Astronomy Buff

‘Scuze me while I kiss this guy: Carl Sagan

by Tony on January 2nd, 2007

Of all the people I never met, Carl Sagan ranks as the most influential in my life. As a youngster, wanting to become an astronomer, he taught me to become a critical thinker and the importance of asking the most basic of questions about the universe we live in.

These lessons came back to me in my adult life when, as a scientist, I was astonished to find out just how many practicing, card-carrying PhD astronomers didn’t seem to know, or remember, some of the most fundamental principles governing our universe. It seemed that in the rush to get out papers and be published, basic questions were not being asked.

When I first started going to meetings and conferences, I was quite self-conscious about my own knowledge level and abilities. I never talked that much and I certainly didn’t ask many questions. The reason was simple: I didn’t want to appear stupid, I was afraid of being thought poorly of by my colleagues. Everyone around me seemed to delight in using lots of jargon and very large words. I was lost in a great many conversations.

I realize that in science, jargon is important, the specialized words used in all fields of endeavor help us to convey difficult concepts easily. I never got the feeling though, that that is what was going on. I felt like I was sitting in a smoke screen. Many conversations and talks seemed unnecessarily difficult to me, and I never seemed to shake that feeling of being in a smoke screen. I would often go off by myself and think about what someone had just explained to me and once I got the gist of it, I would often ask, “Well, why didn’t he just say this…. He didn’t have to get that complicated.”

It seemed to me that people were being so unnecessarily opaque in presenting their ideas. I was truly perplexed and kept feeling like I was missing a meeting somewhere.

Over time, an interesting thing happened. I met a man, a senior scientist, who became a mentor to me. He possessed many remarkable qualities, but my favorite was that he loved to sit in the back of an auditorium during a talk and ask basic questions behind the science being discussed. He would sometimes raise his hand in the middle of a talk or, if he was irritated by the speaker’s assumptions, he would just blurt out his questions. It was usually a question about how some basic principle, like gravity on solar plasmas or current sheets, or something else that one usually learned in their basic plasma classes, was being accounted for in their research. It was amazing to watch. More times than not, the speaker would start harumphing and hemming and hawing in sometimes quite hilarious ways.

I was astonished at how many times a scientist could not answer very simple questions about the science related to his/her research. It was easily the majority of the time.

Now, it could be argued that the speaker was caught off guard and was flustered because the flow of his talk had been disrupted. And this was certainly the case some of the time, but not always. There appeared to be a genuine lack of understanding on very basic levels.

As I spent more time with my mentor, and going to conferences with him and watching him interact with his colleagues, it became extremely obvious to me that I was not alone with my fear of appearing stupid. My mentor was extremely smart and well-respected, no one wanted to appear stupid in front of him, so they always tried to answer his questions instead of blowing him off and saying it was a stupid question.

It was then, while they were trying to answer his questions, that I saw that those smoke screens I had been sensing were real in many cases. People actively tried to avoid getting too fundamental in their discussions, because they just didn’t understand many of the basic concepts. One person actually confided in me one day and said, “Yeah, we’re all basically terrified we’re going to meet someone smarter than we are. We’re just as insecure as everybody else.”

To be sure, there were many excellent scientists who just couldn’t communicate very well. They understood the first principles, but really had a hard time making them clear. Others were just put off by being asked these questions at all, but were quite skilled in their field.

I’ve learned that the most competent scientists are the ones not afraid to ask the ’stupid questions’. They had no problems blurting out or restating basic principles in the context of whatever conversation or talk was being presented. I began to admire that above all else in a scientist.

Then, I remembered Carl Sagan. I remember that he was really the first one who taught me that. He was never afraid to address basic issues. Quite the contrary, the understanding of them was so important to him, that he risked ridicule among his peers by presenting them to all of us. He wanted us all to understand what many scientists struggled with: the fundamentals of our universe.

The reason this is important is that science progresses based on what has come before. In order to move forward in our understanding of the universe, we must always check ourselves with that which has already been established. To make sure that what we are doing is consistent and sensible in the context of first principles, to build on a solid foundation.

Carl Sagan understood that importance and it appeared to be a guiding motivation in the way he lived his life. I can’t express how much I admire that.

Carl Sagan died 10 years ago last December and the world has never been the same since. Our loss is immeasurable.

I miss you Carl Sagan.

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