Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning About the Decline of Scientific Thinking in America: Watch His Final Interview (1996)

in Current Affairs, Science | April 18th, 2025

Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) con­tin­ued doing what he did all along — pop­u­lar­iz­ing sci­ence and “enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly con­vey­ing the won­ders of the uni­verse to mil­lions of peo­ple on tele­vi­sion and in books.” When­ev­er Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show with John­ny Car­son dur­ing the 70s and 80s, his goal was to con­nect with every­day Amer­i­cans — peo­ple who did­n’t sub­scribe to Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can — and increase the pub­lic’s under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of sci­ence.

At the end of his life, Sagan still cared deeply about where sci­ence stood in the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion. But while los­ing a bat­tle with myelodys­pla­sia, Sagan also sensed that sci­en­tif­ic think­ing was los­ing ground in Amer­i­ca, and even more omi­nous­ly with­in the cham­bers of the Newt Gin­grich-led Con­gress.

Dur­ing his final inter­view, aired on May 27, 1996, Sagan issued a strong warn­ing, telling Char­lie Rose:

We’ve arranged a soci­ety on sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in which nobody under­stands any­thing about sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, and this com­bustible mix­ture of igno­rance and pow­er soon­er or lat­er is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is run­ning the sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in a democ­ra­cy if the peo­ple don’t know any­thing about it.

And he also went on to add:

And the sec­ond rea­son that I’m wor­ried about this is that sci­ence is more than a body of knowl­edge. It’s a way of think­ing. A way of skep­ti­cal­ly inter­ro­gat­ing the uni­verse with a fine under­stand­ing of human fal­li­bil­i­ty. If we are not able to ask skep­ti­cal ques­tions, to inter­ro­gate those who tell us that some­thing is true, to be skep­ti­cal of those in author­i­ty, then we’re up for grabs for the next char­la­tan polit­i­cal or reli­gious who comes ambling along.

Near­ly 30 years lat­er, we have reached that point. Under the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion, DOGE has rushed to dis­man­tle the sci­en­tif­ic infra­struc­ture of our gov­ern­ment, hap­haz­ard­ly cut­ting the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion, the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, and NASA. Next, they’re going after our lead­ing research uni­ver­si­ties, inten­tion­al­ly weak­en­ing the research engine that has fueled the growth of Amer­i­can corporations—and the over­all Amer­i­can economy—since World War II. And they’re replac­ing sci­en­tif­ic lead­ers with char­la­tans like RFK Jr. who dab­ble in the very pseu­do­science that Sagan warned us about. Need­less to say, our com­peti­tors aren’t mak­ing the same mis­takes. Few seri­ous gov­ern­ments are stu­pid enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Steps a Pres­i­dent Would Take to Destroy His Nation, Accord­ing to Elon Musk’s AI Chat­bot, Grok

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing

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A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets

in History, Science, Technology | April 16th, 2025

The Aus­tri­an mil­i­tary engi­neer Con­rad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, con­sid­er­ing that he was work­ing on rock­ets aimed for out­er space back in the mid-six­teenth cen­tu­ry. Need­less to say, he nev­er actu­al­ly man­aged to launch any­thing into the upper atmos­phere. But you have to give him cred­it for get­ting as far as he did with the idea, a con­sid­er­able progress doc­u­ment­ed in his trea­tise “How You Must Make Quite a Nice Rock­et That Can Trav­el Itself into the Heights,” which no doubt sounds bet­ter in the orig­i­nal Ger­man. As Kaushik Pato­wary notes at Amus­ing Plan­et, its 450 pages are “filled with draw­ings and tech­ni­cal data on artillery, bal­lis­tics and detailed descrip­tions of mul­ti­stage rock­ets.”

“Born in 1509 in Dorn­bach, now part of Vien­na, to a Ger­man fam­i­ly from Bavaria,” Haas moved to Tran­syl­va­nia, then part of the Aus­tri­an Empire, ear­ly in his adult­hood. “In 1551, Haas was invit­ed by Stephen Bátho­ry, the grand prince of Tran­syl­va­nia, to Her­mannstadt (now Sibiu, Roma­nia), where he became the com­man­der of the artillery bar­racks and a weapons engi­neer.”

It was in this pro­fes­sion­al capac­i­ty that he began his research into rock­etry, which led him to dis­cov­er the con­cept of “a cylin­dri­cal thrust cham­ber filled with a pow­der pro­pel­lant, with a con­i­cal hole to pro­gres­sive­ly increase the com­bus­tion area and con­se­quent­ly the thrust,” a clear intel­lec­tu­al ances­tor of the mul­ti-stage design “still used in mod­ern rock­ets.”

Haas’ is the ear­li­est sci­en­tif­ic work on rock­ets known to have been under­tak­en in Europe. And until fair­ly recent­ly, it had been for­got­ten: only in 1961 was his man­u­script found in Sibi­u’s pub­lic archives, which moti­vat­ed Roma­nia to claim Haas as the first rock­et sci­en­tist. Though anachro­nis­tic, that des­ig­na­tion does under­score the far-sight­ed­ness of Haas’ world­view. So do the per­son­al words he includ­ed in his chap­ter about the mil­i­tary use of rock­ets. “My advice is for more peace and no war, leav­ing the rifles calm­ly in stor­age, so the bul­let is not fired, the gun­pow­der is not burned or wet, so the prince keeps his mon­ey, the arse­nal mas­ter his life,” he wrote. But giv­en what he must have learned while liv­ing in polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble Euro­pean bor­der­lands, he sure­ly under­stood, on some lev­el, that it would be eas­i­er to get to the moon.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 16th-Cen­tu­ry Astron­o­my Book Fea­tured “Ana­log Com­put­ers” to Cal­cu­late the Shape of the Moon, the Posi­tion of the Sun, and More

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

The Great­est Shot in Tele­vi­sion: Sci­ence His­to­ri­an James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

Meet the Mys­te­ri­ous Genius Who Patent­ed the UFO

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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What the World Will Look Like in 250 Million Years: Mapping the Distant Future

in Science | April 14th, 2025

Most of us now accept the idea that all of Earth­’s con­ti­nents were once part of a sin­gle, enor­mous land mass. That was­n’t the case in the ear­ly nine­teen-tens, when the geol­o­gist Alfred Wegen­er (1880–1930) first pub­li­cized his the­o­ry of not just the super­con­ti­nent Pangea, but also of the phe­nom­e­non of con­ti­nen­tal drift that caused it to break apart into the series of shapes we all know from class­room world maps. But as humor­ous­ly explained in the Map Men video above, Wegen­er did­n’t live to see these ideas con­vince the world. Only after his death did oth­er sci­en­tists fig­ure out just how the geo­log­i­cal churn­ing under the plan­et’s sur­face caused the con­ti­nents to drift apart in the first place.

With that infor­ma­tion in place, Pangea no longer seemed like the crack­pot notion it had when Wegen­er ini­tial­ly pro­posed it. Less wide­ly appre­ci­at­ed, even today, is the deter­mi­na­tion that, as the Map Men put it, “Pangea, far from being the orig­i­nal super­con­ti­nent, was actu­al­ly the eleventh to have formed in Earth­’s his­to­ry.”

It seems that the con­ti­nents have been cycli­cal­ly break­ing apart and com­ing togeth­er again, with no sign of the process stop­ping. When, then, will we next find our­selves back on a super­con­ti­nent? Per­haps in 250 mil­lion years or so, accord­ing to the “Novopangea” mod­el explained in the video, which has the Pacif­ic ocean clos­ing up as Aus­tralia slots into East Asia and North Amer­i­ca while Antarc­ti­ca drifts north.


Oth­er mod­els also exist, includ­ing Auri­ca, “where Eura­sia splits in half, and both the Pacif­ic and Atlantic oceans close up”; Pangea Ulti­ma, “where Britain gets clos­er to Amer­i­ca”; and Ama­sia, “where all the con­ti­nents con­gre­gate around the North Pole, except Antarc­ti­ca” (whose drift pat­terns make it seem like “the lazi­est con­ti­nent”). At this kind of time scale, small changes in the basic assump­tions can result in very dif­fer­ent-look­ing super­con­ti­nents indeed, not that any of us will be around to see how the next Pangea real­ly takes shape. Nev­er­the­less, in this age when we can hard­ly go a week with­out encoun­ter­ing pre­dic­tions of human­i­ty’s immi­nent extinc­tion, it’s refresh­ing to find a sub­ject that lets us even con­sid­er look­ing a quar­ter-bil­lion years down the road.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Bil­lion Years of Tec­ton­ic-Plate Move­ment in 40 Sec­onds: A Quick Glimpse of How Our World Took Shape

The Plate Tec­ton­ic Evo­lu­tion of the Earth Over 500 Mil­lion Years: Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Mil­lion Years in the Future

Map Show­ing Where Today’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

Pangea to the Present to the Future: Watch Ani­ma­tions Show­ing 500 Mil­lion Years of Con­ti­nen­tal Drift

Paper Ani­ma­tion Tells Curi­ous Sto­ry of How a Mete­o­rol­o­gist The­o­rized Pan­gaea & Con­ti­nen­tal Drift (1910)

A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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This Is What a Nuclear Strike Would Feel Like: A Precise Simulation

in Current Affairs, Science, Technology | March 28th, 2025

Though cer­tain gen­er­a­tions may have grown up trained to take cov­er under their class­room desks in the case of a nuclear show­down between the Unit­ed States and the Sovi­et Union, few of us today can believe that we’d stand much chance if we found our­selves any­where near a det­o­nat­ed mis­sile. Still, the prob­a­ble effects of a nuclear blast do bear repeat­ing, which the New York Times video above does not just con­vey ver­bal­ly but also visu­al­ly, deriv­ing its infor­ma­tion “from inter­views of mil­i­tary offi­cials and com­put­er sci­en­tists who say we’re speed­ing toward the next nuclear arms race.”

The last nuclear arms race may have been bad enough, but the rel­e­vant tech­nolo­gies have great­ly advanced since the Cold War — which, with the last major arms treaty between the U.S. and Rus­sia set to expire with­in a year, looks set to re-open. Don’t both­er wor­ry­ing about a whole arse­nal: just one mis­sile is enough to do much more dam­age than you’re prob­a­bly imag­in­ing. That’s the sce­nario envi­sioned in the video: “trav­el­ing at blis­ter­ing speeds,” the nuke det­o­nates over its tar­get city, and “every­one in range is briefly blind­ed. Then comes the roar of 9,000 tons of TNT,” pro­duc­ing a fire­ball “hot­ter than the sur­face of the sun.” And that’s just the begin­ning of the trou­ble.

A destruc­tive “blast wave” emanates from the site of the explo­sion, “and then… dark­ness.” The air is full of “dust and glass frag­ments,” mak­ing it dif­fi­cult, even dead­ly, to breathe. What’s worse, “no help is on the way: med­ical work­ers in the imme­di­ate area are dead or injured.” For sur­vivors, there begins the “radi­a­tion sick­ness, nau­sea, vom­it­ing, and diar­rhea”; some of the dead­liest effects don’t even man­i­fest for weeks. “The imme­di­ate toll of this one war­head: thou­sands dead, expo­nen­tial­ly more wound­ed. Dam­age to the ecosys­tem will linger for years.” Indeed, the extent of the dam­age is too great to pon­der with­out resort to gal­lows humor, as evi­denced by the video’s cur­rent top com­ment: “My boss would still force me to come into the office the next day.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Would Hap­pen If a Nuclear Bomb Hit a Major City Today: A Visu­al­iza­tion of the Destruc­tion

See Every Nuclear Explo­sion in His­to­ry: 2153 Blasts from 1945–2015

Pro­tect and Sur­vive: 1970s British Instruc­tion­al Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

Every Nuclear Bomb Explo­sion in His­to­ry, Ani­mat­ed

When the Wind Blows: An Ani­mat­ed Tale of Nuclear Apoc­a­lypse With Music by Roger Waters & David Bowie (1986)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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NASA Visualizes the Ocean Currents in Motion: A Mesmerizing View of Earth’s Underwater Highways

in Environment, Nature, Science | March 25th, 2025

The mes­mer­iz­ing video above lets you visu­al­ize the ocean cur­rents around the world. Using data from space­craft, buoys, and oth­er mea­sure­ments, the visu­al­iza­tion shows the ocean in motion, with the cur­rents cre­at­ing Van Gogh-like swirls around the globe.

Accord­ing to NASA, “the ocean has been [his­tor­i­cal­ly] dif­fi­cult to mod­el. Sci­en­tists strug­gled in years past to sim­u­late ocean cur­rents or accu­rate­ly pre­dict fluc­tu­a­tions in tem­per­a­ture, salin­i­ty, and oth­er prop­er­ties. As a result, mod­els of ocean dynam­ics rapid­ly diverged from real­i­ty, which meant they could only pro­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion for brief peri­ods.” This all changed, how­ev­er, when NASA and oth­er part­ners devel­oped ECCO, short for “Esti­mat­ing the Cir­cu­la­tion and Cli­mate of the Ocean.” “By apply­ing the laws of physics to data from mul­ti­ple satel­lites and thou­sands of float­ing sen­sors, NASA sci­en­tists and their col­lab­o­ra­tors built ECCO to be a real­is­tic, detailed, and con­tin­u­ous ocean mod­el that spans decades.” “The project pro­vides mod­els that are the best pos­si­ble recon­struc­tion of the past 30 years of the glob­al ocean. It allows us to under­stand the ocean’s phys­i­cal process­es at scales that are not nor­mal­ly observ­able.” Watch above as years of ocean data come to life in a crisp, com­pelling visu­al­iza­tion.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent 

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

What the Earth Would Look Like If We Drained the Water from the Oceans

A Fas­ci­nat­ing 3D Ani­ma­tion Shows the Depths of the Ocean

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A Boy and His Atom: Watch The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film

in Science, Technology | March 17th, 2025

What you’re watch­ing above isn’t your ordi­nary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom – holds the Guin­ness World Record for being the World’s Small­est Stop-Motion Film. It’s lit­er­al­ly a movie made with atoms, cre­at­ed by IBM nanophysi­cists who have “used a scan­ning tun­nel­ing micro­scope to move thou­sands of car­bon monox­ide mol­e­cules, all in the pur­suit of mak­ing a movie so small it can be seen only when you mag­ni­fy it 100 mil­lion times.” If you’re won­der­ing what that means exact­ly, then I’d encour­age you to watch the behind-the-scenes doc­u­men­tary below. It takes you right onto the set — or, rather into the lab­o­ra­to­ries — where IBM sci­en­tists reveal how they move 5,000 mol­e­cules around, cre­at­ing a sto­ry frame by frame. As you watch the doc­u­men­tary, you’ll real­ize how far nan­otech­nol­o­gy has come since Richard Feyn­man laid the con­cep­tu­al foun­da­tions for the field in 1959.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nano Gui­tar: Dis­cov­er the World’s Small­est, Playable Micro­scop­ic Gui­tar

Richard Feyn­man Intro­duces the World to Nan­otech­nol­o­gy with Two Sem­i­nal Lec­tures (1959 & 1984)

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

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Puppets of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens & Edgar Allan Poe Star in 1957 Frank Capra Educational Film

in Education, Science, Television | March 13th, 2025

Pro­duced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Tele­phone Sci­ence Hour TV spe­cials antic­i­pate the lit­er­ary zani­ness of The Mup­pet Show and the sci­en­tif­ic enthu­si­asm of Cos­mos. The “ship of the imag­i­na­tion” in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cos­mos reboot may in fact owe some­thing to the episode above, one of nine, direct­ed by none oth­er than It’s A Won­der­ful Life’s Frank Capra. “Strap on your wits and hop on your mag­ic car­pet,” begins the spe­cial, “You’ve got one, you know: Your imag­i­na­tion.” As a guide for our imag­i­na­tion, The Strange Case of the Cos­mic Rays enlists the humanities—specifically three pup­pets rep­re­sent­ing Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dick­ens, and, some­what incon­gru­ous­ly for its detec­tive theme, Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky, who plays the foil as an incu­ri­ous spoil­sport. The show’s host, Frank Bax­ter (“Dr. Research”) was actu­al­ly a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at UCLA and appears here with Richard Carl­son, explain­ing sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts with con­fi­dence.

The one-hour films became very pop­u­lar as tools of sci­ence edu­ca­tion, but there are good reasons—other than their dat­ed­ness or Dr. Baxter’s expertise—to approach them crit­i­cal­ly. At times, the degree of spec­u­la­tion indulged by Bax­ter and the writ­ers strains creduli­ty. For exam­ple, writes Geoff Alexan­der in Aca­d­e­m­ic Films for the Class­room: A His­to­ry, 1958’s The Unchained God­dess (above) “intro­duces the view­er to bizarre con­cepts such as the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ‘steer­ing’ hur­ri­canes away from land by cre­at­ing bio-haz­ards such as ocean borne oil-slicks and intro­duc­ing oil-based ocean fires.” These grim, fos­sil fuel indus­try-friend­ly sce­nar­ios nonethe­less open­ly acknowl­edged the pos­si­bil­i­ty of man-made cli­mate change and looked for­ward to solar ener­gy.

Along with some dystopi­an weird­ness, the series also con­tains a good deal of explic­it Chris­t­ian pros­e­ly­tiz­ing, thanks to Capra. As a con­di­tion for tak­ing the job, “the renowned direc­tor would be allowed to embed reli­gious mes­sages in the films.” As Capra him­self said to AT&T pres­i­dent Cleo F. Craig:

If I make a sci­ence film, I will have to say that sci­en­tif­ic research is just anoth­er expres­sion of the Holy Spir­it… I will say that sci­ence, in essence, is just anoth­er facet of man’s quest for God.

At times, writes Alexan­der, “the reli­gious per­spec­tive is tak­en to extremes,” as in the first episode, Our Mr. Sun, which begins with a quo­ta­tion from Psalms and admon­ish­es “view­ers who would dare to ques­tion the causal rela­tion­ship between solar ener­gy and the divin­i­ty.” The Unchained God­dess, above, is the fourth in the series, and Capra’s last.

After­ward, a direc­tor named Owen Crump took over duties on the next four episodes. His films, writes Alexan­der, “did not overt­ly pros­e­ly­tize” and “relied less on ani­mat­ed char­ac­ters inter­act­ing with Dr. Bax­ter.” (Watch the Crump-direct­ed Gate­ways to the Mind above, a more sober-mind­ed, yet still strange­ly off-kil­ter, inquiry into the five sens­es.) The last film, The Rest­less Sea was pro­duced by Walt Dis­ney and direct­ed by Les Clark, and starred Dis­ney him­self and Bax­ter’s replace­ment, Ster­ling Hol­loway.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oscar-Win­ning Direc­tor Frank Capra Made an Edu­ca­tion­al Sci­ence Film Warn­ing of Cli­mate Change in 1958

The Great­est Shot in Tele­vi­sion: Sci­ence His­to­ri­an James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

Pri­vate Sna­fu: The World War II Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons Cre­at­ed by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel Blanc

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Who Was the Greatest Scientific Mind in History

in History, Science | February 10th, 2025

Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talk­ing up not just sci­ence itself, but also its prac­ti­tion­ers. If asked to name the great­est sci­en­tist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it — or even to find him­self unable to choose. But that’s hard­ly Tyson’s style, as evi­denced by the clip above from his 92nd Street Y con­ver­sa­tion with Fareed Zakaria. “Who do you think is the most extra­or­di­nary sci­en­tif­ic mind that human­i­ty has pro­duced?” Zakaria asks. “There’s no con­test,” Tyson imme­di­ate­ly responds. “Isaac New­ton.”

Those famil­iar with Tyson will know he would be pre­pared for the fol­low-up. By way of expla­na­tion, he nar­rates cer­tain events of New­ton’s life: “He, work­ing alone, dis­cov­ers the laws of motion. Then he dis­cov­ers the law of grav­i­ty.” Faced with the ques­tion of why plan­ets orbit in ellipses rather than per­fect cir­cles, he first invents inte­gral and dif­fer­en­tial cal­cu­lus in order to deter­mine the answer. Then he dis­cov­ers the laws of optics. “Then he turns 26.” At this point in the sto­ry, young lis­ten­ers who aspire to sci­en­tif­ic careers of their own will be ner­vous­ly recal­cu­lat­ing their own intel­lec­tu­al and pro­fes­sion­al tra­jec­to­ries.

They must remem­ber that New­ton was a man of his place and time, specif­i­cal­ly the Eng­land of the late sev­en­teenth and ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­turies. And even there, he was an out­lier the likes of which his­to­ry has hard­ly known, whose eccen­tric ten­den­cies also inspired him to come up with pow­dered toad-vom­it lozenges and pre­dict the date of the apoc­a­lypse (not that he’s yet been proven wrong on that score). But in our time as in his, future (or cur­rent) sci­en­tists would do well to inter­nal­ize New­ton’s spir­it of inquiry, which got him pre­scient­ly won­der­ing whether, for instance, “the stars of the night sky are just like our sun, but just much, much far­ther away.”

“Great sci­en­tists are not marked by their answers, but by how great their ques­tions are.” To find such ques­tions, one needs not just curios­i­ty, but also humil­i­ty before the expanse of one’s own igno­rance. “I do not know what I may appear to the world,” New­ton once wrote, “but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy play­ing on the seashore, and divert­ing myself in now and then find­ing a smoother peb­ble or a pret­ti­er shell than ordi­nary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undis­cov­ered before me.” Near­ly three cen­turies after his death, that ocean remains for­bid­ding­ly but promis­ing­ly vast — at least to those who know how to look at it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Stag­ger­ing Genius of Isaac New­ton

Isaac New­ton Con­ceived of His Most Ground­break­ing Ideas Dur­ing the Great Plague of 1665

Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents a Brief His­to­ry of Every­thing in an 8.5 Minute Ani­ma­tion

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dict­ed That the World Will End in 2060

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Isaac New­ton Cre­ates a List of His 57 Sins (Cir­ca 1662)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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