Like what you said?
Lol.
Before every chapter, he decorate the beginnings with words from ancient legends and books which surely have no acceptance by orthodox science, but Sagan wants to sell books like Velikovsky. Carls Sagan used the same source used by Velikovsky to "attract readers" right at the beginning of his first chapter.
The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter,
the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer . . . They were endowed
with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When
they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in
turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth . . . [Then the Creator said]:
‘They know all . . . what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to
that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth! . . . Are they not
by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods?’
- The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya
Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Where is the way to the dwelling
of light, And where is the place of darkness . . . ?
- The Book of Job
Funny thing is finding his craziness in his writings, just from one chapter to another. In one chapter he says Newton was influenced by mysticism which was common in his days
Like Kepler, he was not immune to the superstitions of his day and had many encounters with mysticism. Indeed, much of Newton’s intellectual development can be attributed to this tension between rationalism and mysticism. At the Stourbridge Fair in 1663, at age twenty, he purchased a book on astrology, ‘out of a curiosity to see what there was in it.’ He read it until he came to an illustration which he could not understand, because he was ignorant of trigonometry. So he purchased a book on trigonometry but soon found himself unable to follow the geometrical arguments. So he found a copy of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, and began to read. Two years later he invented the differential calculus.... ....Newton discovered the law of inertia, the tendency of a moving object to continue moving in a straight line unless something influences it and moves it out of its path. The Moon, it seemed to Newton, would fly off in a straight line, tangential to its orbit, unless there were some other force constantly diverting the path into a near circle, pulling it in the direction of the Earth. This force Newton called gravity, and believed that it acted at a distance. There is nothing physically connecting the Earth and the Moon. And yet the Earth is constantly pulling the Moon toward us. Using Kepler’s third law, Newton mathematically deduced the nature of the gravitational force.* He showed that the same force that pulls an apple down to Earth keeps the Moon in its orbit and accounts for the revolutions of the then recently discovered moons of Jupiter in their orbits about that distant planet....
So, "ignorant Newton" invented differential calculus.
I still wonder, what the hell Sagan discovered?
Lets see now how Sagan is slave of modern mysticism in the chapter following his criticism against Newton. The famous case of the Siberia explosion.
In the early morning hours of June 30, 1908, in Central Siberia, a giant fireball was seen moving rapidly across the sky. Where it touched the horizon, an enormous explosion took place. It leveled some 2,000 square kilometers of forest and burned thousands of trees in a flash fire near the impact site. It produced an atmospheric shock wave that twice circled the Earth. For two days afterwards, there was so much fine dust in the atmosphere that one could read a newspaper at night by scattered light in the streets of London, 10,000 kilometers away. The government of Russia under the Czars could not be bothered to investigate so trivial an event, which, after all, had occurred far away, among the backward Tungus people of Siberia. It was ten years after the Revolution before an expedition arrived to examine the ground and interview the witnesses. These are some of the accounts they brought back:
Early in the morning when everyone was asleep in the tent, it was blown up into the
air, together with the occupants. When they fell back to Earth, the whole family
suffered slight bruises, but Akulina and Ivan actually lost consciousness. When they
regained consciousness they heard a great deal of noise and saw the forest blazing
round them and much of it devastated.
I was sitting in the porch of the house at the trading station of Vanovara at breakfast
time and looking towards the north. I had just raised my axe to hoop a cask, when
suddenly . . . the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern
part of the sky appeared to be covered with fire. At that moment I felt a great heat as
if my shirt had caught fire . . . I wanted to pull off my shirt and throw it away, but at
that moment there was a bang in the sky, and a mighty crash was heard. I was
thrown on the ground about three sajenes away from the porch and for a moment I
lost consciousness. My wife ran out and carried me into the hut. The crash was
followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or guns firing. The Earth
trembled, and when I lay on the ground I covered my head because I was afraid that
stones might hit it. At that moment when the sky opened, a hot wind, as from a
cannon, blew past the huts from the north. It left its mark on the ground . . .
When I sat down to have my breakfast beside my plough, I heard sudden bangs, as
if from gun-fire. My horse fell to its knees. From the north side above the forest a
flame shot up . . . Then I saw that the fir forest had been bent over by the wind and I
thought of a hurricane. I seized hold of my plough with both hands, so that it would
not be carried away. The wind was so strong that it carried off some of the soil from
the surface of the ground, and then the hurricane drove a wall of water up the
Angara. I saw it all quite clearly, because my land was on a hillside.
The roar frightened the horses to such an extent that some galloped off in panic,
dragging the ploughs in different directions, and others collapsed.....
I was in the fields . . . and had only just got one horse harnessed to the harrow and
begun to attach another when suddenly I heard what sounded like a single loud shot
to the right. I immediately turned round and saw an elongated flaming object flying
through the sky. The front part was much broader than the tail end and its color was
like fire in the day-time. It was many times bigger than the sun but much dimmer,
so that it was possible to look at it with the naked eye. Behind the flames trailed
what looked like dust. It was wreathed in little puffs, and blue streamers were left
behind from the flames . . . As soon as the flame had disappeared, bangs louder than
shots from a gun were heard, the ground could be felt to tremble, and the window
panes in the cabin were shattered.
I was washing wool on the bank of the River Kan. Suddenly a noise like the
fluttering of the wings of a frightened bird was heard . . . and a kind of swell came
up the river. After this came a single sharp bang so loud that one of the workmen
fell into the water.
Look at the most stupid conclusions made by scientists, including, of course, the modern mysticism over Sagan's mind.
This remarkable occurrence is called the Tunguska Event. Some scientists have suggested that it was caused by a piece of hurtling antimatter, annihilated on contact with the ordinary matter of the Earth, disappearing in a flash of gamma rays.
"antimatter" Ha ha ha ha
But the absence of radioactivity at the impact site gives no support to this explanation. Others postulate that a mini black hole passed through the Earth in Siberia and out the other side.
"Mini black holes"... ha ha ha ha...
But the records of atmospheric shock waves show no hint of an object booming out of the North Atlantic later that day. Perhaps it was a spaceship of some unimaginably advanced extraterrestrial civilization in desperate mechanical trouble, crashing in a remote region of an obscure planet.
"a spaceship of some unimaginably advanced extraterrestrial civilization "... ha ha ha ha....
This guy is showing that the scientific community was a circus with a bunch of clowns.
He concluded
There seems to be only one explanation consistent with all the facts: In 1908 a piece of comet hit the Earth.
Here, with Carl Sagan, you have another supporter of Velikovsky.
And what about Kepler, from whom you base your version of plates orbiting the same or millions and millions of years?
You are going to be disappointed. Pythagoras was the first claiming that planets orbiting around the Sun make melodies. He argued that because we are born with that "sound since conception" we don't hear those melodies. (We don't have a single word written by Pythagoras, but his teachings were given by his followers, who were attacked by Plato and others.
Well, Kepler was a follower of astrology. He believed as well in the influence of other planets and stars on earth.
Within the ‘symphony of voices,’ Kepler believed that the speed of each planet corresponds to certain notes in the Latinate musical scale popular in his day - do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. He claimed that in the harmony of the spheres, the tones of Earth are fa and mi, that the Earth is forever humming fa and mi, and that they stand in a straightforward way for the Latin word for famine. He argued, not unsuccessfully, that the Earth was best described by that single doleful word....
Sagan attempts to comment about ancient chronology.
The major intellectual pursuit of his last years was a concordance and calibration of the chronologies of ancient civilizations, very much in the tradition of the ancient historians Manetho, Strabo and Eratosthenes. In his last, posthumous work, ‘The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended,’ we find repeated astronomical calibrations of historical events; an architectural reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon; a provocative claim that all the Northern Hemisphere constellations are named after the personages, artifacts and events in the Greek story of Jason and the Argonauts, and the consistent assumption that the gods of all civilizations, with the single exception of Newton’s own, were merely ancient kings and heroes deified by later generations.
Of course, orthodox historians refused to accept they are wrong. Slowly but surely, without you noticing, the chronologies will change. This is like the stupid idea that a shrinking collapsed star will become black and will attract with its strong density everything around including space. Today, no more black but shinning bodies called "black holes", imaginary bodies which in the 60s were called "white holes".
The whole world has been invaded by a bunch of lunatics who manipulate information to keep their pride alive, because losers is what they are.
The book Cosmos is full of pictures, the greater percent of mystic origin, a few with scientific background.
Sagan just collected information from other existing sources and resume them in a book. He didn't discover anything, he was just a showman.
