Carl Sagan Quotes
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Random House, 1994, p. 50.
Al-Maarri’s quotations are not only meaningful in their own right, but they illustrate the openness and free thinking that was allowed in the early days of Islam before about 1100. If anyone wrote such things today in most Islamic countries he would at least be jailed if not executed for blasphemy. And if any Christian in Europe made the same statement, he would have been excommunicated at least if not tortured and murdered.
The Higgs Boson was a fundamental particle of physics which controls much of what gives everything mass. At the time he coined the term, no one had ever seen or proved that a Higgs Boson even existed and he was trying to explain why searching for it was so important. The particle was proved to exist with the Super Hadron Collider in 2012. However scientists had some mathematical calculations that show that there should be 5 different Higgs Bosons. The search continued.
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages intended to be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them.
