▼▽Arnold's~~~~~~~ Blog▽▼: October 2007

Education and scientific career

November 9, 1934,was born in Brooklyn, New York
In 1951, Sagan graduated from Rahway High School in New Jersey
In 1955, He attended the University of Chicago, where he received a bachelor's degree
In 1956, a master's degreein physics
In 1960, earning his doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics.
From 1962 to 1968, he worked at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sagan lectured annually at Harvard University until 1968, when he moved to Cornell University.
He became a full professor at Cornell in 1971 and directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies there
From 1972 to 1981 he was Associate Director of the Center for Radio Physics and Space Research at Cornell
Sagan was a leader in the U.S. space program since its inception and worked as an adviser to NASA since the 1950s.
a gold-anodized plaque, attached to the space probe Pioneer 10, launched in 1972
Pioneer 11, also containing the plaque, was launched the following year.
He continued to refine his designs and the most elaborate such message he helped to develop and assemble was the Voyager Golden Record that was sent out with the Voyager space probes in 1977
Sagan taught at Cornell a course on critical thinking until his death on December 20, 1996

Scientific advocacy

So persuasive was he that by 1982, he was able to get a petition advocating SETI published in the journal Science, signed by 70 scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners.
Sagan also helped Dr. Frank Drake write the Arecibo message, a radio message beamed into space from the Arecibo radio telescope on November 16, 1974, aimed at informing extraterrestrials about Earth.
He co-founded the Planetary Society, the largest space-interest group in the world, with over 1,000,000 members in more than 149 countries, and was a member of the SETI Institute Board of Trustees.
He also co-authored the book A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race, a comprehensive examination of the phenomenon of nuclear winter.
Sagan predicted on ABC's Nightline in 1991 that smoky oil fires in Kuwait set by Saddam Hussein's army during the first Gulf War would cause an ecological disaster and send black clouds into the atmosphere resulting in global cooling
In his later years Sagan advocated the creation of an organized search for near Earth objects that would impact the Earth. ( Head, Tom (2006).

Social concerns

Following his marriage to his third wife (novelist Ann Druyan) in June 1981, Sagan became more politically active—particularly in regard to the escalation of the nuclear arms race under President Ronald Reagan.
When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared a unilateral moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons, which would begin on August 6, 1985 — the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima — the Reagan administration dismissed the dramatic move as nothing more than propaganda, and refused to follow suit.
In response, American anti-nuclear and peace activists staged a series of protest actions at the Nevada Test Site, beginning on Easter Sunday of 1986 and continuing through 1987.
Under the pseudonym "Mr. X", he wrote an essay concerning cannabis smoking in the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered, whose editor was Lester Grinspoon
The publishing of this biography, Carl Sagan: A Life, in 1999, brought much media attention to the issue of the use and legalisation of marijuana.

Popularization of science

He delivered the 1977/1978 Christmas Lectures for Young People at the Royal Institution. He hosted and, with Ann Druyan, co-wrote and co-produced the highly popular thirteen-part PBS television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage modeled on Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man.
The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, winning an Emmy and a Peabody Award.
Sagan also wrote the best-selling science fiction novel Contact, but did not live to see the book's 1997 motion picture adaptation, which starred Jodie Foster and won the 1998 Hugo Award.
He wrote a sequel to Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which was selected as a notable book of 1995 by The New York Times.
appeared on PBS' Charlie Rose program in January 1995
In 2006, Ann Druyan edited Sagan's 1985 Glasgow Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology into a new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, in which he elaborates on his views of divinity in the natural world.

Personal life and beliefs

In 1966, Sagan was asked to contribute an interview about the possibility of extraterrestrials to a proposed introduction to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sagan responded by saying that he wanted editorial control and a percentage of the film's takings, which was rejected.
In 1994, Apple Computer began developing the Power Macintosh 7100. They chose the internal code name "Carl Sagan", the in-joke being that the mid-range PowerMac 7100 would make Apple "billions and billions
attributed to Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827)
Sagan married three times: biologist Lynn Margulis, mother of Dorion Sagan and Jeremy Sagan, in 1957
artist Linda Salzman, mother of Nick Sagan, in 1968
1981. His marriage to Druyan continued until his death in 1996

Sagan and UFOs

Sagan had some interest in UFO reports from at least 1964, when he had several conversations on the subject with Jacques Vallee
In 1966, Sagan was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book.
The committee concluded that the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book had been lacking as a scientific study, and recommended a university-based project to give the UFO phenomenon closer scientific scrutiny. The Condon Committee (1966-1968), led by physicist Edward Condon, and their still-controversial final report, formally concluded that there was nothing anomalous about UFO reports.
With physicist Thornton Page, Sagan edited the lectures and discussions given at the symposium; these were published in 1972 as UFO's
In 1971, he considered blackballing Sagan from the prestigious Cosmos Club
Sagan again claimed that there was no evidence that aliens have actually visited the Earth, either in the past or present (Sagan, 1996: 81-96, 99-104).

Death and legacy

Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, leaving behind a wife and five children on December 20, 1996, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. Sagan was a significant figure, and his supporters credit his importance to his popularization of the natural sciences, opposing both restraints on science and reactionary applications of science, defending democratic traditions, resisting nationalism, defending humanism, and arguing against geocentric and anthropocentric views.
The 1997 movie Contact, based on Sagan's novel of the same name and finished after his death, ends with the dedication "For Carl."
On November 9, 2001, on what would have been Sagan’s 67th birthday, the NASA Ames Research Center dedicated the site for the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Cosmos.
Sagan himself was the first recipient of the CSSP award in 1993
Sagan's student Steve Squyres led the team that landed the Spirit Rover and Opportunity Rover successfully on Mars in 2004

Awards and honors

Annual Award for Television Excellence - 1981 - Ohio State University - PBS series Cosmos
Apollo Achievement Award - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal - National Aeronautics and Space Administration (twice)
Emmy - Outstanding Individual Achievement - 1981 - PBS series Cosmos
Emmy - Outstanding Informational Series - 1981 - PBS series Cosmos
Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Helen Caldicott Leadership Award - Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament
Homer Award - 1997 - Contact
Hugo Award - 1981 - Cosmos
Humanist of the Year - 1981 - Awarded by the American Humanist Association
In Praise of Reason Award - 1987 - Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
Isaac Asimov Award - 1994 - Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award - American Astronautical Society
John W. Campbell Memorial Award - 1974 - Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
Joseph Priestley Award - "For distinguished contributions to the welfare of mankind"
Klumpke-Roberts Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific - 1974
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Medal - Awarded by the Soviet Cosmonauts Federation
Locus Award 1986 - Contact
Lowell Thomas Award - Explorers Club - 75th Anniversary
Masursky Award - American Astronomical Society
Oersted Medal - 1990 - American Association of Physics Teachers
Peabody Award - 1980 - PBS series Cosmos
Prix Galbert - The international prize of Astronautics
Public Welfare Medal - 1994 - National Academy of Sciences
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction - 1978 - The Dragons of Eden
SF Chronicle Award - 1998 - Contact
Named the “99th Greatest American” on the June 5, 2005 Greatest American show on the Discovery Channel.

▼▽Arnold's~~~~~~~ Blog▽▼

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MY biography

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