These are the books he wrote or put his name on, in the order they came out, with a line or two
from me on each. I own all of them but one, mostly in paperback, mostly bought used in the
bookshops near campus. The one I don't own I've checked out of the public library so many times that the
librarian asked me if I wanted to just keep it.
If you've never read any of them: start with Cosmos if you like pictures,
Pale Blue Dot if you want to feel something, and The Demon-Haunted World if you're a
parent or a teacher. If you're fourteen, start with Contact. It's a story, and it's got a
girl genius in it, and you won't notice you're learning anything.
| Year |
Book, and my two cents |
| 1966 |
Intelligent Life in the Universe, with I. S. Shklovskii. A Soviet astronomer's book that Sagan took and nearly doubled in size with chapters of his own, so the two of them wrote it together across the Iron Curtain, in the middle of the Cold War, about whether anybody else is out there. Heavy going. I read it for a college seminar and understood about half. |
| 1973 |
The Cosmic Connection. His first book for regular people. Short chapters on the planets and on life elsewhere, including the story of the picture plaque he helped design for the Pioneer probes. A good one to hand a kid who says he doesn't like to read. |
| 1977 |
The Dragons of Eden. How the human brain and human intelligence evolved. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. This is where the Cosmic Calendar first shows up, years before Cosmos, which I didn't know until I'd been teaching it for a decade. |
| 1978 |
Murmurs of Earth, with the others who made the Voyager record. How they chose what went on it, and what they left off. My students love the arguments about the music. So do I. |
| 1979 |
Broca's Brain. Essays. The title one is about seeing the preserved brain of a famous French doctor, Paul Broca, in a jar in a museum in Paris, and wondering how much of the man was still in there. Also some good long takedowns of the crackpot science of the 1970s. |
| 1980 |
Cosmos. The book of the TV series. Big, with color pictures on every other page. My copy has a cracked spine and a coffee ring on the Mars chapter and I wouldn't trade it for a new one. |
| 1985 |
Comet, with Ann Druyan. Written for the return of Halley's Comet. Everything about comets: what they are, where they come from, what people used to think they meant. Halley's turned out to be a smudge from Tucson in 1986, but the book was wonderful. |
| 1985 |
Contact. His one novel. A radio astronomer, Ellie Arroway, hears a signal from the star Vega, and the whole world has to decide what to do about it. The movie came out in 1997. Read the book first. It's different, especially the ending. |
| 1990 |
A Path Where No Man Thought, with Richard Turco. About nuclear winter, the idea that a big nuclear war would throw enough smoke and dust into the sky to cool the whole planet. Dated now that the Cold War is over, but it reads like a geology book about volcanoes and the dinosaurs, which is basically what it is. |
| 1992 |
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, with Ann Druyan. Where we came from: evolution, and our close relatives the chimpanzees and the other apes. The one I don't own. (See above re: the librarian.) |
| 1994 |
Pale Blue Dot. Named for the Voyager picture (see the main page). About our place in the universe and the case for people going out into the solar system. If you only read one, this is the one. |
| 1996 |
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. About how science works and how to tell it from nonsense: flying saucer abductions, faith healers, the works. It came out the year he died. Every school board in America should be issued a copy. |
| 1997 |
Billions and Billions. His last essays, published after he died, with an epilogue by Ann Druyan about his last days. Some of it is about his illness. I read it on the porch in one afternoon and then didn't pick up another book for a month. |
There are other books with his name on them, collections and textbooks and co-written things, but
those are the ones I'd send you to.
The Baloney Detection Kit, in my own words
In The Demon-Haunted World there's a chapter about what he called a baloney detection kit:
a set of thinking tools for when somebody is trying to sell you something, whether it's a
miracle diet or a political speech or a flying saucer. What follows is not his list. It's
my version, the way I explain it to fourteen-year-olds, and it's taped to the wall over my
pencil sharpener. If you want his, buy the book.
The tools:
- Check it somewhere else. One source isn't enough. Find a second, unconnected source
before you believe it. "My cousin's friend saw it" is one source, not two.
- Let people argue. Get people who know the subject and disagree to fight it out over
the evidence. The idea left standing is probably the better one.
- Experts can be wrong. A famous name or a white coat doesn't make something true. In
science, nobody is the boss. The evidence is the boss. (That goes for me too. If I'm wrong in
class, prove it, and I'll put your name on the board.)
- Think of more than one explanation. Lights in the sky over the Catalinas? Could be a
spaceship. Could also be a plane, a planet, a weather balloon, or a flare from the training range.
List them all, then figure out how you'd tell them apart.
- Don't fall in love with your own idea. It's yours, so you want it to be right.
That's exactly why you should try hardest to knock it down.
- Measure it. "A lot" and "really big" aren't data. If you can put
a number on it, you can compare it with other numbers.
- Every link has to hold. If an argument is a chain of steps, every single step has to
work, not just most of them.
- Simpler usually wins. When two explanations fit the facts equally well, go with the
one that needs fewer extra assumptions. (This is called Occam's Razor and it is on the test.)
- Can it be tested? If there is no possible way to ever show an idea is wrong, it isn't
science. It might still be interesting. But it isn't science.
- Use a control. If you want to know whether the new fertilizer works, you need a second
set of bean plants that don't get it. Otherwise you're just watching beans grow.
And the traps to watch for (he had a longer list; these are the ones I see most in ninth
grade, and in grown-ups):
- Attacking the person instead of the argument. "He's a jerk, so he's wrong."
He might be a jerk and still right.
- "You can't prove it isn't true." Not being able to disprove something isn't
evidence for it. The person making the claim has to bring the evidence.
- Counting the hits and forgetting the misses. The psychic on TV who gets one thing
right out of fifty. The horoscope that "came true" once.
- It happened after, so it happened because. I wore my lucky socks and we won. The rooster
crows and the sun comes up.
- Only two choices. "Either you agree with me or you hate America." There are
almost always more than two.
- Tiny numbers. "Three out of four dentists" when they asked four dentists.
- Knocking down a scarecrow. Arguing against a silly version of what the other person
said instead of what they actually said.
A worked example we do in class: the Face on Mars. In 1976 one of the Viking orbiters took
a picture of a hill in a region called Cydonia, and with the light coming in low, it looked like
a giant face. For twenty years people wrote books about who built it. Run it through the kit.
More than one explanation? A face carved by someone, or an eroded hill plus a low sun plus our
brains, which are built to see faces in everything (the man in the moon, the outlet on the wall).
Can it be tested? Yes: take a better picture. In April 1998 the Mars Global Surveyor did, with a
much sharper camera, and it's a hill. A nice hill. Nobody's face.
The part I want the kids to get is that the test was fair. If the new picture had shown a face, I'd
have had to change my mind, and I would have, and it would have been the most exciting day of my
life. That's what makes it science.
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