Carl Edward Sagan was born on the 9th of November 1934 in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father Samuel worked as a garment worker who had emigrated from Kamianets-Podilskyi. His mother Rachel Molly Gruber was a housewife who believed deeply in God and served only kosher meat. The family lived in a modest apartment during the Great Depression years when his father sometimes worked as a movie theater usher. A defining moment occurred when his parents took him to the 1939 New York World's Fair at age four. He remembered seeing an exhibit called America of Tomorrow with moving maps showing highways and little General Motors cars carrying people to skyscrapers. Another display showed how sound from a tuning fork became a wave on an oscilloscope. He also witnessed the burial of a time capsule at Flushing Meadows intended for recovery by Earth's descendants in a future millennium.
His fascination with outer space emerged after reading science fiction writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. In 1947 he discovered the magazine Astounding Science Fiction which introduced him to hard science fiction speculations. When he asked people what stars were no one could give him a clear answer. He recalled getting his first library card at age six or seven and asking for something about stars. The librarian initially returned a picture book displaying portraits of men and women with names like Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. After complaining she found another book that said the stars were suns but very far away. He realized the cosmos was much bigger than he had guessed and described it as a kind of religious experience with magnificence and grandeur that never left him.
Academic Journey And Venus Discoveries
Sagan attended Rahway High School in New Jersey where he graduated in 1951. He entered the University of Chicago at age sixteen despite having excellent high school grades because it was one of the few colleges willing to accept such a young student. His chancellor Robert M. Hutchins had retooled the College into an ideal meritocracy built on Great Books and Socratic dialogue. As an honors-program undergraduate he worked in the laboratory of geneticist H. J. Muller and wrote a thesis on the origins of life with physical chemist Harold Urey. He earned a Bachelor of Liberal Arts in 1954 and a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1955 before earning a Doctor of Philosophy in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960.
His doctoral thesis Physical Studies of the Planets reflected interests he shared with his dissertation director Gerard Kuiper who had been president of the International Astronomical Union's commission on Physical Studies of Planets and Satellites throughout the 1950s. In 1958 Sagan and Kuiper worked on the classified military Project A119 which planned to detonate a nuclear warhead on the Moon. From 1960 to 1962 he served as a Miller Fellow at the University of California Berkeley while publishing an article in the journal Science on the atmosphere of Venus in 1961. Harvard astronomers Fred Whipple and Donald Menzel offered him a lecturer position but he asked for an assistant professor role instead. He lectured performed research and advised graduate students from 1963 until 1968.
In the early 1960s no one knew for certain the basic conditions of Venus' surface. Sagan investigated radio waves from Venus and concluded there was a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees Celsius. His view that Venus was dry and very hot contradicted the balmy paradise others had imagined. Mariner 2 confirmed his conclusions on the surface conditions of Venus in 1962. After being denied academic tenure at Harvard in 1968 he accepted Thomas Gold's offer to move to Ithaca New York and join Cornell University where he remained a faculty member for nearly thirty years until his death.