Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
future of their nation. There is evidence that science programming
can be successful, and that people hunger for more of it. I remain
hopeful that sooner or later we'll see real science skilfully and
appealingly presented as regular fare on major network television
worldwide.
Baseball and soccer have Aztec antecedents. Football is a thinly
disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were
human. Lacrosse is an ancient Native American game, and
hockey is related to it. But basketball is new. We've been making
movies longer than we've been playing basketball.
At first, they didn't think to make a hole in the peach basket so
the ball could be retrieved without climbing a flight of stairs. But
in the brief time since then, the game has evolved. In the hands
mainly of African-American players, basketball has become - at
its best - the paramount synthesis in sport of intelligence, precision,
courage, audacity, anticipation, artifice, teamwork, elegance
and grace.
Five-foot-three-inch Muggsy Bogues negotiates a forest of
giants: Michael Jordan sails in from some outer darkness
beyond the free-throw line; Larry Bird threads a precise,
no-look pass; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar unleashes a skyhook. This
is not fundamentally a contact sport like football. It's a game of
finesse. The full-court press, passes out of the double-team, the
pick-and-roll, cutting off the passing lanes, a tip-in from a
high-flying forward soaring from out of nowhere all constitute a
coordination of intellect and athleticism, a harmony of mind
and body. It's not surprising that the game has caught fire in
America.
Ever since National Basketball Association games became a
television staple, it's seemed to me that it could be used to teach
science and mathematics. To appreciate a free-throw average of
0.926, you must know something about converting fractions into
decimals. A lay-up is Newton's first law of motion in action. Every
shot represents the launching of a basketball on a parabolic arc, a
curve determined by the same gravitational physics that specifies
the flight of a ballistic missile, or the Earth orbiting the Sun, or a
spacecraft on its rendezvous with some distant world. The centre