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What was your first meeting with Carl Sagan?
First meeting he invited me to visit him at Cornell.
I was in high school, I had applied to colleges...
...I was admitted to Cornell and shortly after I was admitted...
...I got a letter in the mail from Carl Sagan.
This is in an era where he’s really famous and I’m just a seventeen year old kid...
...and he’d been on TV, then, on the Johnny Carson Show, written several books...
...not quite, this is pre-cosmos so he’s not as famous as he will be...
...but I already knew who he was.
And he said, I understand you are interested in Cornell, you might choose to come...
...and if you had the occasion to swing by, I’d like to show you the lab...
...to help you decide whether you want to attend Cornell.
I said, mom and dad! Look! Is this real?
And so we arranged for me to go up to Ithaca, New York, took a bus ride up there.
He met me in the snow, well it was cold, it hadn’t been snowing yet...
...outside of the lab, he took me into the lab, this was on a Saturday, by the way...
...sat down, gave me a tour, talked to me about my ambitions and what he did...
...reached behind him, pulled a book out of a shelf.
Didn’t even have to look, just pulled out a book. One of his books...
...and he signed it to me, I still have that book to this day.
We were done, the afternoon came, and this was in late winter.
He drives me in his car back to the bus station, it begins to snow...
...he’s worried whether the bus will come through...
...he writes, on a piece of paper his home phone number, if the bus doesn’t come through...
...give me a call, spend the night at our place.
And I said, who am I, for him to give this level of attention to me?
I’m nobody. I’m just a high school kid. Why did he know about me?
Because the admissions office saw how, sort of, rich in cosmic interest...
...my application to college was, and said we got to get another opinion here.
So they sent it to Carl Sagan for his judgment on that.
I was already admitted so they were just trying to drum up interest...
...from one department to another. I think they did that...
...with various applications if they had, sort of...
...extra interest expressed as mine certainly did...
...because I’d been interested in the universe since age nine.
And the Hayden Planetarium.
And the Hayden Planetarium. So I, to this day...
...have vowed that I would treat students the way he treated me.
I can now say that when students come to my office...
...I get to reach behind my desk and pull out a book...
...because I thought that was the coolest thing you just have books...
...a book you wrote, and it was so remote to me...
...that I would ever be in that position but I said at the time...
...if I’m ever, ever in a remotely similar situation that he was to me...
...that I will be no less respectful of students...
...who express an interest in the universe.
And to this day that's what I do. If you call me...
...and you’re like the president of a museum or somebody important in Washington...
...but a student calls me up, I handle the student first.
I’ll get to you later. That was not so much on how to be a scientist...
...but how to be a person mixed in with what it is to be a scientist.
How to be a person that cares and knows how to sort of... how to pass a torch...
...and ignite flames and promote interests.
That’s a sensitivity that I don’t know that I would have had...
...if it were not for that encounter.
I didn’t ultimately go to Cornell...
...but I’ll never forget that first encounter.