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Apr 8 2011 10:26am
So what if Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking could have a conversation ... what would they discuss? There is an answer in the following 5-part series (just posting part 1, you can find the rest):



I thought the series was really interesting, even if some of the material is a bit dated. Carl Sagan is possibly my all-time favourite scientist, so the video had a lot of appeal on that basis alone.

Also posting this for fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuqS6zs5gds

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Apr 8 2011 10:49am
I definitely agree that Sagan is an icon of science. Way more than the Michio Kaku's and other popular scientists you have right now.

I myself have always liked Feynman.

Any physics teacher should show his students Feynman's 'Fun to Imagine' series.

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Apr 8 2011 01:46pm
Agreed. Feynman was a great scientist who was really interested in sharing what he knew with other people. I have a few of his books. He had a more audacious and wild sense of humor than Sagan. When I was a kid, I had sticker book that helped me learn about the cosmos. It was a fun imaginative tool. It helped me learn about really big things and things that are really far away ... and it also presented a really beautiful image of the universe. It was a few years later (in the 80s) when I read Cosmos by Carl Sagan. If my sticker book was an entry point into thinking about the universe, then the work of Sagan was an introduction to some deeper principles of cosmology (and also ethics). Feynman came much later for me, but what I admire about him is his total fascination with the puzzles of a physical nature. Sagan was an enthusiast, but Feynman was a junkie. I really hope that he has hooked a lot of people onto science. He got it exactly right in the sense that the pursuit of knowledge should be fun, risky, and adventurous. When I meet people that are afraid of science, it disheartens me a bit. Science can be difficult and at times downright boring, but, as Einstein said, science is a way of refining everyday thinking. It engages us with the world around us and it shows us how precious it is. Carl Sagan took a lot of value from this basic point. Science is not just fun. It is quite possibly our only hope for the future. That is, it is our greatest hope so long as we can avoid abusing it and thereby destroying ourselves in the process.

Thanks for posting the Feynman video. He surely belonged in the conversation that I posted. In any case, he is an important part of the historical conversation about science.
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