The Varieties of Scientific Experience

Acknowledgments

Editing these lectures afforded me, for precious moments at a time, the happy delusion that I was working with Carl once again. The words he spoke in these lectures would sound in my head and it felt wonderfully as if we had somehow been transported back to the two heavenly decades when we thought and wrote together.

We had the pleasure of writing several of our projects, the Cosmos television series among them, with the astronomer Steven Soter, our dear friend. Since Carl's death Steve and I wrote the first two planetarium shows for the magnificent Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Once I had turned Carl's Gifford Lectures into a book, I invited Steve to join me in editing the final drafts. We felt sure that Carl would not have wanted us to use the 1985 slides from the lectures. Astronomers have seen farther and more clearly since then. Steve found the gorgeous images that replace them. He also wrote the scientific updates that appear in the footnotes. I am grateful to him for his many editorial contributions to this book.

Ann Godoff has been our editor ever since Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl's favorite among all the books he and we ever wrote. She also edited Carl's Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World, and Billions & Billions. It was her recognition that the Gifford Lectures should become a book that made The Varieties of Scientific Experience possible. Her imagination and wit made the process of that transformation a pleasure. I thank her colleagues at the Penguin Press, art director Claire Vaccaro, and Ann's assistant Liza Darnton for all they did for the book and for me. I am grateful to Maureen Sugden for her meticulous and thoughtful copyediting.

Jonathan Cott has always been a North Star to me, guiding me to every possible kind of great cultural experience. I am further indebted to him for the valuable editorial comments and suggestions he gave me for this book.

I thank Sloan Harris of ICM, for his excellent representation and his consistent commitment to my work, and Katharine Cluverius, in his office, for her kind assistance.

Kristin Albro and Pam Abbey in my office at Cosmos Studios have provided valuable administrative support, and Janet Rice helped in a host of ways, making it possible for me to focus on this work.

I wish to acknowledge the encouragement and loving kindness of Harry Druyan, Cari Sagan Greene, Les Druyan and Viky Rojas-Druyan, Nick and Clinnette Minnis Sagan, Sasha Sagan, Sam Sagan, Kathy Crane-Trentalancia, and Nancy Palmer.

Carl's Gifford Lectures were expertly transcribed from audiotapes long ago by Shirley Arden, his executive assistant at the time. As I read the transcripts, which were done without the text-processing magic of today's computer technology I felt a renewed sense of respect for her consistently meticulous work.

I would also like to thank the organizers of the Gifford Lectures and the University of Glasgow for their kind invitation to Carl and their hospitality to us during our time in Scotland.

In the ten years since Carl's death, these lectures sat in one of the thousand drawers of his vast archives. For some reason the Gifford Lectures were never logged into the archives' otherwise reliably comprehensive index. In the midst of a worldwide pandemic of extreme fundamentalist violence and during a time in the United States when phony piety in public life reached a new low and the critical separation of church and state and public classroom were dangerously eroded, I felt that Carl's perspective on these questions was needed more than ever. I searched in vain for the transcripts. Our friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, succeeded where I had failed. My gratitude to him for this, and much else, is profound.

• Ann Druyan Ithaca, New York March 21, 2006