Wonder and Skepticism
by Carl Sagan
_____________________

from Skeptical Enquirer
Volume 19, Issue 1, January-February 1995
1994 Carl Sagan

I was a child in a time of hope. I grew up when the expectations for science wer
e very high:
in the thirties and forties. I went to college in the early fifties, got my Ph.D
in 1960.
There was a sense of optimism about science and the future. I dreamt of being ab
le to do
science. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and I was a street kid. I came from a
nice nuclear
family, but I spent a lot of time in the streets, as kids did then. I knew every
bush and
hedge, streetlight and stoop and theater wall for playing Chinese handball. But
there was
one aspect of that environment that, for some reason, struck me as different, an
d that was
the stars.
Even with an early bedtime in winter you could see the stars. What were they? Th
ey weren't
like hedges or even streetlights; they were different. So I asked my friends wha
t they were.
They said, "They're lights in the sky, kid." I could tell they were lights in th
e sky, but
that wasn't an explanation. I mean, what were they? Little electric bulbs on lon
g black
wires, so you couldn't see what they were held up by? What were they?
Not only could nobody tell me, but nobody even had the sense that it was an inte
resting
question. They looked at me funny. I asked my parents; I asked my parents' frien
ds; I asked
other adults. None of them knew.
My mother said to me, "Look, we've just got you a library card. Take it, get on
the
streetcar, go to the New Utrecht branch of the New York Public Library, get out
a book and
find the answer."
That seemed to me a fantastically clever idea. I made the journey. I asked the l
ibrarian for
a book on stars. (I was very small; I can still remember looking up at her, and
she was
sitting down.) She was gone a few minutes, brought one back, and gave it to me.
Eagerly I
sat down and opened the pages. But it was about Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, I t
hink, a
terrible disappointment. And so I went back to her, explained (it wasn't easy fo
r me to do)
that that wasn't what I had in mind at all, that what I wanted was a book about
real stars.
She thought this was funny, which embarrassed me further. But anyway, she went a
nd got
another book, the right kind of book. I took it and opened it and slowly turned
the pages,
until I came to the answer.
It was in there. It was stunning. The answer was that the Sun was a star, except
very far
away. The stars were suns; if you were close to them, they would look just like
our sun. I
tried to imagine how far away from the Sun you'd have to be for it to be as dim
as a star.
Of course I didn't know the inverse square law of light propagation; I hadn't a
ghost of a
chance of figuring it out. But it was clear to me that you'd have to be very far
away.
Farther away, probably, than New Jersey. The dazzling idea of a universe vast be
yond
imagining swept over me. It has stayed with me ever since.
I sensed awe. And later on (it took me several years to find this), I realized t
hat we were
on a planet -- a little, non-self-luminous world going around our star. And so a
ll those
other stars might have planets going around them. If planets, then life, intelli
gence, other
Brooklyns -- who knew? The diversity of those possible worlds struck me. They di
dn't have to
be exactly like ours, I was sure of it.
It seemed the most exciting thing to study. I didn't realize that you could be a

professional scientist; I had the idea that I'd have to be, I don't know, a sale
sman (my
father said that was better than the manufacturing end of things), and do scienc
e on
weekends and evenings. It wasn't until my sophomore year in high school that my
biology
teacher revealed to me that there was such a thing as a professional scientist,
who got paid
to do it; so you could spend all your time learning about the universe. It was a
glorious
day.
It's been my enormous good luck -- I was born at just the right time -- to have
had, to some
extent, those childhood ambitions satisfied. I've been involved in the explorati
on of the
solar system, in the most amazing parallel to the science fiction of my childhoo
d. We
actually send spacecraft to other worlds. We fly by them; we orbit them; we land
on them. We
design and control the robots: Tell it to dig, and it digs. Tell it to determine
the
chemistry of a soil sample, and it determines the chemistry. For me the continuu
m from
childhood wonder and early science fiction to professional reality has been almo
st seamless.
It's never been, "Oh, gee, this is nothing like what I had imagined." just the o
pposite:
It's exactly like what I imagined. And so I feel enormously fortunate.
Science is still one of my chief joys. The popularization of science that Isaac
Asimov did
so well -- the communication not just of the findings but of the methods of scie
nce -- seems
to me as natural as breathing. After all, when you're in love, you want to tell
the world.
The idea that scientists shouldn't talk about their science to the public seems
to me
bizarre.
There's another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to d
o it. It's a
foreboding I have -- maybe ill-placed -- of an America in my children's generati
on, or my
grandchildren's generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped a
way to other
countries; when we're a service and information-processing economy; when awesome

technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the
public
interest even grasps the issues; when the people (by "the people" I mean the bro
ad
population in a democracy) have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or ev
en to
knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice i
n
questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously con
sulting our
horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish betwe
en what's
true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition a
nd darkness.
CSICOP plays a sometimes lonely but still -- and in this case the word may be ri
ght --
heroic role in trying to counter some of those trends.
We have a civilization based on science and technology, and we've cleverly arran
ged things
so that almost nobody understands science and technology. That is as clear a pre
scription
for disaster as you can imagine. While we might get away with this combustible m
ixture of
ignorance and power for a while, sooner or later it's going to blow up in our fa
ces, The
powers of modern technology are so formidable that it's insufficient just to say
, "Well,
those in charge, I'm sure, are doing a good job." This is a democracy, and for u
s to make
sure that the powers of science and technology are used properly and prudently,
we ourselves
must understand science and technology. We must be involved in the decision-maki
ng process.
The predictive powers of some areas, at least, of science are phenomenal. They a
re the
clearest counterargument I can imagine to those who say, "Oh, science is situati
onal;
science is just the current fashion; science is the promotion of the self-intere
sts of those
in power." Surely there is some of that. Surely if there's any powerful tool, th
ose in power
will try to use it, or even monopolize it. Surely scientists, being people, grow
up in a
society and reflect the prejudices of that society. How could it be otherwise? S
ome
scientists have been nationalists; some have been racists; some have been sexist
s. But that
doesn't undermine the validity of science. It's just a consequence of being huma
n.
So, imagine -- there are so many areas we could think of -- imagine you want to
know the sex
of your unborn child. There are several approaches. You could, for example, do w
hat the late
film star who Annie and I admire greatly -- Cary Grant -- did before he was an a
ctor: In a
carnival or fair or consulting room, you suspend a watch or a plumb bob above th
e abdomen of
the expectant mother; if it swings left-right it's a boy, and if it swings forwa
rd-back it's
a girl. The method works one time in two. Of course he was out of there before t
he baby was
born, so he never heard from customers who complained he got it wrong. Being rig
ht one
chance in two -- that's not so bad. It's better than, say, Kremlinologists used
to do. But
if you really want to know, then you go to amniocentesis, or to sonograms; and t
here your
chance of being right is 99 out of 100. It's not perfect, but it's a whole lot b
etter than
one out of two. If you really want to know, you go to science.
Or suppose you wanted to know when the next eclipse of the sun is. Science does
something
really astonishing: It can tell you a century in advance where the eclipse is go
ing to be on
Earth and when, say, totality will be, to the second. Think of the predictive po
wer this
implies. Think of how much you must understand to be able to say when and where
there's
going to be an eclipse so far in the future.
Or (the same physics exactly) imagine launching a spacecraft from Earth, like th
e Voyager
spacecraft in 1977; 12 years later Voyager I arrives at Neptune within 100 kilom
eters or
something of where it was supposed to be not having to use some of the mid-cours
e
corrections that were available; 12 years, 5 billion kilometers, on target!
So if you want to really be able to predict the future -- not in everything, but
in some
areas -- there's only one regime of human scholarship, of human claims to knowle
dge, that
really delivers the goods, and that's science. Religions would give their eyetee
th to be
able to predict anything like that well. Think of how much mileage they would ma
ke if they
ever could do predictions comparably unambiguous and precise.
Now how does it work? Why is it so successful?
Science has built-in error-correcting mechanisms -- because science recognizes t
hat
scientists, like everybody else, are fallible, that we make mistakes, that we're
driven by
the same prejudices as everybody else. There are no forbidden questions. Argumen
ts from
authority are worthless. Claims must be demonstrated. Ad hommem arguments -- arg
uments about
the personality of somebody who disagrees with you -- are irrelevant; they can b
e
sleazeballs and be right, and you can be a pillar of the community and be wrong.

If you take a look at science in its everyday function, of course you find that
scientists
run the gamut of human emotions and personalities and character and so on. But t
here's one
thing that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criti
cism that is
considered acceptable or even desirable. The poor graduate student at his or her
Ph.D. oral
exam is subjected to a withering crossfire of questions that sometimes seem host
ile or
contemptuous; this from the professors who have the candidate's future in their
grasp. The
students naturally are nervous; who wouldn't be? True, they've prepared for it f
or years.
But they understand that at that critical moment they really have to be able to
answer
questions. So in preparing to defend their theses, they must anticipate question
s; they have
to think, "Where in my thesis is there a weakness that someone else might find -
- because I
sure better find it before they do, because if they find it and I'm not prepared
, I'm in
deep trouble."
You take a look at contentious scientific meetings. You find university colloqui
a in which
the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into presenting what she or he is sayin
g, and
suddenly there are interruptions, maybe withering questions, from the audience.
You take a
look at the publication conventions in which you submit a scientific paper to a
journal, and
it goes out to anonymous referees whose job it is to think, Did you do anything
stupid? If
you didn't do anything stupid, is there anything in here that is sufficiently in
teresting to
be published? What are the deficiencies of this paper? Has it been done by anybo
dy else? Is
the argument adequate, or should you resubmit the paper after you've actually de
monstrated
what you're speculating on? And so on. And it's anonymous: You don't know who yo
ur critics
are. You have to rely on the editor to send it out to real experts who are not o
vertly
malicious. This is the everyday expectation in the scientific community. And tho
se who don't
expect it -- even good scientists who just can't hold up under criticism -- have
difficult
careers.
Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist likes to
be
criticized. Every scientist feels an affection for his or her ideas and scientif
ic results.
You feel protective of them. But you don't reply to critics: "Wait a minute, wai
t a minute;
this is a really good idea. I'm very fond of it. It's done you no harm. Please d
on't attack
it." That's not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don
't work, you
must throw them away. Don't waste any neurons on what doesn't work. Devote those
neurons to
new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.
There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest hon
ors go to
those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is rev
ered not
just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because h
e found an
imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton. (Isaac Newton was
surely the
greatest physicist before Albert Einstein.)
Now think of what other areas of human society have such a reward structure, in
which we
revere those who prove that the fundamental doctrines that we have adopted are w
rong. Think
of it in politics, or in economics, or in religion; think of it in how we organi
ze our
society. Often, it's exactly the opposite: There we reward those who reassure us
that what
we've been told is right, that we need not concern ourselves about it. This diff
erence, I
believe, is at least a basic reason why we've made so much progress in science,
and so
little in some other areas.
We are fallible. We cannot expect to foist our wishes on the universe. So anothe
r key aspect
of science is experiment. Scientists do not trust what is intuitively obvious, b
ecause
intuitively obvious gets you nowhere. That the Earth is flat was once obvious. I
mean,
really obvious; obvious! Go out in a flat field and take a look: Is it round or
flat? Don't
listen to me; go prove it to yourself That heavier bodies fall faster than light
ones was
once obvious. That blood-sucking leeches cure disease was once obvious. That som
e people are
naturally and by divine right slaves was once obvious. That the Earth is at the
center of
the universe was once obvious. You're skeptical? Go out, take a look: Stars rise
in the
east, set in the west; here we are, stationary (do you feel the Earth whirling?)
; we see
them going around us. We are at the center; they go around us.
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be
counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be conson
ant with
what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's
true. We
have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asympt
otic
approaches to the truth -- never there, just closer and closer, always finding v
ast new
oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key
In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked
to respond
to a toast. This was a time when people stood up, made a toast, and then selecte
d someone to
respond. Nobody knew what toast they'd be asked to reply to, so it was a challen
ge for the
quick-witted. In this case the toast was: "To physics and metaphysics." Now by m
etaphysics
was meant something like philosophy -- truths that you could get to just by thin
king about
them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The
physicist
has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to
him. He goes
to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea
seems. Thus
prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaki
ng. Many
possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurem
ent is
refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the id
ea is shown
to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was
saying a
moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.
The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the meta
physicist
has no laboratory.

Why is it so important to have widely distributed understanding of science and t
echnology?
For one thing, it's the golden road out of poverty for developing nations. And d
eveloping
nations understand that, because you have only to look at modern American gradua
te schools
-- in mathematics, in engineering, in physics -- to find, in case after case, th
at more than
half the students are from other countries. This is something America is doing f
or the
world. But it conveys a clear sense that the developing nations understand what
is essential
for their future. What worries me is that Americans may not be equally clear on
the subject.
Let me touch on the dangers of technology. Almost every astronaut who has visite
d Earth
orbit has made this point: I was up there, they say, and I looked toward the hor
izon, and
there was this thin, blue band that's the Earth's atmosphere. I had been told we
live in an
ocean of air. But there it was, so fragile, such a delicate blue: I was worried
for it.
In fact, the thickness of the Earth's atmosphere, compared with the size of the
Earth, is in
about the same ratio as the thickness of a coat of shellac on a schoolroom globe
is to the
diameter of the globe. That's the air that nurtures us and almost all other life
on Earth,
that protects us from deadly ultraviolet light from the sun, that through the gr
eenhouse
effect brings the surface temperature above the freezing point. (Without the gre
enhouse
effect, the entire Earth would plunge below the freezing point of water and we'd
all be
dead.) Now that atmosphere, so thin and fragile, is under assault by our technol
ogy. We are
pumping all kinds of stuff into it. You know about the concern that chlorofluoro
carbons are
depleting the ozone layer; and that carbon dioxide and methane and other greenho
use gases
are producing global warming, a steady trend amidst fluctuations produced by vol
canic
eruptions and other sources. Who knows what other challenges we are posing to th
is
vulnerable layer of air that we haven't been wise enough to foresee?
The inadvertent side effects of technology can challenge the environment on whic
h our very
lives depend. That means that we must understand science and technology; we must
anticipate
long-term consequences in a very clever way -- not just the bottom line on the
profit-and-loss column for the corporation for this year, but the consequences f
or the
nation and the species 10, 20, 50, 100 years in the future. If we absolutely sto
p all
chlorofluorocarbon and allied chemical production right now (as we're in fact do
ing), the
ozonosphere will heal itself in about a hundred years. Therefore our children, o
ur
grandchildren, our great-grandchildren must suffer through the mistakes that we'
ve made.
That's a second reason for science education: the dangers of technology. We must
understand
them better.
A third reason: origins. Every human culture has devoted some of its intellectua
l, moral,
and material resources to trying to understand where everything comes from -- ou
r nation,
our species, our planet, our star, our galaxy, our universe. Stop someone on the
street and
ask about it. You will not find many people who never thought about it, who are
incurious
about their ultimate origins.
I hold there's a kind of Gresham's Law that applies in the confrontation of scie
nce and
pseudoscience: In the popular imagination, at least, the bad science drives out
the good.
What I mean is this: If you are awash in lost continents and channeling and UFOs
and all the
long litany of claims so well exposed in the Skeptical Inquirer, you may not hav
e
intellectual room for the findings of science. You're sated with wonder. Our cul
ture in one
way produces the fantastic findings of science, and then in another way cuts the
m off before
they reach the average person. So people who are curious, intelligent, dedicated
to
understanding the world, may nevertheless be (in our view) enmired in superstiti
on and
pseudoscience. You could say, Well, they ought to know better, they ought to be
more
critical, and so on; but that's too harsh. It's not very much their fault, I say
It's the
fault of a society that preferentially propagates the baloney and holds back the
ambrosia.
The least effective way for skeptics to get the attention of these bright, curio
us,
interested people is to belittle, or condescend, or show arrogance toward their
beliefs.
They may be credulous, but they're not stupid. If we bear in mind human frailty
and
fallibility, we will understand their plight.
For example: I've lately been thinking about alien abductions, and false claims
of childhood
sexual abuse, and stories of satanic ritual abuse in the context of recovered me
mories.
There are interesting similarities among those classes of cases. I think if we a
re to
understand any of them, we must understand all of them. But there's a maddening
tendency of
the skeptics, when addressing invented stories of childhood sexual abuse, to for
get that
real and appalling abuse happens. It is not true that all these claims of childh
ood sexual
abuse are silly and pumped up by unethical therapists. Yesterday's paper reporte
d that a
survey of 13 states found that one-sixth of all the rape victims reported to pol
ice are
under the age of 12. And this is a category of rape that is preferentially under
-reported to
police, for obvious reasons. Of these girls, one-fifth were raped by their fathe
rs. That's a
lot of people, and a lot of betrayal. We must bear that in mind when we consider
patients
who, say, because they have an eating disorder, have suppressed childhood sexual
abuse
diagnosed by their psychiatrists.
People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. Let us not dismiss pseud
oscience or
even superstition with contempt.
In the nineteenth century it was mediums: You'd go to the seance, and you'd be p
ut in touch
with dead relatives. These days it's a little different; it's called channeling.
What both
are basically about is the human fear of dying. I don't know about you; I find t
he idea of
dying unpleasant. If I had a choice, at least for a while, I would just as soon
not die.
Twice in my life I came very close to doing so. (I did not have a near-death exp
erience, I'm
sorry to say.) I can understand anxiety about dying.
About 14 years ago both my parents died. We had a very good relationship. I was
very close
to them. I still miss them terribly. I wouldn't ask much: I would like five minu
tes a year
with them; to tell them how their kids and their grandchildren are doing, and ho
w Annie and
I are doing. I know it sounds stupid, but I'd like to ask them, "Is everything a
ll right
with you?" Just a little contact. So I don't guffaw at women who go to their hus
bands'
tombstones and chat them up every now and then. That's not hard to understand. A
nd if we
have difficulties on the ontological status of who it is they're talking to, tha
t's all
right. That's not what this is about. This is humans being human.
In the alien-abduction context, I've been trying to understand the fact that hum
ans
hallucinate that it's a human commonplace yes, under conditions of sensory depri
vation or
drugs or deprival of REM sleep, but also just in the ordinary course of existenc
e. I have,
maybe a dozen times since my parents died, heard one of them say my name: just t
he single
word, "Carl." I miss them, they called me by my first name so much during the ti
me they were
alive; I was in the practice of responding instantly when I was called; it has d
eep psychic
roots. So my brain plays it back every now and then. This doesn't surprise me at
all; I sort
of like it. But it's a hallucination. If I were a little less skeptical, though,
I could see
how easy it would be to say, "They're around somewhere. I can hear them."
Raymond Moody, who is an M.D., I think, an author who writes innumerable books o
n life after
death, actually quoted me in the first chapter of his latest book, saying that I
heard my
parents calling me Carl, and so, look, even he believes in life after death. Thi
s badly
misses my point. If this is one of the arguments from chapter I of the latest bo
ok of a
principal exponent of life after death, I suspect that despite our most fervent
wishes, the
case is weak.
But still, suppose I wasn't steeped in the virtues of scientific skepticism and
felt as I do
about my parents, and along comes someone who says, "I can put you in touch with
them."
Suppose he's clever, and found out something about my parents in the past, and i
s good at
faking voices, and so on -- a darkened room and incense and all of that. I could
see being
swept away emotionally.
Would you think less of me if I fell for it? Imagine I was never educated about
skepticism,
had no idea that it's a virtue, but instead believed that it was grumpy and nega
tive and
rejecting of everything that's humane. Couldn't you understand my openness to be
ing conned
by a medium or a channeler?
The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs.
Them -- the
sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe
in all these
stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and i
f not, to
hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It c
ondemns us
to permanent minority status. Whereas, an approach that from the beginning ackno
wledges the
human roots of pseudoscience and superstition, that recognizes that the society
has arranged
things so that skepticism is not well taught, might be much more widely accepted
*

* If skeptical habits of thought are widely distributed and prized, then who is
the
skepticism going to be mainly applied to? To those in power. Those in power, the
refore, do
not have a vested interest in everybody being able to ask searching questions.

If we understand this, then of course we have compassion for the abductees and t
hose who
come upon crop circles and believe they're supernatural, or at least of extrater
restrial
manufacture. This is key to making science and the scientific method more attrac
tive,
especially to the young, because it's a battle for the future.
Science involves a seemingly self-contradictory mix of attitudes: On the one han
d it
requires an almost complete openness to all ideas, no matter how bizarre and wei
rd they
sound, a propensity to wonder. As I walk along, my time slows down; I shrink in
the
direction of motion, and I get more massive. That's crazy! On the scale of the v
ery small,
the molecule can be in this position, in that position, but it is prohibited fro
m being in
any intermediate position. That's wild! But the first is a statement of special
relativity,
and the second is a consequence of quantum mechanics. Like it or not, that's the
way the
world is. If you insist that it's ridiculous, you will be forever closed to the
major
findings of science. But at the same time, science requires the most vigorous an
d
uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong,
and the only
way you can distinguish the right from the wrong, the wheat from the chaff, is b
y critical
experiment and analysis.
Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea, and hypothesis -- which is
tantamount
to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism -- especially_ ally rejection of new ide
as before
they are adequately tested -- and you're not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also
closed to
the advance of science. A judicious mix is what we need.
It's no fun, as I said at the beginning, to be on the receiving end of skeptical

questioning. But it's the affordable price we pay for having the benefits of so
powerful a
tool as science.

-

You are viewing proxied material from sdf.org. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.