Context: Carl Sagan has just spent 27 pages telling you how big the universe is. Summary? It's big. It's REALLY big. Think of something really, really huge.
It's bigger than that.
"All that we have seen is something of a vast and intricate and lonely universe. There is no particular theological conclusion that comes out of an exercise such as the one we have just gone through. What is more, when we understand something of the astonomical dynamics, the evolution of worlds, we recognize that worlds are born and worlds die, they have lifetimes just as humans do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the cosmos if there is a great deal of life. For example, we've talked about stars in the late stages of their evolution. We've talked about supernova explosions. There are much vaster explosions. There ...
Much to my delight, I noticed a really wonderful endorsement on the front cover from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut. "Find here a major fraction of this stunningly valuable legacy left to all of us by a great human being."
Just so you know, "reading" a page means doing all the experiments, building all the circuits, and getting them all to work. That's why 2 pages takes like a day :)
A nice chapter regarding aesthetics: So much for science, and how helpful it can be in these times of environmental calamities. Chernobyl is still hotter than a Hiroshima baby carriage. Our underarm deoderants have eaten holes in the ozone layer. And just get a load of this: My big brother Bernie, who can’t draw for sour apples, and who at his most objectionable used to say he didn’t like paintings because they didn’t do anything, just hung there year after year, has this summer become an artist! I shit you not! This Ph.D. physical chemist from MIT is now the poor man’s Jackson Pollock! He squoozles glurp of various colors and consistencies between two flat sheets of impermiable materials, such as windowpanes or bathroom tiles. The pulls them apart, et voila! This has nothing to do with his cancer. He didn’t know he had ...
Just a beautiful book. Sagan's writing remains powerful, clear, wonder-full, and inspiring. This book captures both the successes & failures, the gifts and dangers of our species. Reading it is wonderful, but it will make you sad because you will never get to read it for the first time again.
"The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star."
Trying hard to modify the labs in this book to work with my old copy of Visual Studio 2005 rather than the recommended shiny new Visual Studio 2008. Had a heck of a time tracking down svcutil.
John Brit says I should read this.
egoodberry replies...
A Brief History of the American People by Paul Johnson. I haven't read this one and someone stole (slash I lost) my copy of ABHOTAP somewhere in the eventful years following the Civil War, but it's about as good a book as one can read, and on history no less! Written by a Brit with no prior education on American history using only first-hand documents. Excellent. I hear this one's good, too.