Ann Druyan shares her passion for learning and science, and it's about to get archival

"Understanding is a virtually limitless power." Our special guest in this week's You've Got This is Ann Druyan, Founder and Chair of Cosmos Studios as well as writer, director, and producer of the award-winning Cosmos series. Bringing her experience as Creative Director of NASA’s legendary Voyager Interstellar Message, Ann has also served for ten years as the elected Secretary of the Federation of American Scientists, and co-wrote the original Cosmos series as well as six New York Times best-sellers with her late husband, Carl Sagan. Along with Carl, Ann co-created the motion picture Contact. She also wrote, directed and produced Cosmos:A SpaceTime Odyssey for which she won the Emmy and Peabody Awards. What's coming up next for Ann? Besides the Cosmos: Possible Worlds premiere on Tuesday, September 22 at 8/7pm central on FOX, she's helping advise the interactive immersive digital and live platform “Einstein: Visualize the Impossible,” in conjunction with the Einstein archives at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The exhibition will be launching in 2021 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Nobel Prize in Physics.

In our conversation on the phone this past week, Ann's passion and dedication to science education shone through - as did her hopes for future innovations and discoveries. Read on for her answers - and don't miss our next guest, Director of Information Services and Cultural Insights at Scholastic Inc. Deimosa Webber-Bey.

Victoria: "Many people will associate you with the iconic series COSMOS, the most recent season of which was Cosmos: Possible Worlds which aired in March 2020 on National Geographic. You mentioned having a vision for a season four in mind: what do you hope to see tackled on future COSMOS episodes?"

Ann: "Well, I don’t want to completely show my hand for a season that’s yet to be written, let alone produced! But I have to say that there are virtually infinite number of stories to be told in the cosmos.

"If you’re trying to convey an idea that might seem complex, and completely unfamiliar to people, for me the doorway into every idea is a story. Whether it’s a story of a person who persevered until they understood and could share with us their understanding and bring us one step closer to being citizens of the cosmos, one step closer to understanding nature, to appreciating it and protecting it. So I find those stories endlessly fascinating."

Unlike so many of our heroes, these are people who never directly harmed or injured another person, but in some cases were willing to die, to standup for what’s true, what’s real. And that’s a quality I think we need more of at this moment than at any other time in human history. In our current circumstances, we don’t have any hope of solving the challenges we face without a faithfulness to reality, the courage to face reality as it is. At this same time, science is a firehose of discoveries. Every new day brings some revelation, some new tiny piece of the picture of nature, to us. If I could live long enough, I could go on trying to demystify these new insights and new questions, forever. So when people said to me after the first COSMOS, why another COSMOS? I was thinking “Are you kidding?!” The subject matter is as wide, deep, tall as the universe itself and all of nature. So I have zillions of more COSMOS episodes kicking around my brain. And now I have a new theme for the next season. It was hatched in collaboration with Sam Sagan, my son, who has contributed to the second and third seasons of COSMOS, so now he and Brannon Braga and I have a new season of COSMOS we hope to share."

Victoria: "Can you tell us a bit more about this Einstein Exhibit set to launch in 2021 for the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Nobel Prize in Physics? What inspired you to get involved with it?"

Ann: "There are precious few minds in our history that are so fertile with new ideas, and ways of looking at nature, that more than 100 years later, scientists at this moment are still working to understand, demonstrate and explore them further. Einstein’s life is to me one of the most inspiring stories of all, because not only black holes and the idea of their existence, those ideas in good part stem from Einstein, but even the verification of gravitational waves, which Kip Thorne won a Nobel Prize of his own (shared with many others) for verifying what Einstein had intuited and theorized so long before… and that’s what I mean by our cutting edge science is still chewing on the ideas of Albert Einstein! And there’s a kind of bottomless greatness to Einstein. Moreover, Einstein was unusual in a number of ways. He was not poisoned by a kind of racist perspective that his contemporaries were riddled with. He didn’t have that blindness, that sickness. As he lived he rid himself of those biases. And so you will see Einstein making a special effort to stand up for those of us humans who were belittled and demeaned and exploited and from whom nothing of any kind of intellectual contribution was expected. He was not one of those people. And we can see this not only in his rhetoric, but in his actions.

"He’s a person of truly cosmic perspective. He was so far ahead of his time in so many different ways that his life, his existence, gives me hope. It’s what I call a rare occasion for human self-esteem. And in our time, human self-esteem may be at an all-time low. We see ourselves failing at critical challenges. And we come from a line of ancestors that stretch back FOUR BILLION - with a B - years. Every link in that chain of life did what they had to do to endure and flourish against hardship we couldn’t possibly even imagine. So now we are the latest links in the chain, and it’s up to us to be strong, and to face the future realistically, informed by science. And we don’t do that. We can’t even change a little bit the way we live in order to give our children and grandchildren a future. So I look to Einstein, and I see the strength, the imagination, and the conviction that is called for now."

At this early stage, I don’t exactly know the details of the complete exhibition. But I know that it will convey to a whole new generation the uniqueness of this human, who showed us the way to quantum physics, to a deeper understanding of the cosmos, of time, and to a relativistic perception of space-time that revolutionized every aspect of human culture: art, fashion, music, entertainment, philosophy, literature - all of those things have been influenced by Albert Einstein. And he’s touched them in ways that are harder to trace than others, but all of them real. What inspired me to get involved with this exhibition was the possibility that we could convey to the broadest possible public the power of his ideas, and of the realities of his greatness."

Victoria: "Your career has encompassed so many creative facets - writing, film production, directing, and most notably scientific education. What would be some words of advice that you’d have for similar multifaceted professionals?"

Ann: "I don’t know if I’m the right person to ask! But that’s a great question. All of these questions are terrific. I hope what visitors will come away with is an enhanced vision of our potential, of human potential. I hope they’ll come away with a sense that you don’t have to be an Einstein, but I think that all of us can reach further than we do, reach higher than we do. The other thing is that Einstein’s life is the best exemplar of which I know of what a soaring imagination can do, can accomplish, if it’s armed with a knowledge of mathematics and physics. Because it was those three elements that it made his discoveries possible. To imagine riding on a beam of light through the universe, you’d have to have a great imagination! But then to examine and scrutinize your fantasy using mathematics and physics to test it - that’s when you get into a whole other realm of predictive, even prophetic power. So it’s not just the imagination which is vital as we often say in COSMOS -without it, we go nowhere! But imagination can carry you only so far. It's when you couple it with mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry - then the potential is virtually limitless. So in order to inspire our kids, and young adults, and adults, to pursue pathways in math and science and all of the sciences - we have to empower them. Because to know a deep thing well, any subject - whether you’re a historian, artist, musician - to know a deep thing well is to be really powerful. Brutality, violence, is a limited kind of power. Understanding is a virtually limitless power. So I hope people come away from this exhibit inspired to read, to teach, to do science and mathematics. We need these people desperately to get out of the big, deep hole we’ve dug for ourselves."

Victoria: "As someone who’s passionate about science and exploration, what keeps you inspired, and what do you think are the most exciting fields of research and innovation happening today?"

Ann: "Wow, well, I have a long-winded answer! There are just so many possibilities. But the one I think about the most, when I look at my children and grandchildren, and I want to be able to look them in the eye, are the fields of bio-remediation, which can redeem some of our most tragic mistakes. There’s a field of bio-remediation which has produced a cress plant, that can actually put down its roots in a field that has been riddled with land mines, mines set to explode if a child or farmer or anyone ventures into them. This cress plant puts its roots down into the soil, and produces one kind of flower if there’s a chemical present that indicates the presence of a sub-surface explosive device. It puts out a flower of a different color, if there’s none of those chemicals present under the soil. We’ve riddled the earth with a million or so of these mines, many of which are from long-settled wars, left behind as booby traps for innocent people to have their lives destroyed through the loss of limbs or even death. But scientists, botanists, chemists, have figured out ways to identify where those mines are in a harmless way, and thereby make it possible for people to keep away from them, and for others who know where there are mines to be disarmed.

"That’s the kind of science, science in the service of life, that really excites me."

Because we have poisoned so much of this planet in one way or another with our short-term thinking, our selfishness, our greed, our inability to imagine the future that our children and grandchildren will be forced to inhabit. I was reading an article this morning about the temperature in Bagdad this summer. We’re talking about a temperature of 124 degrees Fahrenheit. This would be a hell for even wealthy people who have protection between them and the world. But this is the temperature of Bagdad, where there are many people whose lives have been ruined by various wars and invasions and who don’t have power, electricity, air conditioning, freezers, we take for granted. Can you imagine their suffering? And yet, that will be the temperature in Phoenix by 2050 if we continue along the way we’re going. And if we don’t awaken from this, we will be dooming our grandchildren and children. So any science that is in the service of repairing, protecting our environment, making it possible for us to give to future generations a world at least as beautiful as the one we were born into, that gets me very excited."

Follow Ann on LinkedIn.  

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Next week's guest: Deimosa Webber-Bey

I'm thrilled to share that our next guest on You've Got This is Deimosa Webber-Bey, Director of Information Services and Cultural Insights at Scholastic Inc. In her role, Deimosa not only supervises technical services, answers reference questions, and conducts readers’ advisory, but she also manages the Scholastic archive—the comprehensive collection of everything Scholastic has published throughout its 100-year history. With that in mind, here are the questions I'll be asking Deimosa:

• Can you tell us more about your day-to-day as the Senior Librarian and Manager of the Scholastic Archive?
• What are some of the most interesting items you'd think people would be surprised to find in the Scholastic Archive?
• What's on your reading list for this Fall?
• What advice would you have for other professionals who are interested in learning more about working in archival roles and positions?

I invite you to join in the conversation if you'd like to contribute a question of your own - and as always, thank you for reading