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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carl Sagan | 3/13 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:17:36.414677+00:00 | kb-cron |
Sagan attended David A. Boody Junior High School, in his native Bensonhurst and had his bar mitzvah when he turned 13. In 1948, when he was 14, his father's work took the family to Rahway, New Jersey, where he attended Rahway High School. He was a straight-A student but was bored because his classes did not challenge him and his teachers did not inspire him. His teachers realized this and tried to convince his parents to send him to a private school, with an administrator telling them, "This kid ought to go to a school for gifted children, he has something really remarkable." However, his parents could not afford to do so. Sagan became president of the school's chemistry club, and set up his own laboratory at home. He taught himself about molecules by making cardboard cutouts to help him visualize how they were formed: "I found that about as interesting as doing [chemical] experiments." He was mostly interested in astronomy, studying it in his spare time. In his junior year of high school, he discovered that professional astronomers were paid for doing something he always enjoyed. "That was a splendid day—when I began to suspect that if I tried hard I could do astronomy full-time." Before finishing high school, Sagan entered an essay writing contest in which he explored the idea that human contact with advanced extraterrestrials might be as disastrous for people on Earth as Native Americans' first contact with Europeans had been for Native Americans. The subject was considered controversial, but his rhetorical skill won over the judges and they awarded him first prize. When he was about to graduate from high school, his classmates voted him "most likely to succeed" and put him in line to be valedictorian. In 1950, Sagan wrote the essay "Space, Time, and the Poet" for his high school newspaper. In it, he mused on man's place in the universe as expressed by poets like T. S. Eliot and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and "the work containing perhaps the greatest poetry—the Bible." He graduated from Rahway High School in 1951. He attended the University of Chicago as it was one of the few colleges he had applied to that would accept a 16 year old. Robert M. Hutchins, its chancellor, had recently retooled the College of the University of Chicago into an "ideal meritocracy" built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations, and early entrance to college. He joined the Ryerson Astronomical Society. He wrote "College was the fulfillment of my dreams. I found teachers who not only understood science, but were actually able to explain it. … I was a physics student in a department orbiting around Enrico Fermi; I discovered what true mathematical elegance is from Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar; I was given the chance to talk chemistry with Harold Urey; over summers I was apprenticed in biology to H. J. Muller at Indiana University; and I learned planetary astronomy from its only full-time practitioner at the time, G. P. Kuiper." The Miller-Urey experiment, conducted in 1952, sparked his interest in the origin of life. Under Urey, he wrote "Radiation and the Origin of the Gene." He recalled that "science was presented as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge. It was considered unthinkable for an aspiring physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Malinowski and Freud—among many others." He was awarded a Bachelor of Liberal Arts with general and special honors in what he quipped was "nothing." In 1955, he earned a Bachelor of Science in physics. He went on to do graduate work at the University of Chicago, earning a Master of Science in physics in 1956 and a Doctor of Philosophy in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960. His doctoral thesis, under the direction of Kuiper, was "Physical Studies of the Planets". During his graduate studies, he spent summers working with Kuiper, as well as chemist Melvin Calvin and physicist George Gamow. He credited Kuiper with teaching him back-of-the-envelope calculations: "A possible explanation to a problem occurs to you, you pull out an old envelope, appeal to your knowledge of fundamental physics, scribble a few approximate equations on the envelope, and see if your answer comes anywhere near explaining your problem. If not, you look for a different explanation. It cut through nonsense like a knife through butter." In 1958, Sagan and Kuiper worked on the classified military Project A119, a secret United States Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear warhead on the Moon and document its effects. Sagan had a Top Secret clearance at the Air Force and a Secret clearance with NASA. In 1999, an article published in the journal Nature revealed that Sagan had included the classified titles of two Project A119 papers in his 1959 application for a scholarship to University of California, Berkeley. A follow-up letter to the journal by project leader Leonard Reiffel confirmed Sagan's security leak.
== Career and research ==