Cosmos
by Carl Sagan

List Price: $7.99
Our Price: $4.41
You Save: $3.58 (45%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $1.50 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

• ISBN13: 9780345331359
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Book Reviews of Cosmos

Book Review: The best words ever put in print.
Summary: 5 Stars

Indeed, look at us now:

....for with steady hands, the biologists are splicing and dicing in our genetic kitchens. Shuffling DNA like a deck of cards, they hybridize our fauna and flora, changing and accelerating their evolution. They extract silk from the udders of goats, make plants intolerant to insects, and they build electronic circuits and cure diseases using viruses, which they also engineer to become our friends, not our foes. With confidence and pride in who we are, we are poised to make copies of ourselves, and choose our progeny's phenotype with ease.Tapping on our keyboards, we blast our way through an enormity of DNA strings, finding similarities of our genes with other lifeforms, and discovering our genetic kinship with all life on Earth. What makes us so can now be put on disk: we can now carry our genome in our pocket.

....with objects that loop around our globe, and with others anchored on its surface, the astronomers have found other worlds orbiting other suns. Turning around our cold-war satellites to look outward instead of downward, they have observed the perplexing gamma ray bursters. Beginning as a journey with the naked eye, our technology has expanded our vision across the whole spectrum. Looking up has always been a habit with us. Our evolved up-right posture is a cause and proof of our optimism and confidence. We are natural astronomers.

....the engineers, the computer and cognitive scientists, are teaching machines to think, to talk, to dance, to play cards, to sing, to compose music, to trade, to read and write novels and poetry, to prove theorems, to diagnose our diseases, to judge our cases, to manage our networks, to discover and classify new objects in the heavens and in our accelerators . We find exhiliration in the presence of the silicon geniuses. Their minds are a reflection of ours. In space travel they have become our surrogates.

.....banging gold atoms, electrons, and protons together, the physicists are finding out the patterns of nature. They celebrate the creation of the gluon plasma and the detection of the flavors of neutrinos. Stopping light in matter, they bring about the long anticipated condensation of Bose. With understanding of the world of the small increasing steadily each decade, attention is turned to its engineering, to the rise of the nanomachines.

....we have all hooked up to the Internet spider. We send messages to others half-way around the world. We ping our friends and relatives with our images and our words. Immersing ourselves in exabytes of information, we google through it with delight. The Web has become our playground, our shopping center, our bank, and our oracle....

Indeed, as the author points out in the last chapter of the book, we have walked far. We now sit on the knee of an exponential curve. We become exhilirated at the prospect of whirlwind scientific and technological development. We are confident that this century will be even more breathtaking than the last.

The book summarizes what is best not only about science but also about human existence. Written by one man, it speaks accurately about all humankind. Consisting only of a few hundred pages, it says in print what the vast majority of humans have done throughout history. The author will always be one of my heros, for his optimism in unequaled and his respect for truth constant through time. He explains with joyous enthusiasm the gentle stirring, that quiet feeling of understanding something for the first time: the rhyme and romance of scientific discovery.

Summary of Cosmos

I was positive from my own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics--the origin of life, the Earth, and the Cosmos, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the universe. And I was certain that this interest could be excited through that most powerful communications medium, television.

Sagan's own interest and enthusiasm for the universe were so vivid and infectious, his screen presence so engaging, that viewers and readers couldn't help but be caught up in his vision. From stars in their "billions and billions" to the amino acids in the primordial ocean, Sagan communicated a feeling for science as a process of discovery. Inevitably, some of the science in Cosmos has been outdated in the years since 1980--but Sagan's sense of wonder is ageless. --Mary Ellen Curtin

Astronomy Books

• Books > Subjects > Science & Math > Astronomy & Space Science
• Cosmology
• Earth Sciences > Rivers
• Nature & Ecology
• Reference
• Environment > Weather