trying to explain a concept that really had no common frame of reference with which to base an explanation. Hence he took his poor blind friend on a convoluted path from milk to swans using the common to explain the unknown. By doing this his friend would then understand something that they had no prior experience with, and now know and understand it at the same level that he understood things common to him - which of course, was absurd. This is the same challenge we face when explaining faith known principles to the scientific community.

It reminds me of a meeting that I attended at a planetarium where an eminent scientist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was discussing interplanetary missions that NASA was involved in. After many fascinating stories such as findings of water on the moon and Mars, he took some time to discuss the Kepler telescopic instrument that was designed to look for planets orbiting around stars in our galaxy.

The way the instrumentation on the Kepler telescope works is that it “watches” stars and when a star blinks it then presumably has had something cross in front of it. The crossing body is then thought to be a planet orbiting the star in its own solar system. When NASA scientists first proposed the Kepler mission, the premise was that this project would be able to detect other exceptional solar systems in the galaxy that were like ours. The notion that there were large numbers of stars which had planets orbiting around them was not even considered because the hypothesis was that our solar system was fairly unique in this respect. What they have since concluded through Kepler, is that it is very common for stars to have planets orbiting around them and it is now understood, as far as our galaxy is concerned, that it is more the rule than the exception. There are billions of planets orbiting around stars in the universe. With that knowledge scientists are now not only looking for planets orbiting stars but they have now refined the search for planets that are in the “Goldilocks” sweet spot in orbital placement. Those planets may have the potential for life as we understand it.

With those interesting conclusions, he started talking about the Hubble Deep Field Imagery Project. How scientists found the darkest spot in the night sky, presumably devoid of any light from any stars and took a long exposure photograph in that region. To their surprise they discovered that the region was not only populated with stars but galaxies of stars, more than could be counted. He showed Hubble photos of what looked like a field of stars but upon magnification turned out to be many varieties of different kinds of galaxies as numerous as the aforementioned stars.

Hubble Deep Field photo

With that, the scientist stated: “now doesn’t that make you feel small and insignificant?” This statement totally took me by surprise because I was at that time having an exactly opposite and profoundly spiritual experience. I felt wonder and awe that God’s creations go on forever and yet he is mindful of the fall of a sparrow. And I know he is mindful of me because I have felt his spirit in unmistakable communication. It puts a totally new perspective on the Cosmos, which was the name of Carl Sagan’s masterpiece series that first raised the consciousness of so many to the wonders of the universe…