|
Carl Edward Sagan (; November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. His contributions were central to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of Venus. However, he is best known for his contributions to the scientific research of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages that were 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. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. Sagan wrote many popular science books, such as ''The Dragons of Eden'', ''Broca's Brain'' and ''Pale Blue Dot'', and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series ''Cosmos: A Personal Voyage''. The most widely-watched series in the history of American public television, ''Cosmos'' has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 different countries. The book ''Cosmos'' was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the science fiction novel ''Contact'', the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. Sagan always advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. 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, regarding ''Cosmos: A Personal Voyage'', two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award and the Hugo Award. He married three times and had five children. After suffering from myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62 on December 20, 1996. == Early life == Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York.〔Poundstone 1999, pp. 363–364, 374–375〕 His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then Russian Empire, in today's Ukraine. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew."〔Davidson 1999〕 He had a sister, Carol, and the family lived in a modest apartment near the Atlantic Ocean, in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood. According to Sagan, they were Reform Jews, the most liberal of North American Judaism's four main groups. Both Sagan 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 ... and served only kosher meat."〔 During the depths of the Depression, his father worked as a theater usher. According to biographer Keay Davidson, Sagan's "inner war" was a result of his close relationship with both of his parents, who were in many ways "opposites." 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.〔 As a young woman she had held her own intellectual ambitions, but they were frustrated by social restrictions: her poverty, her status as a woman and a wife, and her Jewish ethnicity. Davidson notes that she therefore "worshipped her only son, Carl. He would fulfill her unfulfilled dreams."〔 However, he claimed that his sense of wonder came from his father. In his free time he gave apples to the poor or helped soothe labor-management tensions within New York's garment industry.〔 Although he was awed by Carl's intellectual abilities, he took his son's inquisitiveness in stride and saw it as part of his growing up.〔 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''.〔 Sagan describes his parents' influence on his later thinking: : My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.〔Spangenburg & Moser 2004, pp. 2–5〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Carl Sagan」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|