The Demon-Haunted World

I finished The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan tonight. I had received it as a gift from Mike Cornnell a few years ago, but never got around to reading past the very beginning until this week. The book is excellent on many levels.

It’s difficult if not impossible to summarize the book, so I’m just going to write a bit about the things I liked the most and the things that struck me. At its core, the book promotes the value and importance of science, and the dangers of ignoring it. Specifically, it promotes the teaching and application of skeptical thinking in all aspects of life. Sagan goes into fascinating subjects including UFOs, psuedoscience, inquisitions (some of which were unexpected), literal and proverbial witch hunts, the hydrogen bomb, and science education. I undoubtedly learned a lot in the process of reading the book, and it proved quite thought-provoking. I especially liked how Sagan took a skeptical attitude toward even his own ideas, writing criticism and then defending against it.

The thing that struck me the most (though I’ve seen it before) was statistics like “Sixty-three percent of American adults are unaware that the last dinosaur died before the first human arose”. Even if the statistical error is 30%, it’s still terrible. It’s not like this is any new knowledge, like relativity or string theory. Scary. There’s a rant brewing in the back of my head (not literally, don’t worry) about how school is not challenging enough for American students and how we have to work harder or forget being so powerful in the world. Not tonight, though.

The book isn’t hard to read if you don’t know much about science, it’s meant to be accessible to anyone who enjoys thinking. In the course of reading this book, I came up with a couple of other things I’d like to read. First of all, I’ve always wanted to read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, so I’ll add that to my queue. Additionally, I’d like to read something about the story of the Manhattan project. Not the science or the military application; stuff about the people involved and the secrecy and such. Any suggestions are appreciated. I’m also interested in learning more about the Cold War, but I’m not quite sure what aspects… let me know if you have suggestions for that, too.

Next book on the list is The C Programming Language. As Barthol so eloquently put it, “GO TO THE EXTREME MAXX AND KEEP READING”. Indeed.