Who Was Carl Sagan?
The famed scientist, and celebrity, had a lot more going on than just hosting a television series.
Dan Vergano - National Geographic
PUBLISHED MARCH 16, 2014


Astronomer Carl Sagan was the "most famous U.S. scientist of the 1980s and early 1990s."
PHOTOGRAPH BY EVELYN HOFER, TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY

<snip>

"He worked very hard for his students, got them jobs, worried about their education, many of them very well placed now," says William Poundstone, author of Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos. "If you talk to the people he inspired, who knew him, they are uniformly effusive."


"Sagan was certainly the most famous U.S. scientist of the 1980s and early 1990s," says science journalism expert Declan Fahy of American University in Washington, D.C. Fahy says, "After Cosmos reached half a billion viewers in 60 nations, his fame reached another level. The book of the series spent more than 70 weeks on the bestseller list."

But who was Carl Sagan? Scientist, celebrity, writer, professor, skeptic, and free-thinker, he was much more than the narrator of a TV series.


"Part of what made him great was the number of things he pursued," says NASA's David Morrison, director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Morrison marveled both at Sagan's breadth of accomplishments and his lack of self-importance.

"He worked very hard, 18-hour days. He had a tremendous appetite for his work," says Poundstone. "He was made for television, sure, and he looked very relaxed and normal in jeans when other scientists didn't. But there was a lot more to him."


As a scientist, Sagan made a real mark on planetary science in the early 1970s as a young Harvard professor, "at a time when planetary science was a bit of a backwater," Poundstone says.


Sagan first predicted that the greenhouse effect made the atmosphere of Venus hot enough to melt lead, at a time when some scientists still speculated that its clouds might hide oceans, says Morrison...

<snip>

More: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...alaxies-space/