The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [177]
On the night of 20 February 1895 - more than thirty years after Emancipation - following an appearance at a women’s rights rally with Susan B. Anthony, he collapsed and died, a true American hero.
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Significance Junkies
We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.
Henri Poincare (1854-1912)
I hope no one will consider me unduly cynical if I assert that a good first-order model of how commercial and public television programming work is simply this: money is everything. In prime time, a single rating point difference is worth millions of dollars in advertising. Especially since the early 1980s, television has become almost entirely profit-motivated. You can see this, say, in the decline of network news and news specials, or in the pathetic evasions that the major networks offered to circumvent a Federal Communications Commission mandate that they improve the level of children’s programming. (For example, educational virtues were asserted for a cartoon series that systematically misrepresents the technology and lifestyles of our Pleistocene ancestors, and that portrays dinosaurs as pets.) As I write, public television in America is in real danger of losing government support, and the content of commercial programming is in the course of a steep, long-term dumbing down.
In this perspective, fighting for more real science on television seems naive and forlorn. But owners of networks and television producers have children and grandchildren about whose future they rightly worry. They must feel some responsibility for the future of their nation. There is evidence that science programming can be successful, and that people hunger for more of it. I remain hopeful that sooner or later we’ll see real science skilfully and appealingly presented as regular fare on major network television worldwide.
Baseball and soccer have Aztec antecedents. Football is a thinly disguised reenactment of hunting; we played it before we were human. Lacrosse is an ancient Native American game, and hockey is related to it. But basketball is new. We’ve been making movies longer than we’ve been playing basketball.
At first, they didn’t think to make a hole in the peach basket so the ball could be retrieved without climbing a flight of stairs. But in the brief time since then, the game has evolved. In the hands mainly of African-American players, basketball has become - at its best - the paramount synthesis in sport of intelligence, precision, courage, audacity, anticipation, artifice, teamwork, elegance and grace.
Five-foot-three-inch Muggsy Bogues negotiates a forest of giants: Michael Jordan sails in from some outer darkness beyond the free-throw line; Larry Bird threads a precise, no-look pass; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar unleashes a skyhook. This is not fundamentally a contact sport like football. It’s a game of finesse. The full-court press, passes out of the double-team, the pick-and-roll, cutting off the passing lanes, a tip-in from a high-flying forward soaring from out of nowhere all constitute a coordination of intellect and athleticism, a harmony of mind and body. It’s not surprising that the game has caught fire in America.
Ever since National Basketball Association games became a television staple, it’s seemed to me that it could be used to teach science and mathematics. To appreciate a free-throw average of 0.926, you must know something about converting fractions into decimals. A lay-up is Newton’s first law of motion in action. Every shot represents the launching of a basketball on a parabolic arc, a curve determined by the same gravitational physics that specifies the flight of a ballistic missile, or the Earth orbiting the Sun, or a spacecraft on its rendezvous with some distant world. The centre of mass of the player’s body during a slam dunk is briefly in orbit about the centre of the Earth.
To get the ball in the basket, you must loft