Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists

I finally got my 7″ record of “A Glorious Dawn” today in the mail. If you haven’t seen the video, you must watch it now. It’s a wonderful song composed of auto-tuned voice clips of Carl Sagan speaking in Cosmos. It is a moving song I mus say. You can get the 7″ records from Third Man Records for $6 each including shipping if you’re in the US. “A Glorious Dawn” was created by John Boswell for The Symphony of Science a “musical project…designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.”

Here is what the record looks like. Click the image to see the large version.

I am a bit disappointed that the side with the Voyager record etching isn’t made to look like it’s gold, but overall I like this record. I bought 3 more and will give them out as nice science gifts.

Here are the lyrics:

[Sagan]
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas

[Sagan]
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting