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Remember Contact, the film w/ which this course began? and Carl Sagan, who wrote the book (hey! who lived the life!) on which it was based? According to the Times yesterday, his widow, Ann Druyan (who produced the movie) had this to say about the spiritual implications of the scientific revolution: "I know of no other force that can wean us from our infantile belief that we are the center of the universe."

Motivated by her impatience with religious fundamentalism, Druyan has just published a book of Sagan's reflections on the relation between science and religion, called The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (the title plays with William James's famous Varieties of Religious Experience). Much of what was excerpted in the Times article has resonances for, and works as interesting extensions of, the essays we read on Monday, by Traweek and Wertheim, about physics as a secular religion. For instance,

"I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.....[The search for who we are] goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predisposition on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us."