Carl Sagan

1934–1996 · American astronomer, planetary scientist & science communicator

Carl Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996) was an American astronomer and planetary scientist who held the David Duncan Professorship of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Dragons of Eden, and in 1980 co-wrote and narrated the thirteen-part PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which reached an audience Wikipedia puts at at least 500 million viewers in 60 countries. His 1979 essay collection Broca’s Brain gathered a decade of magazine pieces, several of them sustained attacks on pseudoscience — which is exactly where this sentence lives.

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