Carl Sagan Changed My Life: Bill Nye on Chuck Berry, Kids' Love of Science, and Voyager Spacecraft

[Music] Hello! No matter the science guy. I am a guy. I'm a YouTuber named Wesley, and I wanted to ask you if, since Carl Sagan was your mentor, if I'm not mistaken, what is your fondest memory with your mentor, Carl Sagan? Take care and have a good day.

So my fondest memory with Carl Sagan, oh, that's the... the fondest might be different from the most important. The fondest memories, we were in class in the spring of 1977, just a few months before the Voyager spacecraft were launched in August of that year. These are the spacecraft that have the golden disc, the record phonograph record mounted on the side of them, with the presumption that an alien civilization will find this, decode the resonance of the hydrogen atom binary symbology, and figure out how to play a phonograph record from Earth at the right speed.

So, extraordinary idea! But it was cool, it was inspirational; it brought out the best in a lot of us. Carl Sagan said, "What rock and roll song should we put on?" He said, "We are considering ‘Roll Over Beethoven,’ but ‘Johnny Be Good’."

And then everybody's like, "No, Professor Sagan, no! Not ‘Roll Over!’ It's a fine song, but the song you want is ‘Johnny Be Good!’” ‘Johnny Be Good’ by Chuck Berry. So that is the song that's on the record, and that is a fond memory. I may have led the charge, but my older sister listened to that music. She was from that time—doo-wop and the beginnings of rock and roll. So I was very familiar with Chuck Berry, and I thought, "That's great!"

So he changed it to Chuck Berry—‘Johnny Be Good’ is the one that's flying out into space on two spacecraft.

Then the most important memory I had with Carl Sagan—no question—ten years later, I went to my college reunion in 1987. I arranged with Carl Sagan's assistant to spend about five minutes with him. Maybe I was ten minutes, which was a biggie. He was a superstar by then; he had done Cosmos, he was being asked to speak all the time, he’d written these great books, Pulitzer Prize-winning books.

I asked him, "I want to do this kids' show about science. What should I do? I've been doing demonstrations about bridges." And he says, "No, no, don’t do engineering; do science." Then he said, "Kids resonate to pure science." That was the verbiage: resonate. That really stuck with me.

So if you ever watched the old Bill Nye the Science Guy shows, we did our best to use—tried to show you—to show you pure science rather than technology. In the show we did about computers, which is nominally a show about technology, I did my best to focus on the big ideas—switches and binary and commands that take place without a human having to sit there and tap the button.

So I claim that that meeting with Carl Sagan, at the end of maybe the end of May 1987, changed my life. So, the fondest memory was ‘Johnny Be Good,’ the most important one was "resonate to science." [Music...]