Carl Sagan on the Virtues of Marijuana (1969)

in Astronomy | May 23rd, 2013

Carl Sagan — he was an astronomer, astro­physi­cist, cos­mol­o­gist and great pop­u­lar­iz­er of sci­ence. He was also, it turns out, a life­long smok­er of cannabis. In 1999, and just three years after Sagan’s death, Keay David­son pub­lished Carl Sagan: A Life, a biog­ra­phy that made head­lines for reveal­ing how Sagan wrote an essay in 1969, using the pseu­do­nym “Mr.  X,” where he out­lined the per­son­al ben­e­fits of smok­ing mar­i­jua­na. The essay even­tu­al­ly appeared in the 1971 book Recon­sid­er­ing Mar­i­jua­na. 35 years old at the time, Sagan explained how the drug height­ened his sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence, gave him an appre­ci­a­tion for the spir­i­tu­al realm (“a feel­ing of com­mu­nion with my sur­round­ings, both ani­mate and inan­i­mate”), enhanced his enjoy­ment of sex, and allowed him to achieve some “dev­as­tat­ing” insights into sci­en­tif­ic, cre­ative and par­tic­u­lar­ly social ques­tions. The drug also gave him a new­found respect for art and music. He wrote:

The cannabis expe­ri­ence has great­ly improved my appre­ci­a­tion for art, a sub­ject which I had nev­er much appre­ci­at­ed before. The under­stand­ing of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high some­times car­ries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human fron­tiers which cannabis has helped me tra­verse.…  A very sim­i­lar improve­ment in my appre­ci­a­tion of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the sep­a­rate parts of a three-part har­mo­ny and the rich­ness of the coun­ter­point. I have since dis­cov­ered that pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians can quite eas­i­ly keep many sep­a­rate parts going simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in their heads, but this was the first time for me.

You can read the com­plete essay here.

A quick foot­note: lat­er in life, Sagan advo­cat­ed legal­iz­ing med­ical mar­i­jua­na, as you can hear below. And his wife, Ann Druyan, who made sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions to the PBS doc­u­men­tary series Cos­mos, has since pushed for the out­right legal­iza­tion of cannabis. She served on the Board of Direc­tors of the Nation­al Orga­ni­za­tion for the Reform of Mar­i­jua­na Laws for a decade.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan’s Under­grad Read­ing List: 40 Essen­tial Texts for a Well-Round­ed Thinker

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

Hunter S. Thomp­son Runs for Aspen, Col­orado Sher­iff on the “Freak Pow­er” Plat­form (1970)

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Astronaut Chris Hadfield Sings David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” On Board the International Space Station

in Astronomy, Music | May 12th, 2013

Chris Had­field has spent the past five months on the ISS. And, if you reg­u­lar­ly fol­low our site, you’ll know that the media-savvy astro­naut has engaged earth­lings with a steady stream of tweets, a series of edu­ca­tion­al videos (see below), and the occa­sion­al enter­tain­ing rou­tine. In recent months, he has kib­itzed with William Shat­ner and even strummed a tune for Peter Gabriel. Now, before hand­ing over com­mand of the ISS to a Russ­ian cos­mo­naut, Had­field bade us farewell by singing a zero grav­i­ty ver­sion of “Space Odd­i­ty,” the song that helped launch David Bowie’s music career back in 1969. What could be a more per­fect pick? In case you’re won­der­ing, Had­field is play­ing a Lar­rivée Par­lor gui­tar, which he used to make the first album ever record­ed in orbit. We’ll even­tu­al­ly tell you more about that.…

 Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About Going to the Bath­room in Space But Were Afraid to Ask

If Astro­nauts Cry in Space, Will Their Tears Fall?

William Shat­ner Puts in a Long Dis­tance Call to Astro­naut Aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

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CERN Physicist Explains the Origins of the Universe for Beginners with a Short Animated Video

in Animation, Astronomy, K-12 | April 17th, 2013

If you have kids, you’re going to get the inevitable ques­tion: Where did the uni­verse come from? And you’re like­ly going to take a long pause before try­ing to present the sci­ence of the big bang. Before you head down that path, know this: CERN physi­cist Tom Whyn­tie has cre­at­ed a new TED-ED video that explains, in three ani­mat­ed min­utes, how the uni­verse began, why it’s expand­ing, and oth­er basic phe­nom­e­na that con­cern cos­mol­o­gists and par­ti­cle physi­cists. Phew. By the time you’re done, you might be eager­ly await­ing a where-do-babies-come-from video. That’s hope­ful­ly some­where in TED-ED’s media pipeline too.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200 Free Kids Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Web­sites & More

Grow­ing Up in the Uni­verse: Richard Dawkins Presents Cap­ti­vat­ing Sci­ence Lec­tures for Kids (1991)

The Sto­ry Of Men­stru­a­tion: Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

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If Astronauts Cry in Space, Will Their Tears Fall?

in Astronomy, Physics, Science | April 11th, 2013

The astro­nauts aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion work every day on all kinds of exper­i­ments, from work­ing with robots to prepar­ing for space­walks. But when they get a break, they often field ques­tions from school chil­dren and adults about life in space.

Com­man­der Chris Had­field recent­ly video­taped him­self demon­strat­ing a sim­ple exper­i­ment inspired by a com­mon ques­tion: If an astro­naut cries in space, do their tears fall?

On Earth, of course, it’s grav­i­ty that caus­es tears to roll down the cheek. In a micro­grav­i­ty envi­ron­ment, if an astro­naut is sad or gets some­thing in his/her eye, tears will cer­tain­ly well up, but there will be none of what Smokey Robinson’s tears made on his face.

Had­field, pos­si­bly the most social media-savvy astro­naut ever with more than 500,000 Twit­ter fol­low­ers, game­ly demon­strates that tears do pool under the eye but they make no tracks. Squirt­ing water into his right eye, he rolls his head around, caus­ing the pud­dle of “tears” to shift back and forth and even roll over the bridge of his nose.

Tears don’t fall, he con­cludes, so bring a han­ky.

Had­field is no stranger to demon­strat­ing, or dis­cussing, human bod­i­ly func­tions in space. Speak­ing before the Ontario Space Cen­tre a few years ago, he dis­cussed some­thing that you may have won­dered about: going to the bath­room in space.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site: .

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60 Second Adventures in Astronomy Explains the Big Bang, Relativity & More with Fun Animation

in Animation, Astronomy | April 8th, 2013

Like many pos­i­tive terms, the phrase “big bang” orig­i­nat­ed as a pejo­ra­tive. Fred Hoyle coined the term in 1949 as a way of deflat­ing the con­cept of an expand­ing uni­verse. It stuck, even after Edwin Hub­ble showed that 13.7 bil­lion years ago, all of the mat­ter in our mas­sive uni­verse was indeed com­pact­ed into “one super­dense ball.” Astronomers have also fig­ured out that the vol­ume of the big bang was only 120 deci­bels, about the loud­ness of your aver­age rock show (though how there might have been sound with­out an atmos­phere escapes me). There is some irony in Hoyle’s dig: the “big bang” wasn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly big, and wasn’t much of a bang, but it hap­pened.

We learn all this and more in the video above from The Open Uni­ver­si­ty, and all with­in a minute, as the title of the series, 60 Sec­ond Adven­tures in Astron­o­my, promis­es. These amus­ing ani­ma­tions are very much like oth­er OU series we’ve fea­tured in the past: 60 Sec­ond Adven­tures in Eco­nom­ics; 60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Eco­nom­ics: and 60 Sec­ond Adven­tures in Thought. (Find them all on iTune­sU here.)

The uni­ver­si­ty describes the new astron­o­my series like this:

Ever won­dered where the Uni­verse came from? Or more impor­tant­ly, where it’s head­ed? Voiced by David Mitchell, this series of twelve 60 sec­ond ani­ma­tions exam­ines dif­fer­ent sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts from the big bang to rel­a­tiv­i­ty, from black holes to dark mat­ter. The series also explores the pos­si­bil­i­ty of life beyond Earth and con­sid­ers why David Bowie is still none the wis­er about life on Mars.

Spend a few extra min­utes edu­cat­ing your­self with some more 60 sec­ond astron­o­my adven­tures below, or vis­it the com­plete col­lec­tion here on YouTube or iTune­sU.

Super­novae

Exo­plan­ets

Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty

Event Hori­zons

Life on Mars

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson Answers the Big Enchi­la­da Ques­tion, “Does the Uni­verse Have a Pur­pose?”

Mea­sur­ing the Uni­verse: How Astronomers Learned to Mea­sure Celes­tial Dis­tances Explained with Ani­ma­tion

The Hig­gs Boson, AKA the God Par­ti­cle, Explained with Ani­ma­tion

Demys­ti­fy­ing the Hig­gs Boson with Leonard Susskind, the Father of String The­o­ry

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New Heat Map Reveals the Creation of Our Infant Universe

in Astronomy, Science, Video - Science | March 28th, 2013

Planck Light

This map shows the old­est light in our uni­verse, as detect­ed by the Planck mis­sion. Click on the map for a larg­er image.

By now the Big Bang the­o­ry is wide­ly accept­ed sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly. The idea is that the uni­verse began to expand rapid­ly about 14 bil­lion years ago from a dense, hot state and con­tin­ues to expand to this day.

One of the most telling fin­ger­prints left behind by the Big Bang is cos­mic microwave back­ground radi­a­tion. This ther­mal radi­a­tion was thought to be left over from the Big Bang itself. It fills the uni­verse almost com­plete­ly.

A new map of cos­mic radi­a­tion ques­tions some of the core con­cepts of the Big Bang. What if, this pre­cise heat map sug­gests, the Uni­verse expe­ri­enced a long, pre-Bang phase? What if the Big Bang wasn’t the first burp of cre­ation after all?

The Euro­pean Space Agency’s Planck space­craft mea­sures between infra-red and radio waves, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to see back in time to the first light ever pro­duced.

Cos­mol­o­gists released the new images of the ear­ly uni­verse this week. What sur­pris­es them is that Planck detect­ed stronger light sig­nals on one half of the sky than the oth­er and picked up a series of anom­alies or “cold spots.” While this doesn’t chal­lenge the Big Bang the­o­ry as a whole, it does height­en the mys­tery around the universe’s birth and devel­op­ment.

The data is still com­ing in. Like the Human Genome Project, Planck stands to gen­er­ate dou­ble the amount of data it has pro­duced so far.

Planck two

This full-sky map from the Planck mis­sion shows mat­ter between Earth and the edge of the observ­able uni­verse. Regions with more mass show up as lighter areas while regions with less mass are dark­er. The grayed-out areas are where light from our own galaxy was too bright, block­ing Planck­’s abil­i­ty to map the more dis­tant mat­ter. Click the map for a larg­er image.

Some oth­er sur­pris­es from the Planck space­craft data:

• The uni­verse is about 100 mil­lion years old­er and appears to be expand­ing much slow­er than pre­vi­ous­ly thought

•  There is less dark ener­gy and more mat­ter in the uni­verse than pre­vi­ous research showed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Nimoy Nar­rates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voy­age to the Ori­gins of the Solar Sys­tem

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

Google Presents an Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion of 100,000 Stars

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Con­tact her and learn more about her work at .

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Big History: David Christian Covers 13.7 Billion Years of History in 18 Minutes

in Astronomy, History, TED Talks | March 19th, 2013

Per­haps you noticed? Dur­ing the past two years, the TED brand has mor­phed into some­thing new. Once known for stag­ing a cou­ple of high-priced annu­al con­fer­ences, TED has recent­ly launched a series of new prod­ucts: TEDx con­fer­ences for the mass­es, TED Books, TED Radio, TED ED and Ads Worth Spread­ing. In the wake of all of this, some have ques­tioned whether TED has grown too quick­ly, or to put it more col­lo­qui­al­ly, “jumped the shark.” There are days when TED feels like a vic­tim of its own suc­cess. But there are oth­er days — espe­cial­ly when it returns to its roots — where the orga­ni­za­tion can still be a vital force. That hap­pens when­ev­er TED wraps up its big annu­al con­fer­ence, as it did two weeks ago, and puts some note­wor­thy talks online. (See, for exam­ple, Stew­art Brand describ­ing how sci­en­tists will bring extinct species back from the dead.) Or it hap­pens when TED brings old­er talks from its archive to YouTube.

Which brings us to the talk above. Here we have David Chris­t­ian, a pro­fes­sor at Aus­trali­a’s Mac­quar­ie Uni­ver­si­ty, explain­ing the his­to­ry of the world in less than 18 min­utes, start­ing with the Big Bang and then cov­er­ing anoth­er 13.7 bil­lion years. For­mal­ly trained as a Russ­ian his­to­ri­an, Chris­t­ian began work­ing on Big His­to­ry in the 1980s, a meta dis­ci­pline that “exam­ines long time frames using a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary approach based on com­bin­ing numer­ous dis­ci­plines from sci­ence and the human­i­ties.” Chris­t­ian then pop­u­lar­ized his new­fan­gled way of telling his­to­ry when he pro­duced for the Teach­ing Com­pa­ny: Big His­to­ry: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Human­i­ty. It did­n’t hurt that Bill Gates stum­bled upon the lec­tures and gave back­ing to The Big His­to­ry Project, an online ini­tia­tive that exper­i­ments with bring­ing Big His­to­ry to high school stu­dents. The Big His­to­ry Project got its start at the 2011 TED con­fer­ence, with the talk pre­sent­ed above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

The Com­plete His­to­ry of the World (and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty) in 100 Objects

The Pod­cast His­to­ry of Our World Will Take You From Cre­ation Myths to (Even­tu­al­ly) the Present Day

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Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking & Arthur C. Clarke Discuss God, the Universe, and Everything Else

in Astronomy, Science, Television | March 6th, 2013

Name the three fig­ures, liv­ing or dead, with whom you would most like to sit down to din­ner. Though per­haps a lit­tle tired, the chal­lenge still reveals some­thing worth know­ing about the respon­den­t’s per­son­al­i­ty. If I know the per­son­al­i­ties of Open Cul­ture read­ers at all, I’d wager that more than a few of you would choose to set places at the table for Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing, and Arthur C. Clarke. Any­one inter­est­ed in ask­ing the big, exis­ten­tial ques­tions and under­stand­ing the sci­ence under­neath them would have the time of their lives at such a meal, espe­cial­ly if astro­phys­i­cal­ly inclined. But until a genie grants you this wish, may we offer God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else?

Pre­sent­ed by Mag­nus Mag­nus­son, long­time host of the BBC’s Mas­ter­mind, this pro­gram brings the three togeth­er to dis­cuss “the Big Bang the­o­ry, God, our exis­tence as well as the pos­si­bil­i­ty of extrater­res­tri­al life.” Hawk­ing, of course, talks through his sig­na­ture speech syn­the­siz­er, and Sagan joins up through a satel­lite link — beamed through, yes, the very sort of float­ing mir­a­cles of engi­neer­ing that Clarke wrote about in his nov­els. With minds like these, you can rest assured that the con­ver­sa­tion won’t stray far from what Sagan calls “the fun­da­men­tal ques­tions,” nor will it come unteth­ered from estab­lished human knowl­edge and float into the realms of wild spec­u­la­tion and wish­ful think­ing. And of course, in such con­ver­sa­tions, a sense of humor like Hawk­ing’s — a man who, not expect­ed to reach age thir­ty, would nev­er­the­less live to see more advance­ment in human knowl­edge than any­one else on the broad­cast — nev­er goes amiss.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawk­ing Remixed

Watch Errol Mor­ris’ Trib­ute to Stephen Hawk­ing, A Brief His­to­ry of Time

Sev­en Ques­tions for Stephen Hawk­ing: What Would He Ask Albert Ein­stein & More

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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