: 2 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. : 2 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.
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However, he claimed that his sense of wonder came from his father, who in his free time gave apples to the poor or helped soothe labor-management tensions within New York's garment industry. He would fulfill her unfulfilled dreams." : 2 Davidson notes that she therefore "worshipped her only son, Carl. : 2 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. 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. : 12Īccording 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". : 12 During the depths of the Depression, his father worked as a theater usher.
Carl 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. According to Sagan, they were Reform Jews, the most liberal of North American Judaism's four main groups. The family lived in a modest apartment near the Atlantic Ocean, in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood. 'emancipated woman', we'd call her now." She was a rather rebellious child and young adult. According to Carol (Carl's sister), Rachel "never accepted Rose as her mother. Rachel's father remarried to a woman named Rose. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew", because she died while giving birth to her second child. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then in the Russian Empire, in today's Ukraine.
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The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, Cosmos, has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries. He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Cosmos, Broca's Brain, Pale Blue Dot and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. Initially an associate professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell where he would spend the majority of his career as the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to and calculated using the greenhouse effect.
Sagan assembled the first physical messages 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. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Carl Edward Sagan ( / ˈ s eɪ ɡ ən/ November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator.