The past and future of American astronomy

DEC 01, 1974

Seventy‐five years ago, astronomy was full of promise and confusion, with new instruments, ingenious ideas, “paradoxers,” polemics—sometimes modern, but often sparse in physics.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3129032

Carl Sagan

The world has changed since 1899, but there are few fields that have changed more—in the development of fundamental insights and in the discovery of new phenomena—than astronomy. When we glance at the titles (see the box below) of some of the recent papers published, for example, in the Astrophysical Journal and Icarus, we can only conclude that our astronomical ancestors would have extracted a glimmer of meaning from them, but that the principal reaction would have been incredulity.

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References

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More about the authors

Carl Sagan, Laboratory for Planetary Studies, Cornell University.