COVER STORY ‘Cosmos’ Season 3 Rekindles Interest in Science in the Midst of a Pandemic Shubhobroto Ghosh Carl Sagan and his Cosmos 14 | Science Reporter | September 2020 Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s wife Rice Burroughs (Mars and Venus series), Patrick Moore, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Fred Hoyle and Robert new season of the famous ‘Cosmos’ television series Heinlein.” conceived by pioneering science communicator Carl In 1973, Cornell University hosted a session on ‘Science A Sagan has just finished broadcasting in India, giving and Science Fiction’ featuring Asimov, Hoyle, Thomas Gold rise to nostalgia among those who grew up with the show. and Sagan. “I have no doubt who would have been the star of ‘Cosmos: Possible Worlds’, succeeds earlier Cosmos seasons that session,” reminisces Ray. ‘A Personal Voyage’, aired in 1980 (in the USA) and 1986 Sagan’s work also influenced the career choices of a (in India); and ‘A Spacetime Odyssey’ broadcast in 2014. lot of youngsters in the 1980s. “We need Carl Sagans in Ann Druyan, Sagan’s wife and producer of Cosmos says India to excite young minds into living scientifically, ask the series comes from a place of hope – not wishful thinking questions and not just study science for the sake of obtaining – “but optimism that science and technology will be used with jobs. Science is a way of life which is constantly evolving wisdom and foresight”. “When we turn away from science, as we are constantly understanding mother nature better,” we are turning away from reality,” Druyan told in an e-mail says Abhishek Dey, Professor, Chemical Science, Indian interview about the new series. Association for Cultivation of Science, Kolkata. Civilisations should pay heed to scientists’ dire warnings and their stunning revelations about the universe, so that science becomes the preferred tool for finding solutions to mankind’s problems, she hopes. Prasadranjan Ray, a former bureaucrat in the West Bengal state government who attended Sagan’s lectures as a Hubert Humphrey fellow student in Cornell University in New York in the USA, recalls how he met Carl Sagan, a man with bubbling energy and an impressive capability to communicate, in 1981. “The talk was easy to follow. Many of the listeners were Astronomy undergraduates and I learnt that he usually took the introductory courses ASTRO 102 and 104 but these students had joined when he was on long leave. To their seniors, he taught ASTRO 201 and he also started a course on skepticism (ASTRO 490) because he believed that a scientist had to be a skeptic.” Says Ray, “Carl was then the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences as well as the director of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies at Cornell and co-founder of the Planetary Society. While discussing inter-planetary travel, he got quite carried away when he learnt that I had not only read Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but also Edgar September 2020 | Science Reporter | 15 The broadcast time in India may have come in the way the early pioneers of the modern understanding of biodiversity. of wide-scale viewership this season in the first run National( He created the seed bank in Leningrad as a massive endeavour Geographic, Tuesdays 7 am and Wednesdays 12 am). toward creating food security so that humanity could avoid The latest series had a strong India element that Sagan starvation in the future. The third season of ‘Cosmos’ touched and Druyan wanted to capture ever since the first episodes upon periods of starvation and famine in the world, including were penned four decades ago. the ones in China, the one artificially engendered by colonial “Carl and I wanted to tell the story of emperor Ashoka’s rule in India and also in Ireland. stunning transformation from a sadistic murderer to a shining Cosmos showed us how Nikolai Vavilov was determined light of humanism,” Druyan says. Their son Sam suggested to research agriculture to prevent such human tragedies. He that the emperor’s saga be included in this new series to explain was very well respected amongst his colleagues in Russia and the morality behind his transition from killer to nurturer. The scientists across the world. Unfortunately one of Vavilov’s story of Ashoka was illustrated in the new Cosmos as part of own proteges, Trofim Lysenko, was jealous of the attention the theme, ‘Can We Change?’ from being violence driven he was receiving and poured poison into Stalin’s ears about beings fighting for glory and triumph to individuals showing him and the nature of his work. The result was Vavilov’s empathy and compassion. arrest and interrogation on charges of aiding the enemy. The celebrated 1980 tele-series that fueled the imagination Faced with torture and trial, Vavilov was asked to confess that of many science enthusiasts, especially astrophysicists and his science was flawed. He replied that he could be tortured astronomers, also had a strong Indian element. Carl Sagan or even burnt at the stake, but he would not compromise with had associations with several Indian scientists, including the integrity of his science. His refusal to bow down to the Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar who was his teacher at the supreme leader, Stalin, meant solitary imprisonment and the University of Chicago, Kameshwar Wali, a friend from his dominance of Lysenko over Soviet agricultural policy. graduate school days and Bishun Khare, who worked with him on the origins of life for more than two decades and was shown in the first Cosmos series in 1980. Carl Sagan also knew Vikram Sarabhai, when he was on the faculty at Harvard University. Forty years after the first Cosmos series was broadcast, the charm and importance of conveying science to the public still remain potent. The new Cosmos features a number of unsung heroes of science – a botanist who dared to stand up to the infamous https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-carl- sagan-truly-irreplaceable-180949818/ Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, a forgotten genius who discovered ‘gravity assist’ as a means for spacecraft to swing Despite this and the unrelenting bombardment and military by from one cosmic body to another, a 19th century scientist assault on Leningrad by Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Vavilov’s who devised an ingenious way to record the dream of an team at his seed bank continued working assiduously, even abandoned child, a scientist who made first contact with a when they were restricted to a war-time ration of two slices species that uses symbolic language to communicate and a of bread in a day. They eventually perished and Vavilov man who stumbled upon a hole in the curtain of classical was slowly starved to death. The importance of his work in physics to discover a Universe where its laws do not apply. preserving different kinds of seeds and the importance of his The story of Nikolai Vavilov is among the most moving, seed bank for humanity was realized only sometime after the portrayed in the third season of Cosmos. Vavilov was among end of World War II. 16 | Science Reporter | September 2020 The episode dedicated to Nikolai Vavilov ended with a poignant statement from the presenter, Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Did you eat today?” If you did, then we all owe a debt of gratitude to Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov and his team of heroic scientists, who laid down their lives so that we could survive with adequate food today. human conflict given their kill radius and kill ratio, by Carl Sagan, who had stated, “The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.” The sensible thing to do in this instance is to destroy the matches and wipe away the gasoline, as Carl Sagan wanted. As a tool for science communication, the Cosmos series remains exceptional given that the programme broke down the barrier between scientists and the public. Ms Druyan clarifies one lingering doubt that lies in the minds of many people still, including those in India, that is, whether Carl Sagan was a good scientist or a good science popularizer and whether a good scientist can be a good popularizer. Neil deGrasse Tyson who now presents Cosmos, with Carl Sagan’s wife “Carl studied mathematics under the great Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar at the University of Chicago,” she says. “It Other episodes were devoted to the works of pioneers like was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. We were honoured Karl Ritter von Frisch, Nobel Prize winner in Physiology and to have Chandra and Lalitha as guests in our home. I hope Medicine in 1973, who decoded the language of honey bees to tell Chandra’s remarkable story in a future season. His and thus gave us an insight into the language and behaviour contributions to science are so numerous as to fill a series of a species that uses patterns of language to communicate of his own. Carl authored or co-authored some 600 refereed comparable to our own. scientific papers. Only those blinded by elitism or snobbery The moral dilemma of scientists at the Manhattan Project, would deny his prodigious excellence as a scientist. Those including Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos that do are merely projecting their own feelings of inadequacy Laboratory and responsible for the research and design of an or their bias against the citizen scientist who would share the atomic bomb was sensitively illustrated. The show alluded insights of science with the widest possible public. There’s a to the opposition to nuclear weapons as a tool to resolve word for the way the scientific community punishes a truly great scientist for communicating with the public, it’s called the Sagan effect.” “Only those blinded by elitism Scepticism, wonder, learning, love, compassion, or snobbery would deny Sagan’s tolerance and respect are values to be imbibed from the latest prodigious excellence as a scientist.” season of Cosmos, qualities that were manifested by the – Ann Druyan originator, Carl Sagan.