Cosmos  (English, Paperback, Sagan)

This book can considered a textual version of the highly popular late 1970s television series, Cosmos, by Carl Sagan.

Summary Of The Book

This book is based on the thirteen part television series by Carl Sagan, exploring the origin of the Universe, the evolution of humans, and the development of intelligence, and Earth’s and humanity’s place in the vast context of the cosmos.

The beautifully illustrated book has thirteen chapters corresponding to the thirteen episodes of the series. Over those thirteen chapters, Sagan explores the 15 billion year history of the Cosmos. The range of subjects covered includes evolution of the cosmos itself, the development of science and civilizations, and also includes anecdotes from the lives of famous scientists through the ages.

The chapters in the book correspond to the episodes - The Shores Of The Cosmic Ocean, One Voice in The Cosmic Fugue, The Harmony of The Worlds, Heaven and Hell, Blues For a Red Planet, Travellers Tales, The Backbone of Night, Journeys In Space and Time, The Lives Of The Stars, The Edge Of Forever, The Persistence of Memory and Who Speaks For The Earth.

The book finishes with two appendices - Reductio ad Absurdum, that is, proof by contradiction, using the classic example of the square root of two The second appendix discusses the five Pythagorean solids. The final section contains references for further reading.

The book explores the timeline of the cosmos, the evolution of life and the evolution of intelligence. It explores the eternal human quest to uncover the deepest and most hidden mysteries of the Universe, from ancient times, including creationist theories, to current scientific discoveries and theories.

Presented in an engaging, conversational style, this book explains, even to the layman, the complex concepts that are involved in the exploration of the Universe and its origins. It has remained as one of the bestsellers in popular science books, surpassed only by Stephen Hawking’s Brief History Of Time.

About Carl Sagan

Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, and writer .

Some other books authored, co-authored by Carl Sagan - Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Other Worlds, Intelligent Life in the Universe, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, and Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium.

All his books were about the cosmos, space science, exploration of other worlds and the possibility of life in other planets.

Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1934. His parents were Jewish and during the Second World War, his family was terribly worried about their relatives in Europe. But he says that he himself was blissfully unconcerned, as his parents did their best to prevent him from realizing the horrors of the Holocaust. He attended the University of Chicago, and earned a bachelor and a masters degree in physics and later a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics. He worked at the University of California, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and at Harvard University before he moved to Cornell University. He was also associated with the American space program. Carl Sagan died in 1996. He had been suffering from myelodysplasia, and had received three bone marrow transplants. Among the many awards and honours he received during and after his lifetime is the Pulitzer Prize which he received for his book, The Dragons Of Eden. Another book, Contact, was made into a film in 1997.