Sagan, Carl - Cosmos

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 1.11MB 211 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Spacecraft missions to nearby Planets

The Library of ancient Alexandria

The human brain

Egyptian Hieroglyphics

The origin of life

The death of the Sun

The evolution of galaxies

The origins of matter, suns and worlds

COSMOS

The story of fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution transforming matter and life into

consciousness, of how science and civilization grew up together, and of the forces and

individuals who helped shape modern science. A story told with Carl Sagan’s remarkable

ability to make scientific ideas both comprehensible and exciting, based on his acclaimed

television series.

For Ann Druyan

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time,

it is my joy to share

aplanet and an epoch with Annie

Carl Sagan was the Director of the Laboratory for Planetary studies and David Duncan

Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University. He played a leading role

in the Mariner, Viking and Voyager expeditions to the planets, for which he received the

NASA medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and for Distinguished Public

Service, and the international astronautics prize, the Prix Galabert.

He served as Chairman of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American

Astronomical Society, as Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association

for the Advancement of Science, and as President of the Planetology Section of the

American Geophysical Union. For twelve years, he was Editor-in-Chief of Icarus,the

leading professional journal devoted to planetary research. In addition to four hundred

published scientific and popular articles, Dr Sagan was the author, co-author or editor of

more than a dozen books, including Intelligent Life in the Universe,The Cosmic

Connection,The Dragons of Eden,Murmurs of Earth,Broca’s Brain and the bestselling

science fiction novel, Contact.

He was a recipient of the Joseph Priestly Award ‘for distinguished contributions to the

welfare of mankind’, and the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

Carl Sagan died in December 1996.

CARL SAGAN

Cosmos

CONTENTS

Introduction

1The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean

2One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue

3The Harmony of Worlds

4Heaven and Hell

5Blues for a Red Planet

6Travelers’ Tales

7The Backbone of Night

8Travels in Space and Time

9The Lives of the Stars

10 The Edge of Forever

11 The Persistence of Memory

12 Encyclopaedia Galactica

13 Who Speaks for Earth?

Appendix 1: Reductio ad Absurdum and the Square Root of Two

Appendix 2: The Five Pythagorean Solids

INTRODUCTION

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things

which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not

be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject . . . And so this knowledge will be

unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants

will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them . . . Many discoveries

are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. Our

universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate . . .

Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.

-Seneca, Natural Questions,

Book 7, first century

In ancient times, in everyday speech and custom, the most mundane happenings were

connected with the grandest cosmic events. A charming example is an incantation against

the worm which the Assyrians of 1000 B.C. imagined to cause toothaches. It begins with

the origin of the universe and ends with a cure for toothache:

After Anu had created the heaven,

And the heaven had created the earth,

And the earth had created the rivers,

And the rivers had created the canals,

And the canals had created the morass,

And the morass had created the worm,

The worm went before Shamash, weeping,

His tears flowing before Ea:

‘What wilt thou give me for my food,

What wilt thou give me for my drink?’

‘I will give thee the dried fig

And the apricot.’

‘What are these to me? The dried fig

And the apricot!

Lift me up, and among the teeth

And the gums let me dwell! . .

Because thou hast said this, O worm,

May Ea smite thee with the might of

His hand!

(Incantation against toothache.)

Its treatment: Second-grade beer . . . and oil thou shalt mix together;

The incantation thou shalt recite three times thereon and shalt put the medicine upon

the tooth.

Our ancestors were eager to understand the world but had not quite stumbled upon

the method. They imagined a small, quaint, tidy universe in which the dominant forces

were gods like Anu, Ea, and Shamash. In that universe humans played an important if not a

central role. We were intimately bound up with the rest of nature. The treatment of

toothache with second-rate beer was tied to the deepest cosmological mysteries.

Today we have discovered a powerful and elegant way to understand the universe, a

method called science; it has revealed to us a universe so ancient and so vast that human

affairs seem at first sight to be of little consequence. We have grown distant from the

Cosmos. It has seemed remote and irrelevant to everyday concerns. But science has found

not only that the universe has a reeling and ecstatic grandeur, not only that it is accessible

to human understanding, but also that we are, in a very real and profound sense, a part of

that Cosmos, born from it, our fate deeply connected with it. The most basic human events

and the most trivial trace back to the universe and its origins. This book is devoted to the

exploration of that cosmic perspective.

In the summer and fall of 1976, as a member of the Viking Lander Imaging Flight

Team, I was engaged, with a hundred of my scientific colleagues, in the exploration of the

planet Mars. For the first time in human history we had landed two space vehicles on the

surface of another world. The results, described more fully in Chapter 5, were spectacular,

the historical significance of the mission utterly apparent. And yet the general public was

learning almost nothing of these great happenings. The press was largely inattentive;

television ignored the mission almost altogether. When it became clear that a definitive

answer on whether there is life on Mars would not be forthcoming, interest dwindled still

further. There was little tolerance for ambiguity. When we found the sky of Mars to be a

kind of pinkish-yellow rather than the blue which had erroneously first been reported, the

announcement was greeted by a chorus of good-natured boos from the assembled reporters

-they wanted Mars to be, even in this respect, like the Earth. They believed that their

audiences would be progressively disinterested as Mars was revealed to be less and less

like the Earth. And yet the Martian landscapes are staggering, the vistas breathtaking. I was

positive from my own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration

of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics - the origin of life, the Earth, and the

Cosmos, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the universe. And I

was certain that this interest could be excited through that most powerful communications

medium, television.

My feelings were shared by B. Gentry Lee, the Viking Data Analysis and Mission

Planning Director, a man of extraordinary organizational abilities. We decided, gamely, to

do something about the problem ourselves. Lee proposed that we form a production

company devoted to the communication of science in an engaging and accessible way. In

the following months we were approached on a number of projects. But by far the most

interesting was an inquiry tendered by KCET, the Public Broadcasting Service’s outlet in

Los Angeles. Eventually, we jointly agreed to produce a thirteen-part television series

oriented toward astronomy but with a very broad human perspective. It was to be aimed at

popular audiences, to be visually and musically stunning, and to engage the heart as well as

the mind. We talked with underwriters, hired an executive producer, and found ourselves

embarked on a three-year project called Cosmos.At this writing it has an estimated

worldwide audience of 140 million people, or 3 percent of the human population of the

planet Earth. It is dedicated to the proposition that the public is far more intelligent than it

has generally been given credit for; that the deepest scientific questions on the nature and

origin of the world excite the interests and passions of enormous numbers of people. The

present epoch is a major crossroads for our civilization and perhaps for our species.

Whatever road we take, our fate is indissolubly bound up with science. It is essential as a

matter of simple survival for us to understand science. In addition, science is a delight;

evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding - those who understand are

more likely to survive. The Cosmos television series and this book represent a hopeful

experiment in communicating some of the ideas, methods and joys of science.

The book and the television series evolved together. In some sense each is based on

the other. But books and television series have somewhat different audiences and admit

differing approaches. One of the great virtues of a book is that it is possible for the reader to

return repeatedly to obscure or difficult passages; this is only beginning to become

possible, with the development of videotape and video-disc technology, for television.

There is much more freedom for the author in choosing the range and depth of topics for a

chapter in a book than for the procrustean fifty-eight minutes, thirty seconds of a

noncommercial television program. This book goes more deeply into many topics than does

the television series. There are topics discussed in the book which are not treated in the

television series and vice versa. Explicit representations of the Cosmic Calendar, featured

in the television series, do not appear here - in part because the Cosmic Calendar is

discussed in my book The Dragons of Eden;likewise, I do not here discuss the life of

Robert Goddard in much detail, because there is a chapter in Broca’s Brain devoted to him.

But each episode of the television series follows fairly closely the corresponding chapter of

this book; and I like to think that the pleasure of each will be enhanced by reference to the

other.

For clarity, I have in a number of cases introduced an idea more than once - the first

time lightly, and with deeper passes on subsequent appearances. This occurs, for example,

in the introduction to cosmic objects in Chapter 1, which are examined in greater detail

later on; or in the discussion of mutations, enzymes and nucleic acids in Chapter 2. In a few

cases, concepts are presented out of historical order. For example, the ideas of the ancient

Greek scientists are presented in Chapter 7, well after the discussion of Johannes Kepler in

Chapter 3. But I believe an appreciation of the Greeks can best be provided after we see

what they barely missed achieving.

Because science is inseparable from the rest of the human endeavor, it cannot be

discussed without making contact, sometimes glancing, sometimes head-on, with a number

of social, political, religious and philosophical issues. Even in the filming of a television

series on science, the worldwide devotion to military activities becomes intrusive.

Simulating the exploration of Mars in the Mohave Desert with a full-scale version of the

Viking Lander, we were repeatedly interrupted by the United States Air Force, performing

bombing runs in a nearby test range. In Alexandria, Egypt, from nine to eleven A.M. every

morning, our hotel was the subject of practice strafing runs by the Egyptian Air Force. In

Samos, Greece, permission to film anywhere was withheld until the very last moment

because of NATO maneuvers and what was clearly the construction of a warren of

underground and hillside emplacements for artillery and tanks. In Czechoslovakia the use

of walkie-talkies for organizing the filming logistics on a rural road attracted the attention

of a Czech Air Force fighter, which circled overhead until reassured in Czech that no threat

to national security was being perpetrated. In Greece, Egypt and Czechoslovakia our film

crews were accompanied everywhere by agents of the state security apparatus. Preliminary

inquiries about filming in Kaluga, U.S.S.R., for a proposed discussion of the life of the

Russian pioneer of astronautics Konstantin Tsiolkovsky were discouraged - because, as we

later discovered, trials of dissidents were to be conducted there. Our camera crews met

innumerable kindnesses in every country we visited; but the global military presence, the

fear in the hearts of the nations, was everywhere. The experience confirmed my resolve to

treat, when relevant, social questions both in the series and in the book.

The essence of science is that it is self-correcting. New experimental results and

novel ideas are continually resolving old mysteries. For example, in Chapter 9 we discuss

the fact that the Sun seems to be generating too few of the elusive particles called neutrinos.

Some proposed explanations are listed. In Chapter 10 we wonder whether there is enough

matter in the universe eventually to stop the recession of distant galaxies, and whether the

universe is infinitely old and therefore uncreated. Some light on both these questions may

since have been cast in experiments by Frederick Reines, of the University of California,

who believes he has discovered (a) that neutrinos exist in three different states, only one of

which could be detected by neutrino telescopes studying the Sun; and (b) that neutrinos -

unlike light - have mass, so that the gravity of all the neutrinos in space may help to close

the Cosmos and prevent it from expanding forever. Future experiments will show whether

these ideas are correct. But they illustrate the continuing and vigorous reassessment of

received wisdom which is fundamental to the scientific enterprise.

On a project of this magnitude it is impossible to thank everyone who has made a

contribution. However, I would like to acknowledge, especially, B. Gentry Lee; the Cosmos

production staff, including the senior producers Geoffrey Haines-Stiles and David Kennard

and the executive producer Adrian Malone; the artists Jon Lomberg (who played a critical

role in the original design and organization of the Cosmos visuals), John Allison, Adolf

Schaller, Rick Sternbach, Don Davies, Brown, and Anne Norcia; consultants Donald

Goldsmith, Owen Gingerich, Paul Fox, and Diane Ackerman; Cameron Beck; the KCET

management, particularly Greg Andorfer, who first carried KCET’s proposal to us, Chuck

Allen, William Lamb, and James Loper; and the underwriters and co-producers of the

Cosmos television series, including the Atlantic Richfield Company, the Corporation for

Public Broadcasting, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Polytel International. Others who helped in

clarifying matters of fact or approach are listed at the back of the book. The final

responsibility for the content of the book is, however, of course mine. I thank the staff at

Random House, particularly my editor, Anne Freedgood, and the book designer, Robert

Aulicino, for their capable work and their patience when the deadlines for the television

series and the book seemed to be in conflict. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Shirley

Arden, my Executive Assistant, for typing the early drafts of this book and ushering the

later drafts through all stages of production with her usual cheerful competence. This is

only one of many ways in which the Cosmos project is deeply indebted to her. I am more

grateful than I can say to the administration of Cornell University for granting me a two-

year leave of absence to pursue this project, to my colleagues and students there, and to my

colleagues at NASA, JPL and on the Voyager Imaging Team.

My greatest debt for the writing of Cosmos is owed to Ann Druyan and Steven

Soter, my co-writers in the television series. They made fundamental and frequent

contributions to the basic ideas and their connections, to the overall intellectual structure of

the episodes, and to the felicity of style. I am deeply grateful for their vigorous critical

readings of early versions of this book, their constructive and creative suggestions for

revision through many drafts, and their major contributions to the television script which in

many ways influenced the content of this book. The delight I found in our many

discussions is one of my chief rewards from the Cosmos project.

Ithaca and Los Angeles

May 1980

CHAPTER I

The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean

The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter,

the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer . . . They were endowed

with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When

they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in

turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth . . . [Then the Creator said]:

‘They know all . . . what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to

that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth! . . . Are they not

by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods?’

-The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya

Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Where is the way to the dwelling

of light, And where is the place of darkness . . . ?

-The Book of Job

It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my

thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe

encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

-Blaise Pascal, Pensées

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the

midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is

to reclaim a little more land.

-T. H. Huxley, 1887

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the

Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a

distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of

mysteries.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost

somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic

perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is

young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have

made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place

within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have

evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I

believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote

of dust in the morning sky.

Those explorations required skepticism and imagination both. Imagination will

often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. Skepticism enables

us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. The Cosmos is rich beyond

measure - in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe.

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

SpacecraftmissionstonearbyPlanetsTheLibraryofancientAlexandriaThehumanbrainEgyptianHieroglyphicsTheoriginoflifeThedeathoftheSunTheevolutionofgalaxiesTheoriginsofmatter,sunsandworldsCOSMOSThestoryoffifteenbillionyearsofcosmicevolutiontransformingmatterandlifeintoconsciousness,ofhowscienceandcivilizat...

展开>> 收起<<

Sagan, Carl - Cosmos.pdf

共211页,预览43页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Sagan, Carl - Cosmos

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: