The poetry and passion of science

Thanks to his undeniable scientific credentials and his poetic books and TV specials, Carl Sagan was the foremost science educator of the 20th century. Few people dispute that assessment. But practically everything else about him inspired mixed feelings -- his career-minded publicity seeking, his stormy marriages, his sometimes contentious dealings with colleagues. Each of these issues left behind scars and, inevitably, anecdotes. Two authors have grappled with the scientific and personal details and produced biographies of the man who became science's best apostle to the masses since Thomas Huxley kept Victorian working men spellbound with his vision of nature.

REVIEWS BY MICHAEL SIMS

The better of the two biographies is Keay Davidson's Carl Sagan: A Life. Davidson is the chief science reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and has written many articles and coauthored the science book Wrinkles in Time. His biography is thoughtful, balanced, with a solid understanding of the scientific background, and Davidson writes with a feel for language and analogy. He understands Sagan's passions and conveys the difficulties and complexities of a career that combined both serious scientific work and mass-appeal education. Davidson also understands the extent to which Sagan's attention-hungry personality was shaped by his doting but ferocious mother. Sagan slowly admitted his faults to himself, and finally struggled in later years to achieve a more balanced personality.

Davidson occasionally strays into apologies for Sagan: for the sexist assumptions behind his behavior toward his first wife (now the world-famous biologist Lynn Margulis), and for his headlong pursuit of fame and glory, for example. But mostly he tells the story without apparent bias.

We all know who Carl Sagan was, and Davidson has no need to keep us in suspense about such a famous life. Therefore he progresses through Sagan's adventures with constant reminders of where each development will lead. He quotes from interviews with Sagan's sister, ex-wives, children, and former colleagues. Davidson vividly sketches the personalities of the many scientists and public figures who befriended (or battled) Sagan over the decades.

When characters disappear for a while, Davidson brings them back on stage with reminders of their significance. Throughout the ups and downs of Sagan's whirlwind professional and personal life, his biographer keeps us oriented and on course. It's an impressive accomplishment, considering the array of issues Sagan tackled over the years -- extraterrestrial life, the greenhouse effect, global warming, nuclear winter, and the rising tide of pseudoscientific nonsense.

One of the things Davidson does best is portray the psychological roots of scientific research so that science comes across as part of the human urge for meaning rather than the mad pursuit of power over nature. He painlessly sketches the background behind each issue. Frequently the restless Sagan trespassed on the turf of people who had spent their lives in their respective fields. Davidson enables us to understand the passions and territoriality behind the professional bickering.


The other biography is Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, by William Poundstone. Poundstone's writing is more workmanlike and journalistic than Davidson's, with frequent one-sentence paragraphs that seem rather breathless. But his pace never flags, and he has an endless supply of lively anecdotes at hand. His enthusiasm for the quirks of personality lead him to paint lively and frequently amusing portraits of such scientific loose cannons as John Lilly. The behaviorist's work with dolphins engaged Sagan's interest because, if Lilly was right, dolphins were a separate intelligence right here on earth, and therefore communication with them ought to inform Sagan's dream of communication with other species.

Sagan was a jumble of apparent contradictions. Obsessed (that doesn't seem too strong a word) with the search for extraterrestrial life, he was slow to abandon his hope that "flying saucers" would indeed turn out to be visitors from outer space. However, after he looked into what was really a social and psychological phenomenon, he became the most vocal critic the UFO people ever had. The child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he lifted himself by sheer brainpower to the pinnacle of his profession to become world famous and highly influential.

Along the way, Carl Sagan became a familiar presence who helped the rest of us understand what science was trying to do, and why we should find it exciting. He knew that the scientific endeavor was poetic and passionate, and that too often, in their pursuit of objectivity, scientists left out the enthusiasm and mystery, recounting only the dry statistics. Both of these new biographies demonstrate how Carl Sagan restored the poetry and the passion to science and made the rest of us care about it.


Michael Sims is the author of Darwin's Orchestra (Henry Holt).

© 1999 ProMotion, inc.
www@bookpage.com