Inside BAR

Carl Sagan is the author of the 1978 Pulitzer prize-winning Dragons of Eden and the current best-seller Broca’s Brain from which his story “A Scientist Looks at Velikovsky’s ‘Worlds in Collision’” is adapted. In this article, Sagan responds to the unorthodox but popular astronomer Immanuel Velikovsky who proposes to account for a number of Biblical events by relating them to the near-collision of the earth with a comet which later became the planet Venus.

Sagan is David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies there. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 1960. After teaching at both Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology, he moved to Cornell in 1972.

This past year he has been at work creating a thirteen-week television series entitled ‘Cosmos,’ which will appear next fall on public television networks throughout the nation.