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Life cycle of a star: Carl Sagan and the circulation of reputation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2019

OLIVER MARSH
OLIVER MARSH*
Affiliation:
UCL, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK. Email: oliver.marsh.13@ucl.ac.uk.
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Abstract

It is a commonplace in the history of science that reputations of scientists play important roles in the stories of scientific knowledge. I argue that to fully understand these roles we should see reputations as produced by communicative acts, consider how reputations become known about, and study the factors influencing such processes. I reapply James Secord's ‘knowledge-in-transit’ approach; in addition to scientific knowledge, I also examine how ‘biographical knowledge’ of individuals is constructed through communications and shaped by communicative contexts. My case study is Carl Sagan, widely discussed – amongst scientists, media professionals and publics – for his skill as a charismatic popularizer, his perceived arrogance, his political activism, and his debated merit as a researcher. By examining how aspects of Sagan's reputation circulated alongside his scientific work – rather than existing as a static context for his scientific work – I show how different forms of knowledge (biographical and scientific) influence each other as they circulate.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 2019, pp. 467 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2019 

In science, as in celebrity culture, people acquire knowledge of a subject without encountering it themselves. Just as the complexity of the natural world is simplified and passed around in the form of scientific knowledge, so the complexity of individual lives is simplified and passed around in stories and shared characterizations. As such, reputations can be treated in a similar fashion to scientific knowledge: as accounts produced by social actions, shared in some settings and contested in others, and bearing the marks of contexts through which they have passed. By attending to these processes, we can see how communications encode scientific and reputational claims simultaneously, and how the story of one depends on the story of the other.

The question of how assessments of claims occur alongside assessments of claimants need not be confined to scientists or celebrities. However, figures such as Carl Sagan, the ‘glamor boy of astronomy’, provide useful cases to illustrate the particular interplay between circulation of science and reputation.Footnote 1 Due to his blending of popularization and research Sagan was (and is) known to many audiences, for a variety of activities and characteristics, and through an array of communication channels. His lyrical writing style, countercultural sympathies, and charismatic personality were widely used to portray him as a departure from ‘typical’ scientists. However, critics claimed he was a second-rate scientist who gained attention by popularizing speculations instead of well-grounded research – a phenomenon later dubbed the ‘Sagan effect’.Footnote 2 These various aspects of Sagan's reputation did not always coexist; they emerged, were emphasized, were downplayed or disappeared at different times and in different settings.

I examine the emergence and effects of Sagan's reputation(s) through reapplying James Secord's ‘knowledge in transit’. After introducing this approach I build up the empirical argument across three sections, each focusing on particular episodes in Sagan's life: his exobiological research, his work in radio and television, and the ‘nuclear-winter’ debates of the 1980s. I begin by focusing on Sagan's personal profile, tracing the development and circulation of reputation via two different forms of communication (first personal contact, then texts).Footnote 3 I then use Sagan's television show Cosmos to illustrate how particular representations of ‘science’ and representations of Sagan influenced one another. Finally, I re-examine the story of Sagan's role in debates over ‘nuclear winter’, showing how communicative acts were simultaneously contests around scientific and biographical knowledge. In my conclusion I build on these observations to extend the knowledge-in-transit approach. I argue that we must consider how communicative acts involve multiple forms of circulating knowledge, and how these forms of knowledge influence one another's circulation. As such, distinctions between ‘circulating knowledge’ and ‘communicative context’ benefit from re-examination.

Background: reputation in history of science

What is meant by ‘charisma’ is not easy to say. It seems to refer to some sort of ambrosial body odour.Footnote 4

Reputation is often presented in studies of science as a context underlying assessment of claims, acquisition of resources and available forums for communication.Footnote 5 Sagan's appearances in historical literature exemplify this approach.Footnote 6 For example, Sagan's television programme Cosmos is discussed in Marcel LaFollette's history of science on American television; here Sagan is mostly portrayed as a ‘celebrity machine’ acquiring viewership for the programme, and the reciprocal effect of Cosmos on Sagan's reputation and scientific career is not considered.Footnote 7 Histories of Sagan's role in the ‘nuclear-winter’ debates of the 1980s usefully consider not only that Sagan was well known, but also what he was known for (especially his political activism). However, they deal only with a later segment of his life, and exactly how he had become known is not fully contextualized via his earlier work.Footnote 8 Rae Goodell's work on ‘visible scientists’ illustrates how Sagan achieved ‘visibility’ (i.e. extensive media attention).Footnote 9 However, Goodell focuses on visibility as an end point, rather than considering how different contexts could produce multiple reputations. The work also pre-dates Cosmos and the nuclear-winter debates, two major episodes in which Sagan's reputation and scientific work were assessed side by side. All this is not simply biographical nitpicking; as I shall illustrate, both Sagan's distinctive features and the means through which they were communicated are essential for understanding the stories of both Sagan and his science.

The main intention of this piece is not a social biography of Sagan but rather a contribution to historiography.Footnote 10 I use, and propose an extension to, James Secord's ‘knowledge-in-transit’ approach.Footnote 11 This sees ‘knowledge-making itself as a form of communicative action’ by ‘eradicating the distinction between the making and the communicating of knowledge’.Footnote 12 It emphasizes such factors as material media, the availability of channels and relationships between interlocutors.Footnote 13 I refer to such factors as ‘communicative contexts’. I particularly focus on communicative contexts related to two settings. First, the scientific disciplines Sagan worked within: exobiology and atmospheric chemistry. Both had distinctive practices, and reputations, of their own; these shaped representations of Sagan and their circulation. Second, the twentieth century saw a diversification of media channels, and a concomitant development of the ‘celebrity scientist’.Footnote 14 I examine how the circulation of Sagan's reputation differed in these various media, and changed as his fame brought him new audiences, as well as themes which were common across different forms of communication and throughout Sagan's life.

However, where Secord focuses on scientific knowledge, I also bring in reputations – in other words, how communicative actions spread ‘biographical knowledge’ about an individual.Footnote 15 I use Sagan's life to provide historiographical reflections on how we can see scientific knowledge circulating alongside reputations – and, by extension, other forms of circulating knowledge – and examine how these circulations influence one another.

From specialism to stardom

I don't think one can know Carl intellectually without also knowing him socially.Footnote 16

In this section I discuss Sagan's early reputation amongst the professional exobiology community in the 1950s–1970s.Footnote 17 I focus on communication through personal contact, in relation to two themes which were important to both Sagan and exobiology in this period: interdisciplinarity and public profile.

Space sciences in 1960s America were undergoing substantial changes, following the formation of NASA in 1958. This was a context in which professional contact and networks played a substantial role. The rapid expansion of new lines of enquiry, in addition to a frequently committee-based style of working, meant that younger scientists could receive patronage from prominent figures in order to follow unconventional interests.Footnote 18 Poundstone notes of Sagan's thesis adviser Gerard Kuiper that, at that time, ‘being the only planetary astronomer in the United States, his students were in great demand’.Footnote 19 The biologist Lynn Margulis received funding from NASA Exobiology in 1970 on recommendation of the programme's director, Richard Young; she later recalled that supporting young scientists who struggled to fit their work into disciplinary lines seemed to be one of the hallmarks of NASA Exobiology.Footnote 20

Sagan was one such scientist. As an undergraduate at Chicago, obsessed with exobiology, Sagan studied a mix of astronomy, biology and chemistry.Footnote 21 In 1959 the theoretical division of NASA received a letter from Nobel Prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg, advocating publication of a ‘handbook of planetary biology’. Lederberg feared ‘some problem in finding a sufficiently informed enthusiast’, but suggested Sagan, whom he had encountered when Sagan was a visiting student at the University of Colorado, as ‘well informed and deeply interested in planetary biology’.Footnote 22 Similarly, when astronomer Frank Drake asked Sagan to join the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence conference in 1961, it was on the basis that ‘he knew more about biology than any astronomer I'd ever met’.Footnote 23 From these initial recommendations Sagan was soon employed on a range of groups, and he was consulting for NASA before he had finished his PhD.Footnote 24 As Sagan put it, ‘I sort of glided effortlessly from attending late-night bull sessions about exobiology at Lederberg's house to advising the government’.Footnote 25

Face-to-face committee work also developed a specific interdisciplinary role for Sagan: translator between astronomers and biologists. Kuiper and W.W. Kellogg spoke of Sagan's usefulness in discussions involving different disciplinary experts, while Elie Shneour remarked that ‘Carl has created a new field – one bridging the gap between astronomy and biology. He is essentially alone in this field’.Footnote 26 Sagan's face-to-face contact with scientists in group projects also showcased his skill in communication. This was a useful resource to space science in the late 1950s, facing a deluge of new data, theories and questions; as Kellogg remarked, ‘he has such an understanding of the scientific problems and is so articulate, that he can organize these complicated thoughts and ideas in an excellent manner’.Footnote 27

Through Sagan's increasing networks, this reputation as a communicator also spread to more public-facing entities. Space exploration and extraterrestrials had long held a fascination in popular culture – sometimes to the frustration of scientists in other fields, who felt that exobiology was ‘a science without a subject’.Footnote 28 Sagan's mentor Lederberg had a strong public profile; British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle had been successfully popularizing a mixture of astronomy and exobiology since before the launch of sputnik.Footnote 29 The foundation of NASA provided new resources and public visibility for exobiology.Footnote 30 However, this came with complications. Lederberg faced the twin challenges of making exobiology a reputable part of the NASA programme while separating its public face from militaristic associations of the space programme.Footnote 31

These factors of public attention and political connotations around exobiology shaped the emergence of Sagan's public reputation. In the early 1960s Fred Murphy, owner of the new publishing company Holden-Day, was hoping to cash in on public interest in science following the sputnik launch. When Lederberg was invited to the editorial board he recommended Sagan on grounds of his ‘spellbinding’ lecturing skills.Footnote 32 Over a series of meetings Murphy came to see Sagan as a man with ‘an ability [to communicate] that other people don't have’, and appointed him as an adviser.Footnote 33 In this role, Sagan encouraged Murphy to publish an English translation of the Soviet book Vselennaia, Zhizn, Razum (Universe, Life, Mind), which Sagan had encountered through a Russian-speaking colleague at the RAND Corporation.Footnote 34 The author, I.S. Shklovskii, was another space scientist with an interest in extraterrestrial life and a successful public-facing career; his book had been written at an official request to mark the fifth anniversary of the sputnik launch, and sold out a printing run of 50,000 in hours.Footnote 35 The translated work, Intelligent Life in the Universe, was almost doubled in length by additions from Sagan, often well beyond the intended remit of adding details to the biological aspects of the text.Footnote 36

The collaboration between Sagan and Shklovskii – who both enjoyed defying Cold War barriers – supported Lederberg's project of presenting exobiology as a pro-internationalist field.Footnote 37 It also brought Sagan to the attention of liberal, anti-militarist publications such as Saturday Review and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.Footnote 38 This began Sagan's association with left-wing politics and the peace movement, a feature which recurs throughout this article. When the book was reissued in 1970 by Dell, the cover was redesigned to feature a psychedelic image of Saturn, cashing in on Sagan's association with the growing counterculture movement.Footnote 39

I focus on these public images of Sagan further in the next section, but here it is worth considering Sagan's reputation amongst professional colleagues from the 1970s onwards. Sagan remained active in space science research throughout his life. He held the editorship of Icarus, the pre-eminent journal of planetary science in the United States, from 1968 to 1979. This role greatly increased his professional visibility, given that his name appeared (alone) on the front cover of every issue.Footnote 40 As editor he introduced full peer review and solicited contributions from senior planetary scientists.Footnote 41 He also maintained a steady output of technical publications – his colleague Stanley Miller reckoned over a hundred during his life – even as his media work became more intense.Footnote 42 Much of his work mixed research and popularization. For instance, he was a member of the committee selecting a landing site for the Viking mission of 1976.Footnote 43 This included public appearances, where he discoursed on the mission in general (to the annoyance of some colleagues). However, he also built on his expertise in planetary chemistry to predict the effects of high-speed wind on the craft.Footnote 44

Multiple reputations are not identical in their power to spread into other spheres. Sagan's media appearances increasingly discussed broad developments in planetary science, particularly spacefaring craft, and less often the specifics of Sagan's research.Footnote 45 After Thomas's 1963 interviews it is hard to locate any discussion of Sagan's interdisciplinarity in the popular press. However, his new showbusiness reputation circulated back into his research life. As Sagan recalls, by the early 1960s colleagues were making slighting remarks such as, ‘I've been following your career in the Time magazine’.Footnote 46 Throughout his life, and after, colleagues have debated whether Sagan was a high-quality researcher unfairly criticized by jealous colleagues, or a low-quality researcher given undue prominence by the press.Footnote 47 This came to a head in 1992 when he was refused a fellowship of the National Academy of Sciences, on the ground that he had done too little significant research – a decision vehemently criticized by some colleagues.Footnote 48

This is a familiar ‘Sagan effect’ story, that ‘anyone so smooth on TV must be a [scientific] lightweight’ – a criticism applied to many popularizers, often ascribed to professional jealousy.Footnote 49 However, Sagan differed from many other scientist–popularizers, who developed public profiles more explicitly linked to their own research.Footnote 50 Much of Fred Hoyle's popular work was aimed at promoting his own (controversial) life-from-space and steady-state theories.Footnote 51 Lynn Margulis's profile as a ‘scientific rebel’ built on associations with her radical endosymbiosis theory, and later the highly polarizing Gaia theory.Footnote 52 The reputations of these figures were visibly tied to changing perceptions of their research. By contrast, links between Sagan's popular profile and his research work are less explicit. Sagan was happy to speak on subjects outside his specific area, and the press were happy to facilitate this behaviour.Footnote 53 Following the publication of Dragons of Eden in 1977 – a popular book about evolutionary psychology – Sagan increasingly presented himself as a spokesperson for ‘science’ in general.Footnote 54

Nonetheless, Sagan's later reputations still reflected aspects of his research work more broadly. Amongst colleagues his work was often seen as speculative (even science-fictional), and he was frequently depicted as a catalyst for theories rather than someone who engaged with detail.Footnote 55 A New Yorker article of 1976 reported that colleagues found him ‘too freewheeling’, that he was ‘too much of a showman’, with habits of ‘public speculation’ and spreading ‘half-baked ideas’.Footnote 56 Perceptions of his popular work echoed this, even as his subject matter became increasingly distant from space science: reviewers worried about his ‘gee-whiz approach … [and] selective use of experimental evidence’ and feared that his popularization took him ‘out of his depth’.Footnote 57 These criticisms partly arose due to particular features of Sagan's personality, in conjunction with the media in which Sagan appeared (discussed in the next section). But they also reflect a broader image of exobiology, a field which was often accused of being overly speculative.Footnote 58 We can compare Sagan with Hoyle; he too was accused of spreading overly speculative ‘life-from-space’ theories, though criticisms related this to his stubbornness and anti-establishment sentiments rather than the overexcited freewheeling associated with Sagan.Footnote 59

In sum, although Sagan's popular career increasingly diverged from space sciences, representations of him that developed in the context of exobiology were reflected – throughout his life – in attacks on his personality. They also circulated around through the public sphere and back to the professional community, and were used as resources to attack his research – with significant consequences, as we shall see in the story of nuclear winter. But to understand how Sagan became a vector for such attacks, we must consider the communicative contexts which shaped his public reputations.

Mass media, continuities and Cosmos

He was always ‘on stage’, perhaps even to himself.Footnote 60

Sagan's fame skyrocketed throughout the 1970s, thanks to his work across a growing multimedia environment; in the words of Rae Goodell, writing in 1975, Sagan was gaining visibility because ‘he has the makings of a television celebrity’.Footnote 61 In this section I focus on Sagan as an authorial and physical presence, a consistent (or semi-consistent) object across multiple media. The role that object(s) play as they move through different contexts is a rich research tradition within history of science, often addressed with reference to material objects.Footnote 62 Much of Sagan's work can be considered through this lens, in particular the Pioneer plaque and Voyager record.Footnote 63 Here I focus on Sagan as an object, with characteristics which both emerged from and shaped group practices. I examine how these practices drew on, maintained and altered Sagan's reputations.

Journalists in the 1960s and 1970s often presented Sagan as a contrast to other scientists, both to general stereotypes and to those he appeared alongside in NASA's publicity drives – as one reviewer put it, in his popular books Sagan wrote ‘more poetically than scientifically’.Footnote 64 Divergence from stereotype is a common theme in histories of popular science;Footnote 65 however, it is important to consider exactly what these divergences were and how they reflected certain communicative contexts. Being interviewed in the countercultural magazine Rolling Stone or on the star-studded Tonight Show was not just unusual for a scientist; together such appearances created an image distinctive to Sagan.Footnote 66 He appeared as a public intellectual, equally at ease making jokes, quoting literature, and discussing astronomy; a fashionable man who hobnobbed with Francis Ford Coppola and sent the music of Chuck Berry into space; and a countercultural thinker who allied science with left-wing politics and recreational drug use.Footnote 67 Similarly to Victorian popularizer John Tyndall, Sagan proved adept at incorporating metaphysical and spiritual references in his work while preserving a separation from religion, thus presenting science as the defining epistemology of the modern world.Footnote 68

It is worth noting the role of Sagan's distinctive voice, in the double sense of written voice and speaking voice. This remained recognizably consistent across different media, possibly due to Sagan's practice of blurring the boundaries between speech and writing: he often wrote by stream-of-consciousness dictation to a tape recorder.Footnote 69 Interviews allowed him to demonstrate the lyricism of his writing in his speech, which his son Dorion has described as exhibiting ‘perfect diction, encyclopaedic memory, um-less speech, and a preternatural … way of orating reasoned paragraphs’, while his colleague Richard Berendzen commented of his ‘beautiful poetic statements’ that he ‘whipped them off all the time’.Footnote 70 Television and radio interviews even allowed the sound of his voice to become distinctive. Sagan became renowned for his enunciation (especially his plosive ‘billions’), which reviewers noted, colleagues and students mocked – a fake interview in a Cornell campus newspaper put every other word in bold or italics, which readers felt ‘captured his speaking style perfectly’ – and Johnny Carson famously mimicked on the Tonight show.Footnote 71 Besides his voice there were other continuities – particularly personal charisma, physical attractiveness and a penchant for turtleneck sweaters – which were reinforced by his increasing appearances on television.Footnote 72 Therefore, although he appeared in a widening range of media, Sagan himself was recognizable as a consistent vocal, physical and authorial presence.

While many objects may seem to remain naturally consistent as they travel, closer examination often reveals that this consistency requires work.Footnote 73 This can be seen in Sagan's television show Cosmos, broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1980.Footnote 74 Much special-effects work was employed to keep Sagan (usually looking relaxed, frequently in a turtleneck) in the frame, walking on alien planets or flying through galaxies as he described them.Footnote 75 The distinctively Sagan writing style persisted despite the extensive input of two co-writers (Ann Druyan and Steven Soter), and included ideas such as the ‘cosmic calendar’ and ‘star-stuff’ recognizable from Sagan's earlier works.Footnote 76 The chief graphic designer was Jon Lomberg, whose idiosyncratic space art style ‘inspired by psychedelic posters and album covers’ had appeared in all Sagan's popular books.Footnote 77 Even episode titles like ‘Harmony of the worlds’ or ‘The edge of forever’, and the music – combining classical and new-age, with the same tendency towards high melodrama as the script – reflected the Sagan image. The foregrounding of Sagan as a recognizable individual therefore emerged from a coordination of group practices.Footnote 78

However, once Cosmos left the hands of the production team the effect was a discontinuity – a new emphasis in Sagan's representation by the mass media emerged. Although both Sagan's writing and his physical/vocal presence were familiar to the press, the new (and extensive) combination of the two in Cosmos proved unpopular. At the premiere, there were murmurs that the show was ‘a lot of Carl and a little bit of cosmos’.Footnote 79 The New York Times suggested that ‘Cosmos could be subtitled “the selling of Carl Sagan”’, while Village Voice called Sagan ‘an unctuous scene-stealer from the stars’ – an annoyance that they suggested could be avoided by reading the accompanying book instead.Footnote 80 The result was a growing media representation of Sagan as an egotist more concerned about himself than about science.Footnote 81 Sagan was aware how the televisual context shaped this new image – asked by a journalist whether he was as arrogant as purported, he replied that ‘interminable close-ups of me looking awed’ had led to such criticisms.Footnote 82

In addition to the presentation of Sagan, we should consider how Cosmos drew on Sagan's presentations of science. Due to Sagan's habit of using ‘science’ as a rhetorical weapon in conflicts, there are plenty of examples where he explicitly spelled out his views of science (which remained remarkably consistent throughout his life).Footnote 83 Most famous is his dictum that ‘science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking’.Footnote 84 But this ‘way of thinking’ incorporated many elements. First, he claimed that scientific curiosity is innate to humanity, for ‘evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding’.Footnote 85 Science was natural behaviour for all humanity, not simply those with a specialized ‘body of knowledge’.Footnote 86 Sagan's disregard for specialization can also be seen in his approach to disciplinary boundaries. When asked about the range of disciplines in Cosmos, he replied, ‘the boundaries are arbitrary … In the real world, these subjects flow into each other’; he gave a similar answer when asked, in a different interview, about his move from popularizing astronomy to psychology.Footnote 87 These answers did not engage with (common) criticisms that his popularization work disrespected discipline-specific expertise; instead, he simply asserted that science could and should reflect the boundary-less ‘real world’.

Instead of specialized expertise, Sagan proposed a combination of innate curiosity with critical thinking. ‘Unlike many other human endeavours’, he claimed, science ‘reserves its highest rewards for those who disprove the contentions of its most revered leaders’.Footnote 88 Personal authority was replaced with shared method, for ‘science is a collective enterprise … There is an established framework in which any scientist can prove another wrong and make sure everyone else knows’.Footnote 89 Therefore despite downplaying the need for specialized expertise, Sagan still presented an ‘established’ way of thinking scientifically, for which he offered himself as a spokesman.

These pronouncements were reflected in Sagan's popularization, which prioritized critical thinking over disciplinary expertise,Footnote 90 and strayed outside his professional work without distinguishing his personal views from scientific consensus.Footnote 91 Cosmos featured astronomy, biology, psychology, ancient history and more; its content combined Sagan's own work, colleagues’ research and work he had encountered in a non-specialist capacity, without distinguishing between them.Footnote 92 Televisual special effects blended scientific consensus and speculation, such as the interchange of actual astronomical images with artistic mock-ups.Footnote 93 The combination of the typically Sagan script with Sagan's continual on-screen visibility and audibility simultaneously transmitted messages about Sagan and science: science is a way of seeing the world, with Sagan as its oracle.Footnote 94

This co-presentation of a particular image of science with a particular image of Sagan is exemplified by a sequence in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Footnote 95 The viewer is presented with a large communal space, filled with discussion; even when individual scientists are shown, they are in constant communication via headsets. We then move to a meeting room, where new satellite images are being analysed collaboratively. The camera lingers on the images, allowing the viewer to virtually replace a scientist –even to make their own speculations, should they so choose. Sagan's membership of this community is implied by showing him using the equipment, placing him in the background of group shots, and showing him discussing images – taking an identical role to his colleagues, not a more prominent one (except, of course, for his ever-present narration). The images suggest that both Sagan and the viewer are welcome within this community – simultaneously presenting a message about science and about Sagan.

The co-presentation of science and Sagan can also be seen in attacks on Cosmos. The Wall Street Journal Review noted Sagan's ‘tendency to mix metaphysics and scientific statements’, while the New York Times claimed that Sagan ‘progressed blithely from his personal assumptions to grand speculations’.Footnote 96 By suggesting that Cosmos diverged from how science should be presented, and blaming this on Sagan, such reviews used representations of ‘science’ to support their claims of Sagan's egotism. This raises the idea that specific features of reputation interact with different ideas of ‘science’, and vice versa. Did Sagan's anti-establishment personality help him reveal the arbitrariness of disciplinary boundaries? Or was his crossing of essential disciplinary boundaries evidence of his arrogance? This complicates the familiar notion that reputation can be treated as a context for acceptance of scientific work.

Nuclear winter and knowledge in interaction

They wouldn't even listen to the content of the ideas he had. It was Carl Sagan's idea – yuk, yuk.Footnote 97

In 1982–1983, amidst aggressive pro-nuclear rhetoric by the Reagan administration, Sagan and colleagues at the NASA Ames Research centre were modelling possible atmospheric effects of nuclear war. Their initial conclusions, published in Science in an article christened TTAPS, suggested that a nuclear exchange could reduce Earth's surface temperature to below freezing for months – a circumstance they christened ‘nuclear winter’.Footnote 98 Based on the research, Sagan published articles in the popular magazine Parade and the policy journal Foreign Affairs, which provoked responses and counterresponses across various media outlets for the next four years.Footnote 99 Within the scientific community the broad conclusions of TTAPS – that a nuclear strike could cause long-term cooling – were largely accepted, although the magnitude of the effects was revised down by further modelling.Footnote 100 But animosity in the public sphere continued after scientific consensus had been reached, and TTAPS was held up by many influential scientists as poor practice – in part because results were made public before peer review had concluded, largely thanks to Sagan's popularization of the topic.Footnote 101

Reception of TTAPS must be understood within the context of atmospheric science. Like exobiology, this was a field which was increasingly interfacing with public and political spheres. From the 1950s onwards, atmospheric science in the United States had developed substantially as a field, partly through ties with military and political concerns, and also due to interest in the earth as a whole system (most visibly demonstrated in the International Geophysical Year, 1957–1958).Footnote 102 New modelling approaches, made possible by computational developments, had taken an increasingly dominant role in the field.Footnote 103 These raised questions about appropriate forms of evidence, and how modelling might work alongside – or disrupt – existing ideas of credibility and objectivity.Footnote 104 The escalating Cold War gave such questions greater public salience.Footnote 105 In 1975, a National Academy of Sciences report on the possible environmental effects of nuclear war was explicitly aimed at audiences beyond scientific and military spheres.Footnote 106 TTAPS intensified these concerns; Matthew Dörries has argued that the neologism ‘nuclear winter’ allowed oppositional camps, of both scientists and non-scientists, to form around the single parameter of predicted temperature change.Footnote 107 Debates about the atmosphere were therefore already an environment in which reputation and personal views played a substantial role in assessment of knowledge claims.

I argue that features of Sagan's reputations became important rhetorical resources within debates over TTAPS, and that the debates continued to shape Sagan's reputations. Both these processes depended on tactical uses of communication. Even within the public sphere, Sagan's approaches varied.Footnote 108 In Foreign Affairs, his task was persuading politically knowledgeable readers that the TTAPS results were a credible basis for policy change. To this readership, his association with hyperbole, showbusiness and left-wing activism would risk the article, and potentially TTAPS, being dismissed as an extension of Cosmos rather than taken seriously as policy recommendations.Footnote 109 Sagan claimed to offer not personal opinions, but results which ‘have now been endorsed by a large number of scientists’. He opened with a series of quotations to illustrate that ‘comparably dire warnings have been made by respectable scientists with diverse political inclinations’.Footnote 110 Although Foreign Affairs was not intended as a forum for technical discussions, Sagan's article was jargon-heavy – very unlike his popularization.Footnote 111 This included the deployment of military terminology, such as his claim that ‘modern tactical or theater missiles (e.g., Pershing II, SS-20) … make the distinction between “strategic” and “tactical” or “theatre” weapons increasingly artificial’. Such technical confidence suggested his facility in all areas of the debate.Footnote 112 Finally, in his (lengthy) author's biography he emphasized his various research and committee roles, while relegating his popularization to the single sentence ‘Dr. Sagan is also a recipient of the Peabody Award and the Pulitzer Prize’.Footnote 113

By contrast, Sagan's Parade article was aimed at increasing awareness of (and support for) the nuclear-winter cause amongst a twenty-million-strong readership.Footnote 114 His piece narrated the ‘discovery story’ of nuclear winter in emotive terms: how ‘another consequence [of nuclear war] – by far the most dire – has been uncovered’ with results which ‘astonish … us’ and ‘horrif[y] me’.Footnote 115 In this situation Sagan's recognizable hyperbolic style played well with editorial news values, particularly given that he was a regular contributor to Parade.Footnote 116 Outside the Parade article, Sagan also delivered a ‘lay sermon’ on nuclear winter at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City a week after the TTAPS publication. In this, Sagan was reflecting his own ‘oracle’ image acquired from Cosmos, but he was also reflecting a long tradition of the scientific communicator encroaching upon the (literal and rhetorical) territory of religion, thereby associating science with spiritual and moral authority.Footnote 117 In the context of Cosmos, such religious connotations were often used to criticize Sagan. For example, David Rebovich's labelling of the show as a ‘metaphysical parable’ was used to accuse the series of unwisely straying into spiritual questions.Footnote 118 However, within the context of nuclear winter, the cathedral setting provided a suitable space for an emotive appeal to the collective conscience of humanity.Footnote 119 Sagan's recycling of familiar associations can also be seen in the technical Foreign Affairs article – Sagan reformulated his famous and oft-repeated phrase that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ into the opening sentence: ‘apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously, higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other matters where the stakes are not so great’.Footnote 120 Within public debates Sagan himself tried to put alternative reputations in circulation, by choosing to draw on his past work in different ways.

However, as with responses to Cosmos, these different reputations could work against Sagan. Consider his conflict with Pentagon official Richard Perle over a report which argued that TTAPS supported nuclear escalation. At a joint Congressional hearing, Sagan claimed that if the report had been submitted at Cornell ‘it would get a D, maybe a C-minus if I was in a friendly mood’, reminding the audience of his position within a formal scientific institution.Footnote 121 However, the Washington Post review of the hearing presented this soundbite stripped of Sagan's more technical comments, supporting Perle's riposte (also reported) that Sagan's comments were ‘shallow and demagogic’.Footnote 122 Drawing on these comments, the right-wing public intellectual William Buckley ascribed Sagan's ‘arrogant’ performance to his tendency to ‘view himself as The World's Foremost Authority’ and dismissed his warnings as ‘eschatological melodrama’.Footnote 123 Such accusations of hyperbole, and of blending fact with personal opinion, were familiar from Cosmos reviews. In the Wall Street Journal the geophysicist Russell Seitz criticized both TTAPS and Cosmos through recurrent references to deceitful communication tactics.Footnote 124 He argued that ‘Nuclear Winter never existed outside of a computer, except as a painting commissioned by a PR firm’, and that policy analysts ‘have shown themselves to be the lawful prey of software salesmen’.Footnote 125 In concluding the piece, he referred to Sagan's popular work:

His homiletic overkill has been relentless. An animated version of his obsolete apocalypse has been added to his updated documentary ‘Cosmos – A Special Edition’ … the airbrushed edge of nuclear darkness overtakes planet Earth. Marshall McLuhan was right on the mark – with television's advent, advertising has become more important than products.Footnote 126

Such remarks aimed to publicly highlight doubts in the science of nuclear winter by discrediting Sagan – drawing on specific, yet recognizable, criticisms of Sagan's popular work to attack knowledge claims associated with him.

Similar conclusions can be drawn from communications between professional scientists. Commentaries on TTAPS included a suggestion that ‘some authors could unintentionally exaggerate in order to gain attention’, and accusations of a ‘lack of scientific integrity’.Footnote 127 Sagan's name featured prominently in many of these attacks. John Maddox's Nature editorials referred to the TTAPS team as ‘Professor Sagan and a group of associates’ and the paper as ‘Sagan et al.’, even though the lead author was Turco.Footnote 128 A commentary on nuclear winter published in Science collated scientific work alongside a large picture of Sagan, captioned ‘celebrity’.Footnote 129 Though Sagan's professional reputation had always been contested by colleagues, this was rarely as open as when used to discredit nuclear winter. Slighting remarks against Sagan, referencing nuclear winter, were made by scientists and journalists right through the 1990s – including during his rejected nomination to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992 – and Poundstone points out that ‘it was almost a rule’ that the kinder of Sagan's obituaries omitted nuclear winter.Footnote 130

However, if we look to the exobiology research community at the same time, we see different views of Sagan's professional credibility. The characteristic Sagan phrase ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ was used as a ‘standard of proof’ to debate claims of bio-organisms in a Martian meteorite, while Sagan's description of Earth as a ‘pale blue dot’ was used to title a series of workshops proposing a reformulation of exobiology as ‘astrobiology’.Footnote 131 Both were important events for the contested scientific credibility of exobiology, but actors apparently saw no risk in associating their proposals with Sagan's words. This alternative reputation propagated in the absence of Sagan himself, who saw the beginning of these contests but not their conclusions after his death in 1996.Footnote 132 Sagan's reputations have continued to circulate posthumously in various circles. For instance, Sagan's penultimate work The Demon-Haunted World has made him a figurehead for sceptic and atheist communities, though such discussions often downplay, or debate, his professed agnosticism.Footnote 133

Looking at Sagan's reputations in one particular context or another, however, is a side note to the important point: how both scientific knowledge and biographical knowledge were simultaneously in contested circulation. Despite the diversity of the communications in the nuclear-winter debates, one question can be asked of them all – were any of them solely imparting scientific knowledge without biographical knowledge, or vice versa? I argue not. Sagan's Foreign Policy article simultaneously suggested that nuclear winter was scientifically sound and that Sagan himself was a credible scientist; his Parade article reinforced his reputation as an evocative orator and introduced TTAPS to a wider audience; criticisms of nuclear winter used the purported exaggerations of TTAPS and Sagan's persona as an unscientific orator as evidence and explanation for one another. Debates were not just contests to turn assertions about nuclear winter (or the presentation of science in Cosmos, or the public/professional image of exobiology) into accepted facts; they were also contests to turn assertions about Sagan into accepted facts. The success of one contest depended, at least in part, on the other.

Conclusion

Today's credible myth maker may well be a scientist who appears on television.Footnote 134

I began by treating Sagan's reputations as products of communicative acts. By doing so I illustrated that crucial continuities and discontinuities, such as his shift from interdisciplinary specialist to mass-media spokesman for science, were shaped by communicative contexts such as the interests of interlocutors and the media of communication. Then, using the cases of Cosmos and the nuclear-winter debates, I showed that biographical and scientific knowledge were circulated through the same communications, with each form of knowledge influencing the other. The different forms of scientific communication – the ‘gee-whiz’ popularization in Cosmos, and the ‘serious’ research into nuclear winter – brought different forms of media into the story, from television series to policy papers. These, in turn, produced new resources for supporting or attacking Sagan's reputation and the scientific work associated with him.

Bringing these arguments together, we see that circulation of scientific knowledge and reputation are influenced by communicative contexts; they also influence communicative contexts; they also influence each other. There is a simpler way to describe all the above: reputation acts as a communicative context for scientific knowledge, and vice versa. Whether ‘Carl Sagan’ or ‘Lynn Margulis’ is the name on a work, or whether the work claims to contribute to ‘popularization’ or to ‘atmospheric science’, can have a comparable influence on its circulation as whether the article is mass-printed or carved on stone. We need not limit this to scientific and biographical knowledge. Many key factors in history of science, from rival research to social instabilities, must become known about to have an influence; exactly how this ‘knowing about’ occurs is an important question to ask when considering their influence. Therefore I suggest an extension to the knowledge-in-transit project, to consider not just circulation of knowledge but interaction of circulating knowledges.

There are questions to be asked about the approach of this paper. In particular, the difficulties of closely following the reputations of non-celebrity scientists – and the concomitant risk of focusing on figures and groups who are already overrepresented in literature – need to be considered.Footnote 135 Equally, there are theoretical questions to be asked about exactly how biographical knowledge might be like or unlike scientific knowledge. What might be the biographical counterparts of scientific ‘inscription devices’ or ‘immutable mobiles’?Footnote 136 How equivalent is a memoir or interview to a graph or equation? Most pressingly, does reputation share in that important notion that mobilizes so many other knowledge-making practices (most notably science) – that consensus is a possible, even desirable, end point?Footnote 137 The evidence of this paper suggests that there are processes which encourage some agreement over reputations, but this needs further investigation. Despite these open questions, I argue that seeing different forms of knowledge claims as contexts for one another's circulation still has value in showing how abstract (but important) ideas of ‘interacting knowledges’ can be studied through concrete practices of handing around information.

Even today, Sagan's reputation is still passed around through a variety of communications. T-shirts, mugs and pyjamas bearing his aphorisms are sold in the store of the popular Facebook page I Fucking Love Science, in a dedicated ‘Carl Sagan’ section (the only other sections are ‘Top sellers’ and ‘New arrivals’).Footnote 138 The popularizer Neil DeGrasse Tyson includes multiple eulogies to Sagan in the remade Cosmos, alongside excerpts of Sagan's original narration.Footnote 139 Such mythologizing provides insights into how and why people circulate science in an age of social media and celebrity, just as myth-making in general reflects essential concerns of groups across a great many times and settings. In Sagan's words, ‘all myths are worthy of a respectful hearing’.Footnote 140

Footnotes

I am grateful to Helen Curry for her extensive support on this project, as well as Karoliina Pulkkinen, Trudi Martin, Matthew Paskins, Declan Fahy and many others within the Cambridge History and Philosophy of Science and UCL Science and Technology Studies departments for their input. I also thank the reviewers for their comments, which contributed a great deal to this paper.

1 Art Harris, ‘Second view: Sagan on encounters’, Washington Post Weekend, 16 December 1977, pp. 1–2, 1.

2 The term ‘Sagan effect’ originated in Hartz, Jim and Chappell, Rick, Worlds Apart: How the Distance between Science and Journalism Threatens America's Future, Nashville: Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, 1997. For more on the Sagan effect see Shermer, Michael B., ‘This view of science: Stephen Jay Gould as historian of science and scientific historian, popular scientist and scientific popularizer’, Social Studies of Science (2002) 32(4), pp. 489–524. See also Fahy, Declan, The New Celebrity Scientists: Out of the Lab and into the Limelight, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015.

3 In ‘texts’ I include audio and visual recordings.

4 Chargaff, Erwin, ‘A quick climb up Mount Olympus’, Science, new series (1968) 159, pp. 1448–1449, 1448.

5 For some canonical examples see Collins, Harry, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, London: Sage, 1985, esp. pp. 84–89; and Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2nd edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986, especially pp. 194–206.

6 For discussions of Sagan in science studies beyond the examples here see McQuaid, Kim, ‘Selling the space age: NASA and Earth's environment, 1958–1990’, Environment and History (2006) 12(2), pp. 127–163; Strick, James E., ‘Creating a cosmic discipline: the crystallization and consolidation of exobiology, 1957–1973’, Journal of the History of Biology (2004) 37(1), pp. 131–180.

7 LaFollette, Marcel C., Science on American Television, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013, pp. 156–159.

8 Badash, Lawrence, A Nuclear Winter's Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009; Oreskes, Naomi and Conway, Erik, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010, pp. 48–65; Dörries, Matthias, ‘The politics of atmospheric sciences: ‘nuclear winter’ and global climate change’, Osiris (2011) 26(1), pp. 198–223.

9 Goodell, Rae, The Visible Scientists, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1975; for Sagan see 163–176; for ‘visibility’ analysis see 6–10, 201–207.

10 This is not to imply that these are mutually exclusive – see, for example, Söderqvist, Thomas (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007; and Daston, Lorraine and Sibum, Otto, ‘Introduction: scientific personae and their histories’, Science in Context (2003) 16(12), pp. 1–8. Biographies of Sagan are Poundstone, William, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, New York: Henry Holt, 1999; and Davidson, Keay, Carl Sagan: A Life, New York: John Wiley, 1999. An excellent review is Robert Hotz, ‘Star trek’, Los Angeles Times, 16 January 2000, p. 4. There is a third aimed at children – Spangenburg, Ray and Moser, Kit, Carl Sagan: A Biography, Westport, CT: Greenwood Biographies, 2004 – but this draws most of its material from the other two biographies.

11 Secord, James A., ‘Knowledge in transit’, Isis (2004) 95(4), pp. 654–672.

12 Secord, op. cit. (11), p. 661.

13 Secord, op. cit. (11), pp. 657–670.

14 For celebrity scientists see Goodell, op. cit. (9); and Fahy, op. cit. (2). For the role of mass media see LaFollette, op. cit. (7); and Dorothy Nelkin, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, London: W.H. Freeman and Company. The development of the ‘science communicator’ persona pre-dates the twentieth century; see, for example, Huxley, in Desmond, Adrian, Huxley: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1999; and Thomas Gieryn's discussion of Tyndall, John in Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

15 Treating ‘knowledge’ in a sociological sense, i.e. distinguished from ‘belief’ or ‘opinion’ by being collectively endorsed as the truth.

16 Gerald Soffen quoted in Thomas, Shirley, Men of Space: Profiles of the Leaders in Space Research, Development, and Exploration, Philadelphia: Chilton Company Book Division, 1963, vol. 6, p. 193.

17 Exobiologists study the possibilities for biological life elsewhere in our solar system.

18 Doel, Ronald E., Solar System Astronomy in America: Communities, Patronage and Interdisciplinary Science, 1920–1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Dick, Stephen and Strick, James, The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

19 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 39.

20 Dick and Strick, op. cit. (18), pp. 47–48. Margulis was also Sagan's first wife.

21 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 33.

22 Both were briefly at the University of Colorado in 1957; they shared an interest in exobiology, but Lederberg knew little astronomy. The twenty-three-year-old Sagan ended up tutoring him – see Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 36–39.

23 Drake, Frank and Sobel, Dava, Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, New York and London: Pocket Books, 1994, pp. 46–47. Drake knew of Sagan from correspondence over Drake's microwave observations of Venus. Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 88–90.

24 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 39.

25 Drake and Sobel, op. cit. (23), p. 52. On general problems of interdisciplinarity in planetary science in this period see Doel, op. cit. (18), pp. 138–150.

26 Thomas, op. cit. (16), pp. 192 (Kuiper and Shneour), 203 (Kellogg).

27 Thomas, op. cit. (16); Drake and Sobel, op. cit. (23), pp. 54–55.

28 Dick and Strick, op. cit. (18), p. 3.

29 Woolfe, Audra, ‘Germs in space: Joshua Lederberg, exobiology, and the public imagination, 1958–1964’, Isis (2002) 93, pp. 183–205. On Hoyle see Gregory, Jane, ‘The popularization and excommunication of Fred Hoyle's “life-from-space” theory’, Public Understanding of Science (2003) 12(1), pp. 25–46.

30 Dick and Strick, op. cit. (18).

31 Woolfe, op. cit. (29).

32 Fred Murphy, cited in Davidson, op. cit. (10), p. 149.

33 Davidson, op. cit. (10), p. 150.

34 Davidson, op. cit. (10), p. 148.

35 Shklovskii, Iosif, Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist (tr. Zirin, Mary Fleming and Zirin, Harold), New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1991, p. 251; Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 77–78.

36 Shklovskii, op. cit. (35), p. 252, recalls one addition in which Sagan responded to a mention of dialectical materialism by bringing up the positivistic philosophy of Kant.

37 Woolfe, op. cit. (29). For collaboration with Shklovskii see Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 147–151. For Shklovskii's relationship with the Soviet Union see Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 77–79.

38 Davidson, op. cit. (10), p. 198.

39 Davidson, op. cit. (10), p.198.

40 Davidson, op. cit. (10), p. 205. Sagan had first been recommended for a role as associate editor in 1962 by Kuiper and his thesis examiner Joseph Chamberlain.

41 Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 205–206; Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 116.

42 Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 389–390; Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 265.

43 Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 276–279.

44 Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 276–279.

45 McCurdy, Howard, Space and the American Imagination, New York and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997, pp. 54–56, 77.

46 Sagan quoted in Goodell, op. cit. (9), p. 173.

47 Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 388–392; Shermer, Michael B., ‘The measure of a life: Carl Sagan and the science of biography’, Skeptic (1999) 7(4), pp. 32–39.

48 Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 389–392.

49 Shermer, op. cit. (2); Joel Achenbach, ‘The final frontier’, Washington Post, 30 May 1996, p. C1.

50 See Goodell, op. cit. (9); Fahy, op. cit. (2).

51 Gregory, op. cit. (29).

52 Dick and Strick, op. cit. (18).

53 Goodell, op. cit. (9), pp. 169–174.

54 Sagan, Carl, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, New York: Random House, 1997.

55 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 116–117, 194–195, describes perceptions of his work, including a collaboration with Edwin E. Saltpeter which examined the possibility of balloon-like life on Jupiter (later used by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in his story ‘A meeting with Medusa’).

56 Henry S.F. Cooper, ‘A resonance with something alive’, New Yorker, 21 June 1976, p. 39.

57 Klopfer, P.H., ‘The Dragons of Eden: speculations on the evolution of human intelligence’, Quarterly Review of Biology (1978 ) 53(4), p. 495; Maya Pines, ‘Matters of the mind, The Dragons of Eden: speculations on the evolution of human intelligence’, Washington Post, 29 May 1977, p. 119.

58 George Gaylord Simpson quoted in Dick and Strick, op. cit. (18), p. 18.

59 See, for example, Narlikar, Jayant, ‘Fred Hoyle's universe’, Resonance (2010) 15(10), pp. 875–904; Mitten, Simon, ‘Fred Hoyle's biggest bang’, The Lancet (2001) 358(9284), pp. 780–780; Gregory, op. cit. (29).

60 Sagan, Dorion, ‘Truth of my father’, in Margulis, Lynn and Sagan, Dorion, Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007, pp. 8–15, 8.

61 Goodell, op. cit. (9), p. 163; see also 162–174. For more on multimedia see Fahy, op. cit. (2); LaFollette, op. cit. (7); Nelkin, op. cit. (14).

62 Star, Susan Leigh and Griesemer, James R., ‘Institutional ecology, translations, and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science (1989) 19(3), pp. 387–420; Latour, Bruno, ‘Drawing things together’, in Lynch, Michael and Woolgar, Steve (eds.), Representation in Scientific Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990 pp. 19–68. For another study of the scientist's presence as an object see Mialet, Hélène, Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.

63 Macauley, William, ‘Inscribing scientific knowledge: interstellar communication, NASA's Pioneer plaque, and contact with cultures of the imagination 1971–1972’, in Geppert, Alexander C.T. (ed.), Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 286–309.

64 Edward Edelson, ‘Star struck: the cosmic connection, an extraterrestrial perspective’, Washington Post, 25 November 1973, p. BW4; see also Cooper, op. cit. (56); Samuel Mines, ‘Spies in the sky? UFOs: a scientific debate edited by Carl Sagan and Thornton Page’, Washington Post, 28 January 1973, p. BW6; Pines, op. cit. (57).

65 Goodell, op. cit. (9), pp. 29–35; LaFollette, Marcel C., Making Science Our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910–1955, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.

66 Timothy Ferris, ‘A conversation with Carl Sagan’, Rolling Stone, 7 June 1973, pp. 26–30; for the Tonight show see Boyce Rensberger, ‘Carl Sagan: obliged to explain’, New York Times, 29 May 1977, p. 8; and Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 177.

67 For counterculturalism see Ferris, op. cit. (66); and Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 174–176; for appearance see Goodell, op. cit. (9), pp. 163–166; and Pines, op. cit. (57); for connections to film directors see Harris, op. cit. (1); and Cooper, op. cit. (56); for the Voyager music see Drake and Sobel, op. cit. (23), pp. 184–190; and Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 303, 345. How much of this was deliberate on Sagan's part is a fraught question, though Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 175–177, suggests that the title of his book The Cosmic Connection was a conscious move to increase his countercultural appeal – and to sell more copies amongst Rolling Stone readers.

68 Gieryn, op. cit. (14).

69 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 104, 173–175; Cooper, op. cit. (56), p. 27.

70 Sagan, op. cit. (60), p. 8; Berendzen quoted in Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 72. These recollections may, of course, not be entirely reliable; nevertheless, reading transcripts of Sagan's interviews, it is notable how prose-like they are – see Head, Tom, Conversations with Carl Sagan, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

71 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 178, 263; Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 332–333.

72 Harris, op. cit. (1), p. 47; Cooper, op. cit. (56), pp. 20–22; Goodell, op. cit. (9), pp. 163–164. Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 261, relates a story of a New Orleans astronomical society that took to wearing turtleneck sweaters in honour of Sagan.

73 Schaffer, Simon, ‘Mutability, mobility and meteorites: on some material cultures of the sciences’, STS Occasional Papers, 2014, UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies.

74 For background see LaFollette, op. cit. (7), pp. 156–159.

75 Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 329–330; Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 257–260.

76 The famous ‘cosmic calendar’ in the opening episode first appeared in Sagan's Dragons of Eden (op. cit. (54)), while the much-cited ‘star-stuff’ and reference to material from space as ‘manna’ both appeared in Sagan, Carl, The Cosmic Connection, New York: Anchor Press, 1973.

77 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 177.

78 This phenomenon is given a fascinating slant in Mialet, op. cit. (62). Motives behind continuing the ‘glamor-boy of astronomy’ image varied between parties – Sagan and collaborator Gentry Lee wanted to promote flagging public interest in planetary exploration (McCurdy, op. cit. 45, pp. 58, 78); director Adrian Malone wished to ‘make a star out of Sagan’ as he had done with Jacob Bronowski (Shirley Arden in Spangenburg and Moser, op. cit. (10), p. 95); KCET saw Sagan's image as good for marketing (see Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 256–257); for the purported role of Sagan's ego see Lynn Margulis in Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 81.

79 Richard Berendzen quoted in Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 260.

80 John J. O'Connor, ‘TV view: ‘Cosmos – a trip into outer space’, New York Times, 28 September 1980, p. 330; Eliot Fremont-Smith quoted in Davidson, op. cit. (10), p. 334. For mockery see John J. O'Connor, ‘Putting Cosmos in perspective’, New York Times, 14 December 1980, p. 36; and recollections from colleagues in Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 333–338.

81 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 282. This reputation had been circulating amongst the scientific community for decades – even the largely hagiographic Men of Space profile noted that ‘sometimes, Sagan's air of confidence is provoking. His assurance … has caused rancor’. Thomas, op. cit. (16), p. 186. But responses to Cosmos gave this a vast new audience.

82 Glenn Collins, ‘Sagans mix fact and fiction’, New York Times, 27 October 1985, p. 15E. Some have suggested that director Adrian Malone, with whom Sagan had a fraught relationship, deliberately included these shots to embarrass Sagan – see Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 260. Despite criticisms, the show was extremely popular. John O'Connor, ‘Putting Cosmos in perspective’, op. cit. (80), noted that ‘in terms of audience ratings, it is among the most popular television series produced for the Public Broadcasting Service’. Davidson, op. cit. (10), p. 318, estimates that by 1999 the show had been watched by over 400 million people.

83 See the collected interviews in Head, op. cit. (70).

84 Sagan, Carl, ‘Why we need to understand science’, Skeptical Inquirer (1990) 14(3), pp. 263–269, 266. Earlier he used ‘seeing’ instead of ‘thinking’ – see his 1981 interview in Head, op. cit. (70), p. 73.

85 Carl Sagan, Cosmos, New York: Random House, pp. xii–xiii.

86 Sagan, Carl, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, New York, Ballatine Books, 1997, p. 28.

87 Jonathan Cott, ‘The cosmos’, Rolling Stone, 8 January 1981, p. 65; ‘A slayer of demons’, Psychology Today, January 1996, p. 30. Dragons of Eden was criticized by neurologists for siding with the contentious ‘triune brain’ model. Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 254.

88 ‘A slayer of demons’, op. cit. (87).

89 Sagan, Carl, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, New York: Ballatine Books, 1996, pp. 242–244, emphasis added.

90 See Sagan, op. cit. (54); and reviews, op. cit. (64).

91 Sagan, op. cit. (54), discusses psychology; Sagan, Carl, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are (with Druyan, Ann), New York: Ballatine Books, 1993, discusses human evolution; and Sagan, Broca's Brain, New York: Random House, 1978; and Sagan, op. cit. (86), feature a variety of topics. Sagan is the only scientist in Goodell, op. cit. (9), who popularized outside their professional experience. For criticism see especially D. Holzman, ‘Whose brain is it, anyway? Why the politics of science is a beastly business’, Washington Post, 2 December 1984, p. SM6; and Pines, op. cit. (57).

92 See, for instance, his discussion of the Mars lander in Carl Sagan, Cosmos: A Spacetime Voyage, Episode 5, ‘Blues for a red planet’, PBS, first broadcast 26 October 1980.

93 LaFollette, op. cit. (7), pp. 6, 156–157.

94 The Cosmos team used to refer to Sagan's ‘Delphic oracle mode’. Spangenburg and Moser, op. cit. (10), p. 98.

95 Carl Sagan, Cosmos: A Spacetime Voyage, Episode 6, ‘Travellers’ tales’, PBS, first broadcast 2 November 1980.

96 Richard A. Baer, ‘TV: Carl Sagan's narrow view of the cosmos’, Wall Street Journal, 24 October 1980, p. 35; O'Connor, ‘Putting Cosmos in perspective’, op. cit. (80). See also David Paul Rebovich, ‘Sagan's metaphysical parable’, Social Science and Modern Society, July 1981, pp. 91–95; Cooper, op. cit. (56), Dennis Meredith, ‘Carl Sagan's cosmic connection and extraterrestrial life-wish’, Science Digest, June 1979, p. 34. Sagan's ‘innocent scientism’ featured in Walker, Percy's satirical work Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, New York: Picador, 1983, pp. 173, 201, cited in Davidson, op. cit. (10), pp. 336–337.

97 Steward Brand quoted in Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. 263.

98 Oreskes and Conway, op. cit. (8), p. 48. ‘TTAPS’ came from the names of the authors: Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas Ackerman, Jim Pollack and Sagan.

99 Badash, op. cit. (8), p. 66.

100 Oreskes and Conway, op. cit. (8), pp. 51–54, 64.

101 Oreskes and Conway, op. cit. (8), pp. 49–51, 64; Badash, op. cit. (8), pp. 81–85. There are echoes of Hoyle's approach to his life-from-space theory. See Woolfe, op. cit. (29); Gregory, op. cit. (29).

102 Bowler, Peter J., The Fontana History of the Environmental Sciences, London: Fontana, 1992, pp. 392–397; Weart, Spencer R., ‘Global warming, Cold War, and the evolution of research plans’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences (1997) 27(2), pp. 319–356.

103 Demeritt, David, ‘The construction of global warming and the politics of science’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2001) 91(2), pp. 307–337.

104 Demeritt, op. cit. (103).

105 Badash, Lawrence, ‘Nuclear winter: scientists in the political arena’, Physics in Perspective (2001) 3, pp. 76–105.

106 Dörries, op. cit. (8).

107 Dörries, op. cit. (8).

108 The use of varying tactics within popular communication has been considered with reference to numerous scientific communicators – see, in particular, Gieryn on in, John Tyndall ‘Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists’, American Sociological Review (1983) 48(6), pp. 781–795; Gregory, op. cit. (29).

109 For left-wing activism see Badash, op. cit. (8), pp. 86–87; and Oreskes and Conway, op. cit. (8), pp. 44–45, 52–53 for summaries; for an example, see Carl Sagan, Cosmos: A Spacetime Voyage, Episode 13, ‘Travellers’ tales’, PBS, first broadcast 21 December 1980.

110 Sagan, Carl, ‘Nuclear war and climatic catastrophe: some policy implications’, Foreign Affairs (1983) 62(2), pp. 257–292, 258. TTAPS had been subjected to an unconventional workshop-based peer-review process. Oreskes and Conway, op. cit. (8), p. 49.

111 The editorial mission of Foreign Affairs has consistently stated that ‘technical articles will be left to more special magazines’. See www.foreignaffairs.com/about-us, accessed 26 May 2013.

112 Sagan, op. cit. (110), p. 261; for scientific jargon see especially 263–267; for military terminology see 260–261.

113 Sagan, op. cit. (110), p. 257.

114 Badash, op. cit. (8), p. 3, 66.

115 Carl Sagan, ‘The nuclear winter’, Parade, 30 October 1983, pp. 4–7, 5.

116 For discussion of news values see Gregory, Jane and Miller, Steve, Science in Public: Communication, Culture, and Credibility, Cambridge, MA: Perseus Press, 1998, pp. 110–113; and Nelkin, op. cit. (14), pp. 112–113; for Sagan's relationship with Parade see Badash, op. cit. (8), p. 66.

117 For ‘oracle’ image see note 94 above. The format of the ‘lay sermon’ had been developed in the nineteenth century by T.H. Huxley. See Desmond, op. cit. (14). See also discussion of John Tyndall's boundary drawing between science and religion in Gieryn, op. cit. (14). I thank an anonymized reviewer for this point.

118 See Rebovich, op. cit. (96).

119 Dick and Strick, op. cit. (18), p. 123.

120 Sagan, op. cit. (110), p. 257.

121 James R. Dickenson, ‘Sagan, defense official clash on nuclear winter’, Washington Post, 15 March 1985, p. A30.

122 Dickenson, op. cit. (121).

123 William Buckley, ‘The specter of nuclear winter’, Washington Post, 22 April 1985, p. A15.

124 Russell Seitz, ‘The melting of “nuclear winter”’, Wall Street Journal, 5 November 1986, p. 36. The Wall Street Journal ‘had long been a venue for arms race hardliners and anti-environmentalists and a locus of right-wing journalistic crusading’, as noted in Badash, op. cit. (8), p. 91. It should be noted that elsewhere in the piece Seitz was supportive of more ‘sophisticated’ modelling, rather than opposed to modelling de facto. There are wider questions to be asked about how references to ‘computer-generated’ have been used to cast doubt both on mass-media images and on professional scientific models (see Demeritt, op. cit. (103)); however, this is beyond the scope of the current paper.

125 Seitz, op. cit. (124).

126 Seitz, op. cit. (124), emphases added.

127 Rodhe, Henning, ‘A nuclear winter’, Ambio (1984) 13(1), pp. 43–44, 44; Emmanuel, Kerry A., ‘Towards a scientific exercise’, Nature (1986) 6051, p. 259, cited in Badash, op. cit. (8).

128 Maddox, John, ‘From Santorini to Armageddon’, Nature (1984) 307, p. 107, cited in Badash, op. cit. (8), p. 144.

129 Eliot Marshall, ‘Nuclear winter debate heats up’, Science, 16 January 1987, pp. 271–273, 271, cited in Badash, op. cit. (8), p. 296.

130 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), pp. 346, 389–392; Oreskes and Conway, op. cit. (8), p. 64; Achenbach, op. cit. (49).

131 Dick and Strick, op. cit. (18), p. 211.

132 Dick and Strick, op. cit. (18), pp. 192–200.

133 The full title The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (op. cit. 89) is the namesake of the ‘Candle Awards’, given by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in honour of ‘outstanding contributions to the public's understanding of science and scientific principles’. See Nisbet, Matt, ‘Candle in the dark and snuffed candle awards’, Skeptical Inquirer (1999) 23(2), p. 6. For agnosticism see, for example, Joel Achenbach, ‘Carl Sagan denied being an atheist: so what did he believe?’, at www.washingtonpost.com/news/achenblog/wp/2014/07/10/carl-sagan-denied-being-an-atheist-so-what-did-he-believe-part-1, accessed 30 April 2018; Brandon Fibbs, ‘Carl Sagan took my faith: and gave me awe’, at www.richarddawkins.net/2014/03/carl-sagan-took-my-faith-and-gave-me-awe-onfaith, accessed 30 April 2018.

134 Poundstone, op. cit. (10), p. xvii.

135 I thank Matthew Paskins for this point. See also Sivasundaram, Sujit, ‘Sciences and the global: on methods, questions, and theory’, Isis (2010) 101(1), pp. 146–158; and Mialet, Hélène, ‘Do angels have bodies? Two stories about subjectivity in science: the cases of William X and Mister H’, Social Studies of Science (1999) 29(4), pp. 551–581.

136 Latour and Woolgar, op. cit. (5); Latour, op. cit. (62).

137 Fleck, Ludwig, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1935.

138 See http://ilovesciencestore.com/carl-sagan.html?p=3, accessed 5 May 2014.

139 See www.space.com/24955-new-cosmos-show-neil-degrasse-tyson.html, accessed 5 May 2014.

140 Sagan, op. cit. (89), p. 240.