The Man of a Trillion Worlds | Cosmos: Possible Worlds

NARRATOR: Harold Uris was a chemist. Like Gerard Kuiper, he also had to fight his way into science. Uris' family was poor, like Kuiper's, so he took a job teaching grammar school in a mining camp in Montana. The parents of one of his students urged him to find a way to get to college.

[orchestral music]

Harold Uris took that advice all the way to a Nobel Prize in chemistry. By 1949, he was riding high, a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, then and now one of the world's great capitals of science. But when Uris read his morning paper, something began to curdle inside him, a rising resentment. First, a pang at a fellow scientist's heightened celebrity. Well, that was normal. Then he got to the park about the origin of the planets. He was offended then an astronomer was making pronouncements about the chemical nature of the solar system. That was his turf.

[shouting]

Scientists are human. We're primates. We carry the same evolutionary baggage as everyone else. Kuiper and Uris were two alpha males who chose scientific argument as their weapon of combat. And the two men fought over a single hostage, a young student.

When Carl Sagan was a kid, he lived here in a small apartment in Brooklyn.

[ticking]

[honking]

In the mid-1940s, he made this drawing filled with predictions that is now in the US Library of Congress.

[orchestral music]

[whoosh]

MAN: Three, two, one, zero. All engines running. Lift off. We have a lift off.

NARRATOR: In an era where life here was in the last seconds of its four billion year captivity on Earth, he dreamed of going to the planets, and even to the stars. But he didn't want to just go in his imagination. He wanted to really go. He wanted to know what those worlds were really like. And he knew that the only way to do that was to become a scientist.

The boy would come under the wings of the two warring giants. As much as they hated each other, he loved them both. Together, the three of them would tear down the walls between the sciences. And the boy would tear down the tallest wall, the one between science and everyone else.