“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?”
-Carl Sagan
Words strung together in such a convoluted way you cannot make heads or tails of the meaning, this is what happens many times when you open a science textbook. Moving away from the pedantry is a difficult task the world of science has to overcome for its doors to open wide to the general public. Just as our ancestors wondered at the stars as they mapped out their course, we continue to feel great passion for the unanswerable questions the universe throws at us. Wonder and science come hand in hand; in fact, Plato claimed that philosophy was born from wonder, using the Greek work “thauma,” which translates as marvel. Great scientists, among them Einstein and Carl Sagan, viewed this wonder and curiosity as the main fuel of any scientific enquiry.
One of the greatest spokesperson of science was Carl Sagan. He was an astrophysicist who was driven to broaden the minds of the general public when it came to science. He worked with NASA in several projects and was pivotal in projects on Venus and Mars. His greatest legacy is without a doubt his capacity to transmit this great wonder and curiosity of the world of science.
Like anything in the world, this curiosity has to be cultivated, and books allow you to fling wide the windows of your mind. Sagan left behind a list of books that in his eyes will give you a greater understanding of the world in its different expressions, from science and philosophy to the arts.
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1. Timaeus (360 a.C.) — Plato
2. L’immoraliste (1902) — André Gide
3. The Observational Approach To Cosmology (1937) — Edwin Hubble
4. Who Speaks For Man? (1953) — Norman Cousins
5. Young Archimedes and Other Stories (1924) — Aldous Huxley
6. A History of Western Philosophy (1969) — W. T. Jones
7. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) — Charles Mackay
8. The Uses of The Past: Profiles of Former Societies (1952) — Herbert J. Muller
9. The Bible
10. Julius Caesar (1599) — William Shakespeare
11. Heat and Thermodynamics (1900) — Mark Waldo Zemansky
12. Education For Freedom (1943) — Robert Maynard Hutchins
13. The Republic (380 a.C.) — Plato
14. Death Be Not Proud (1949) — John Gunther
15. An Outline to Psychology (1949) — William McDougall
16. In the Matter of (1954) — J. Robert Oppenheimer
17. But We Were Born Free (1954) — Elmer Davis
18. The Portable Greek Reader (1948) — W. H. Auden
19. Quantitative Aspects of Carcinogenic Radiation (1952) — H. Davis
20. The Kinetic Theory of Gases (1938) — E. H. Kennard
21. Theory of Functions (1952) — Konrad Knopp
22. Complex Analysis (1953) — Lars Ahlfors
23. Introduction to Electric Fields (1954) — W. E. Rogers
24. Electromagnetics (1949) — John D. Kraus
Sagan wrote this list during the fall of 1954; he was barely 20 years old. This list may have shifted and changed as the years went by, but it is special to know which were the books that touched him deeply and helped him in his quest for answers. The Library of Congress in the US is safekeeping this list. As we look at the books he proposes, we see that he left no stone unturned, as he jumps from discipline to discipline. This diversity is the only way in which you can fling wide the windows of the world and peer with new eyes at the wonders the universe has to offer.
