![]() In his later years as a writer and scientist, Sagan would often draw on his childhood memories to illustrate scientific points, as he did in his book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Although awed by Carl's intellectual abilities, he took his son's inquisitiveness in stride and saw it as part of his growing up. He would fulfill her unfulfilled dreams." Ĭarl believed that he got his sense of wonder from his father, who in his free time gave apples to the poor or helped soothe labor-management tensions within New York's garment industry. ![]() Davidson suggests that this is why she "worshipped her only son, Carl. As a young woman, she had had intellectual ambitions, but they were frustrated by social restrictions: her poverty, her status as a woman and a wife, and her Jewish ethnicity. Sagan traced his later analytical urges to his mother, a woman who had been extremely poor as a child in New York City during World War I and the 1920s. Īccording to his biographer Keay Davidson, Sagan experienced a kind of "inner war" as a result of his close relationship with both his parents, who were in many ways "opposites". During the worst years of the Depression, his father worked as a theater usher. Carl and his sister agreed that their father was not especially religious, but that their mother "definitely believed in God, and was active in the temple. According to Sagan, they were Reform Jews, the most liberal of North American Judaism's four main groups. 'emancipated woman', we'd call her now.") Ĭarl’s family lived in a modest apartment in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood near the Atlantic Ocean. She was a rather rebellious child and young adult. (According to Carl’s sister Carol, Rachel "never accepted Rose as her mother. Carl was named in honor of his grandmother, Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, who had died while giving birth to her second child Clara was, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew", Rachel's father (Carl’s grandfather) got married again, to a woman named Rose. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then in the Russian Empire, in today's Ukraine. Sagan was born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, on November 9, 1934. After developing myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62 on December 20, 1996. He married three times and had five children. ![]() Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (for his book The Dragons of Eden), and (for Cosmos: A Personal Voyage), two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award, and the Hugo Award. He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan was a popular public advocate of skeptical scientific inquiry and the scientific method he pioneered the field of exobiology and promoted the search for extra-terrestrial intelligent life ( SETI). His papers, comprising 595,000 items, are archived at the Library of Congress. Sagan also wrote a science-fiction novel, published in 1985, called Contact, which became the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. A book, also called Cosmos, was published to accompany the series. He also co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television: Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries. ![]() He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain, and Pale Blue Dot. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell, where he spent most of his career. Sagan argued in favor of the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus are the result of the greenhouse effect. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Carl Edward Sagan ( / ˈ s eɪ ɡ ən/ SAY-gən November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator.
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