Since the earlier post, I have been thinking a lot about physics--a love for the subject that goes all the way back to high school days. And, about the wonderfully gifted popularizer of science and physics: Carl Sagan. Of course, growing up in India, and without television, meant that I had no idea about Sagan; I hadn't even completed high school when PBS began airing Cosmos here in the US. It was much later in life, as a graduate student, that I started reading/watching Sagan. (One of my greatest regrets was that I missed out on an opportunity to go to a Richard Feynman lecture at Caltech, during my first semester in this country, and a year later he died!!!)
Anyway, thinking more about how lonely we humans are in this universe, which is rapidly expanding, made me go back to Carl Sagan's Cosmos. What a coincidence it was that I should watch it now, as in during this time of January--"Pongal" that Sagan talks about in this video was two days ago, and I watched this video on "Maattu Pongal"! Of course, Sagan butchers the pronunciation, but that is ok :)
It is shame that even a series like Cosmos has not been able to rid the creationists who make a caricature of American scientific enterprise. The pursuit of science and truth is being ridiculed on a daily basis, when it really ought to be the other way around. This ought to worry us a lot as a metric of the decline of America :(
No comments:
Post a Comment