The Demon Haunted World By Carl Sagan (Rating ***)

The Demon-Haunted World is a collection of twenty-five essays, several written with Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan. The essays range in scope from eloquent paeans to science to impassioned denunciations of bigotry, from humorous accounts of a variety of pseudoscientific endeavors to serious attempts to understand the nature of alien abduction delusions. With intelligence and wit, and the rational calmness that is his trademark, Sagan takes on a wide variety of topics, among them: alien abductions, astrology, Atlantis, the Bell Curve, channeling, crop circles, demons, electromagnetism, ESP, the face on Mars, fairies, faith healing, magic, miracles, prayer, religion, Roswell, satanic rituals, therapy, and, of course, one of his favorite topics, UFOs and extraterrestrials. Only Velikovsky gets ignored this time around. Through each of his essays he extols the virtues of skepticism, empirical evidence and control studies, while uncovering a multitude of errors and weaknesses in the positions of occultists, paranormalists, supernaturalists and pseudoscientists. And he does so with extreme grace, gentility and civility.

In fact, if there is anything I disagree with in Sagan's book it is probably his encouragement of skeptics to be as civil as he is in dealing with what skeptics see as the dark that extinguishes the candle. He writes

    "...the chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is in its polarization: US vs. Them--the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive....whereas a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted."

    "If we understand this, then of course we feel the uncertainty and pain of the abductees, or those who dare not leave home without consulting their horoscopes....such compassion for kindred spirits in a common quest also works to make science and the scientific method less off-putting, especially to the young."

    "Many pseudoscientific and New Age belief systems emerge out of dissatisfaction with conventional values and perspectives--and are therefore themselves a kind of skepticism."

I can't deny that there is a strong appeal in this call for compassion, for seeing the occultists of the world as after the same thing skeptics are after, and for recognizing the skepticism in those who adhere to pseudoscientific or New Age spiritual notions. If the goal were to try to get the true believer to give up his or her beliefs, then I would agree that an aggressive campaign which arrogantly maintains that it is better to live according to evidence than according to wishes might not be the best tactic. But, the aggressive, blunt, seemingly arrogant approach might be best if the goal is not to convert true believers to skepticism but to provide ideas which will counterbalance the plethora of occult, pseudoscientific, supernatural and paranormal notions which pervade just about any atmosphere in America, or the world, for that matter.

These aggressive methods may be the best ones if the goal is not to help persons who have been encouraged by therapists to think they've been experimented on by aliens, but rather to deter present and future therapists from encouraging patients to accept such beliefs as true and from using hypnosis to recover repressed memories. Such methods can evoke false memories of terrible things which probably never occurred. There is little to be gained, I think, in being compassionate with therapists who have no regard for truth and who encourage their patients to remember childhood abuses regardless of whether the abuses happened or not. Therapists who care for the truth are more likely to get aroused and make some effort to halt the abuses of their colleagues if we make a loud enough noise. And perhaps a future patient of one of these abusive therapists will have heard our angry voices and remember what we've said and question the therapist's methods.

Blunt and direct methods may be called for if the goal is not to persuade someone to give up astrology, crystals or tarot cards, but rather is to try to prevent someone in the future from seriously considering such things as reasonable guides to life.

I agree that it is unconstructive to be dogmatic, to call other people 'morons' or their ideas 'stupid.' I also agree that compassion is the appropriate response for people who have been duped by deluded therapists into believing incredible and harmful things. But I don't think it is the appropriate response to the therapists. We should go after them, and go after them aggressively with the bluntest instruments our language can muster. Likewise for the purveyors of pseudoscientific and New Age rubbish. To the L. Ron Hubbards, Helen Schucmans, Aleister Crowleys, John Macks, Budd Hopkins and Wade Quattlebaums of the world I say show no mercy!

Although some skeptics may take issue with Sagan's genteel style and grandpaternal tone, none of us will find fault with his skilful and recurring emphasis on critical thinking. The more blunt and vulgar among us refer to the need for a crap detector; Sagan provides instruction for building one's "baloney detection kit." He covers several common fallacies and ways to avoid them. He emphasizes the need for skepticism in critical thinking and the necessity for verification and corroboration of claims before accepting them. And he returns again and again to the role of the mass media in forming our characters and opinions. He is especially concerned with the fact that more and more mass media operations are coming into the possession of fewer and fewer individuals or groups. The potential for abuse of power is obvious but, as Orwell said, we have to keep pointing out the obvious. Sagan is hopeful that the internet will be an antidote for this concentration of control over information. So am I.

Another favorite theme of Sagan's is the need for scientists to be communicators, to use the media and the classroom to explain to the masses the truths and beauties of science, instilling in them the sense of wonder which drives people like himself. His criticisms of typical science instruction in America and the paucity of science writers for popular markets are right on target and worth studied perusal by science educators.

It is easy to recommend a book so reflective of one's own views, especially views which are skeptical of belief in God and an afterlife. It is even easier to recommend a book which, even though it covers topics and ideas the reader has gone over a thousand times, does so in a style which makes them seem fresh, is rarely dull, and quite frequently stimulates the reader to want to think about these issues more deeply and wonder if there isn't more he could be doing to make this world a better, saner, more rational place for our children and grandchildren.

Carl Sagan died on December 20, 1996, and it now seems apparent that A Candle in the Dark was meant to be his epitaph. Nothing could be more fitting, for if anyone has been light in these Dark Ages, it was Carl Sagan. But he was more like one of Velikovsky's comets, showering the earth with gifts as he passed through.

Pluto's Big Moon Charon Reveals a Colorful and Violent History

NASA's New Horizons captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Charon just before closest approach on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft's Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC); the colors are processed to best highlight the variation of surface properties across Charon. Charon's color palette is not as diverse as Pluto's; most striking is the reddish north (top) polar region, informally named Mordor Macula. Charon is 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) across; this image resolves details as small as 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers).

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has returned the best color and the highest resolution images yet of Pluto's largest moon, Charon - and these pictures show a surprisingly complex and violent history.

At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they're finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.

"We thought the probability of seeing such interesting features on this satellite of a world at the far edge of our solar system was low," said Ross Beyer, an affiliate of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team from the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, "but I couldn't be more delighted with what we see!"

High-resolution images of the Pluto-facing hemisphere of Charon, taken by New Horizons as the spacecraft sped through the Pluto system on July 14, and transmitted to Earth on Sept. 21, reveal details of a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the moon's equator. This great canyon system stretches across the entire face of Charon, more than a thousand miles, and probably around onto Charon's far side. Four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and twice as deep in places, these faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon's past.

"It looks like the entire crust of Charon has been split open," said John Spencer, deputy lead for GGI at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "In respect to its size relative to Charon, this feature is much like the vast Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars."

The team has also discovered that the plains south of the canyon, informally referred to as Vulcan Planum, have fewer large craters than the regions to the north, indicating that they are noticeably younger. The smoothness of the plains, as well as their grooves and faint ridges, are clear signs of wide-scale resurfacing.

One possibility for the smooth surface is a kind of cold volcanic activity, called cryovolcanism. "The team is discussing the possibility that an internal water ocean could have frozen long ago, and the resulting volume change could have led to Charon cracking open, allowing water-based lavas to reach the surface at that time," said Paul Schenk, a New Horizons team member from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Even higher-resolution Charon images and composition data are still to come as New Horizons transmits data, stored on its digital recorders, over the next year - and as that happens, "I predict Charon's story will become even more amazing!" said mission Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The New Horizons spacecraft is currently 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth, with all systems healthy and operating normally.

New Horizons is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. APL designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.

Isro successfully launches Astrosat, six other satellites

SRIHARIKOTA: Isro on Monday successfully launched India's first astronomy satellite Astrosat, eleven years after the government cleared the project. A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C30) carrying Astrosat and six other satellites lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 10am. In around 25 minutes after liftoff, PSLV-C30 injected Astrosat and other satellites -- four US nano satellites, a microsatellite from Indonesia a nanosatellite from Canada - into their respective orbits. This is the first time India is launching a US satellite.

Astrosat was placed in an orbit 644.651km from earth, as desired. The satellite achieved an expected inclination of 6.002 degree. "The mission is successful. It is a well-professed and synchronous efforts." Satish Dhawan Space Centre director P Kunhikrishnan said after the launch. "It's a hard earned gift," he added.

ASTROSAT

Astrosat, which had a lift-off mass of 1,513kg, will now embark on a five-year astronomy mission studying distant celestial objects. It will observe the universe in the optical, ultraviolet, low and high energy x-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, compared to most other scientific satellites that are capable of observing a narrow range of wavelength band.

Among its assignments, the five payloads of Astrosat will study star birth regions and black holes. ISRO's website lists out the objective of the observatory: to understand high energy processes in binary star systems containing neutron stars and black holes, estimate magnetic fields of neutron stars, study star birth regions and high energy processes in star systems lying beyond our galaxy, detect new briefly bright x-ray sources in the sky and perform limited deep field survey of the universe in the ultraviolet region.

Carrying five payloads, Astrosat is capable of observing the sky in the visible, near ultraviolet (UV) and far UV regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The two telescopes on the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) payload are designed to achieve an excellent image resolution, while the other four payloads have their specific roles.

The other payloads are Large X-Ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC), Soft x-ray Telescope (SXT), Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI) and Charge Particle Monitor (CPM). The payloads will start working on next Monday, on the eighth day after launch.

FOREIGN PASSENGERS

The four LEMUR nanosatellites from Spire Global Inc, San Francisco (US), are non-visual remote sensing satellites focusing primarily on global maritime intelligence through vessel tracking via the Automatic Identification System (AIS), and high fidelity weather forecasting using GPS Radio Occultation technology.

Besides these, the PSLV-C30 also launched LAPAN-A2, a microsatellite from the National Institute of Aeronautics and Space-LAPAN, Indonesia, meant for providing maritime surveillance using Automatic Identification System (AIS), supporting Indonesian radio amateur communities for disaster mitigation and carrying out Earth surveillance using video and digital camera.

And the last foreign passenger is the NLS-14 (Ev9), a nanosatellite from Space Flight Laboratory, University of Toronto Institute for Advanced Studies (SFL, UTIAS), Canada. It is a maritime monitoring Nanosatellite using the next generation Automatic Identification System (AIS).

द व्हॅली ऑफ फिअर मुळ लेखक - ऑर्थर कॉनन डायल अनुवाद - प्रवीण जोशी (दर्जा ****)

"बर्‍याचदा सत्य कल्पनेपेक्षाही थरारक असतं!" - शेरलॉक होम्स. दैवजात तीक्ष्ण बुद्धी लाभलेल्या होम्ससमोर अत्यंत अवघड कोडं सोडवायला आलं; ज्याची पाळंमुळं अमेरिका आणि युरोप अशा दोन खंडांमध्ये रुजली होती. एका धाडसी माणसाचं आयुष्य भीतीने झाकोळून टाकणारी अक्राळविक्राळ दरी... 'द व्हॅली ऑफ फिअर".... ही शेरलॉक होम्सची खूप गाजलेली कादंबरी.

सर आर्थर कॉनन डॉयल यांचा मानसपुत्र शेरलॉक होम्स याच्या थरारक कारनाम्याची ही एक कादंबरी. ती इंग्रजीत खूप गाजली. तिचा हा मराठी अनुवाद. शेरलॉकच्या कादंबऱ्या ज्यांना वाचायला आवडतात, त्यांच्यासाठी हे पुस्तक आहे. त्याविषयी वेगळे काही सांगायची गरज नाही. या पुस्तकाला अनुवादकाने छोटेसे टिपण जोडले आहे. त्याला 'प्रस्तावना' असे नाव दिले असले तरी तो 'ऋणनिर्देश' आहे. प्रस्तावना म्हणण्याजोगे त्यात काहीही नाही. शिवाय अनुवादकाचा 'ऋणनिर्देश' हाही अशा प्रकारच्या पुस्तकासाठी उचित नाही. याशिवाय इन्प्रिंटच्याच पानावर अनुवादकाची अर्पणपत्रिकाही दिली आहे. तिचीही गरज नव्हती. अनुवाद मात्र चांगला उतरला आहे.

गेल्या पाच, सहा पिढ्यांना बुद्धीमान शेरलॉक होम्सच्या गाजलेल्या कादंबरीचा प्रवीण जोशी यांनी केलेला हा अनुवाद आहे. एखादे काल्पनिक पात्र आपल्याच जगातील वाटावे, एवढे जीवंत करण्याचे श्रेय त्याचा जनक सर आर्थर कॉनन डायलकडे जातं. डोक्यावर हॅट, ओठांमध्ये चिरूट, हातात काठी अशा वेशभूषेतील शेरलॉक होम्स "बऱ्याचदा सत्य कल्पनेपेक्षा थरारक असतं" असं सांगतो. अमेरिका आणि युरोपशी संबंधित या कथेत शेरलॉक होम्स त्याच्या तीक्ष्ण बुद्धीच्या साह्याने अत्यंत अवघड कोडे सोडवितो. भयाच्या, भीतीच्या या दरीत खोल बुडी मारून सत्य शोधून काढण्याच्या त्याच्या रोमांचकारी वाचकही सामील होतात.

शेरलॉक होम्स हे सर ऑर्थर कॉनन डॉयल यांच्या कादंबरीतील पात्र, त्यांचा मानसपुत्र. पेशाने डिटेक्टिव्ह असलेल्या शेरलॉक होम्सच्या कादंबऱ्यांनी वाचकांना खिळवून ठेवले. बर्लस्टन राजवाड्यात
झालेल्या डग्लसच्या खुनाचा तपास होम्स ज्या पद्धतीने लावतो, ते अगदी वाचताना मती गुंग होते. अगदी होम्समधील विविध गुणांची चुणूक दिसते. डिटेक्टिव्ह, हेरगिरीच्या कथा ज्यांना आवडतात, त्यांना ही कादंबरी खिळवून ठेवते.

The Plot against America by Philip Roth (Rating ****)

When the hubristic, newly elected US president boasts of America's invulnerability to foreign attack, the sense of imminent calamity is overwhelming. The title invokes 9/11, but the novel is set 60 years ago. The plot against America isn't Islamic but homegrown (with a little assistance from Germany). And instead of reconstructing real historical events, as David Hare does in Stuff Happens, Philip Roth offers something bolder: a reconstruction of imagined events, a "what if...?" that reads like a "what really happened".

Just suppose...that the air hero Charles Lindbergh, the man who made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, who earned huge sympathy when his baby son was kidnapped and murdered five years later, who called Hitler "a great man" and was decorated by order of the Führer for his services to the Reich, just suppose that he'd taken up Republican invitations to run for president in November 1940, and milked the isolationist sentiment that undoubtedly existed then (No more war! Never again will young Americans die on foreign soil!), and that instead of Roosevelt being elected for an unprecedented third term and taking America into Europe to fight the Nazis, Lindbergh won a landslide victory. And then he signed non-aggression treaties with Germany and Japan, and set about realising his vision of America as a land of the brave and blond, and introduced a set of anti-semitic measures which, if not on the scale of Hitler's pogroms, were a betrayal of the rights and liberties enshrined in the constitution and yet, such was the young president's charisma, they were accepted by the mass of ordinary citizens and even by some prominent Jews.

Just suppose...that the princes in the Tower hadn't been murdered, that Britain had remained a republic after Cromwell, that America had turned fascist in 1940. In most hands, "just suppose" is a parlour game, a high-table diversion, whimsical and ultimately trivial. Not with Roth. His stroke of genius - and, given the extraordinary late blooming of an already illustrious career with American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain, the word genius doesn't seem excessive - is to bed his little fantasy in the rich soil of his own childhood in Newark, New Jersey, and watch it grow. The narrator is Philip Roth, aged seven, and the family at the book's centre are his family - father Herman, mother Bess and brother Sandy. The Roths understand the threat posed by Lindbergh, as do their Jewish neighbours, but each member of the family responds differently. Early on, there's a trip to see the sights of Washington, where the Roths find their pre-booked hotel room has become mysteriously unavailable. A blatant case of anti-semitism, Herman shouts, and a violation of the Gettysburg principle that "All men are created equal". But his loudmouth protests embarrass Bess and silence their voluble tour-guide. Already there's a pressure to pretend not to see what's going on. Further frictions arise when, under the auspices of a scheme called "Just Folks", Sandy disappears for the summer for an "apprenticeship" with a Kentucky tobacco farmer. A talented young artist, he returns with a portfolio of animal sketches - and a sudden enthusiasm for Waspish, heartland values. Worse, he's co-opted by the OAA (the Office of American Absorption) to encourage other Jewish city boys to follow his example - and does it so well that through his aunt, Bess's sister Evelyn (whose boyfriend, Rabbi Bengelsdorf, is a passionate supporter of Lindbergh), he's invited to a reception at the White House. A fierce row ensues, with Herman refusing Sandy permission to attend and Evelyn and the rabbi defending Lindbergh as a freely elected democrat "who has exhibited not a single inclination towards authoritarian rule".

In noisily denouncing Lindbergh, Herman is made to feel like a "frightened, paranoid ghetto Jew". Paranoia is a common issue with Roth's narrators, who're frequently told they're imagining or exaggerating things - there's a memorable scene in The Counterlife, when a woman in a London restaurant complains to the waiter of the terrible smell in the place and the hero, Nathan Zuckerman, tells his disbelieving gentile wife "I am that stink".

The thesis of The Plot Against America is paranoid, too - a fascistic US government suspending civil liberties and persecuting minorities deemed a threat to security. Paranoid and yet (even without any allusion to America post-9/11) utterly plausible. To make alternative history credible, you have to register the incredulity of those it's happening to. "We knew things were bad," Herman tells friends after his hotel experience in Washington, "but not like this. You had to be there to see what it looked like." Later, after Von Ribbentrop is warmly greeted at the White House, Herman says: "If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination." Or later still:"It can't happen here? My friends, it is happening here."

What unfolds requires some tweaking of the historical record - the postponement of Pearl Harbor by a year, for instance. But so inevitable is the march of events that this is all it seems, a tweak. It helps that we see things through the eyes of a child. The man the child became can look back at what was lost ("that huge endowment of personal security I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world"), but the child, in medias res, is preoccupied by matters other than politics: his stamp collection, for instance; or how his Aunt Evelyn, holed up in the cellar, will get through the night without access to a toilet; or what to make of his repellently fascinating cousin Alvin, who has come home from the war in Europe minus a leg. But even those postage stamps lose their innocence. Philip dreams of their national park icons being covered by swastikas, and when the collection is eventually lost, anti-semitism is directly to blame: under the new Homestead 42 scheme, the Roths have been "selected" for relocation to Kentucky, and it's while running away in the middle of the night to avoid exile that Philip mislays his most treasured possession.

As it turns out, the Roths avoid the ultimate catastrophe. But Philip's worst-best friend Seldon is less fortunate. There's a hauntingly familiar moment when Seldon, at home alone in Kentucky when his mother Selma fails to return from work, is given painstaking instructions by Philip's mother over the phone from Newark on how to make himself toast for supper. Seldon fears the worst ("Now both my parents are dead") and he's right to. By this point, two years into Lindy's presidency, killings and riots have begun and many Jews are fleeing over the border into Canada. The nadir is the assassination of the Jewish journalist and broadcaster Walter Winchell, a prominent critic of government policy. In truth, as we learn from Roth's postscript, Winchell lived on for 30 more years. But the alternative history which Roth imagines for him, including a detailed account of his vast funeral in 1942, seems more realistic than the reality of Winchell becoming a McCarthyite in the 50s and dying in obscurity.


The postscript, with its short biographies and list of sources, gives us the facts - the ground on which Roth has built his house of fiction. It's instructive yet also redundant. What matters isn't the reality that underpins the novel, but the reality it creates for itself. And The Plot Against America creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond scepticism and with a quotidian attentiveness to sights and sounds, tastes and smells, surnames and nicknames and brandnames - an accumulation of des petits faits vrais - that dissolves any residual disbelief.

Young Philip's greatest epiphany is to recognise the difference between history as taught in school - harmless and inevitable - and history as it's lived through, "the relentless unforeseen". His novel is a different kind of history again, an imagined past which, if we learn from it, might save us from a calamitous future. It's not Roth's funniest novel (and there's hardly any sex). But in its sweep and chutzpah, it ranks with his great trilogy of the late-90s. Isn't it time they gave him the Nobel?