Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [99]
Sagan knew there was a wide margin of error in his calculations, but he presented all the possibilities; the ‘tradition of conservatism’ generally works well in science, he said, but is ‘of more dubious applicability when the lives of billions of people are at stake’. So he published his findings. His analysis was greeted with anger by many atomic scientists, and acute lack of interest from government officials. Aware that he wasn’t going to get far by using the standard scientific channels, Sagan joined a group of people who felt that the stakes were high enough to merit direct action.
At the time of his arrest, the United States was continuing with a programme of weapons testing, even though the Soviet Union had called a unilateral halt to such tests. Two years earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev had announced that the fortieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima – 6 August 1985 – would mark the beginning of a Soviet moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons. President Reagan declared the move nothing more than a propaganda exercise and refused to follow suit.
On that day in 1987, more than two thousand people gathered at the Nevada test site ahead of the year’s first nuclear test. Sagan and 437 others were arrested and bussed to nearby Beatty, Nevada, where they were booked, charged with trespassing or resisting arrest (or both) and then released pending trial.
Carl Sagan’s fight was against the misguided belief that scientists should not interfere with how their work is applied. He did not endorse the post-war rebranding of science and was not prepared to behave like one of the timid monks that Jacob Bronowski had identified as representing the new, craven spirit of science. It was not just in the sphere of nuclear proliferation: Sagan wanted the walls surrounding science to come down, and did his utmost to communicate the delight, the findings and the implications of science to the public. Sadly, it won him few friends among scientists.
Sagan was passed over for tenure at Harvard and denied membership of the US National Academy of Sciences after becoming famous for talking directly to the public through books, magazine articles and TV programmes. The atomic physics pioneer Edward Teller once spluttered to Sagan’s biographer Keay Davidson that Sagan was ‘a nobody’ who ‘never did anything worthwhile’. Yet when Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer took it upon himself to analyse the truth of this statement, he found that, in terms of peer-reviewed publications in journals, Sagan was among the greats. For lifetime publications he ranks alongside Jared Diamond, E.O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould. From 1983 to 1996, the years in which he was at the peak of his media exposure and popular writing, Sagan was still turning out more than one scientific paper per month. His peers, though, saw him as nothing more credible than ‘a publicist’ for science. ‘What Sagan was most famous for, and what got him in the biggest trouble with the academic establishment, was his Brobdingnagian outpouring of popular articles and interviews,’ Shermer says.
After his coming of age in the post-war era, Sagan came to see that science is a tool used for political purposes – and that scientists had largely ignored their responsibilities to make sure that it is used the right way. He became passionately committed to returning science to its proper function of exploring the universe and, where possible, making it a better place to be.
In the early 1970s, environmental scientist James Lovelock wanted to find a way to measure how air moved around the globe. He soon realised that the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) molecules that were then found in every refrigerator, freezer, can of hairspray or deodorant and myriad other products were a godsend. Once released, CFCs are stable in the atmosphere – they don’t break down easily. They are also not naturally occurring: they enter the atmosphere only above populated