Carl Sagan is one of my personal heroes. The legacy of his incredible book "Cosmos", and his documentary of the same name, was extended with the 2014 "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey", hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

This is the third of a 13-piece collection - one per episode of the series. It is my attempt to pay tribute to Sagan, and to spread his humbling influence farther in the world.

Episode 3 is entitled "When Knowledge Conquers Fear". It's mainly about Isaac Newton's incredible work "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" and how it came to be published, esp. with the help of Edmond Halley. "Principia" is considered one of the most important works in the history of science.

The episode further highlights pattern recognition and how we humans love to ascribe meaning to things whether we understand what we're seeing or not. Also spoken about are Halley's many contributions to science, the most famous, of course, being his correct prediction of the date of the return of the comet named after him.

I really wanted to focus on pattern recognition in nature and how looking up at the stars is considered one of the main reasons we humans started to *wonder* about things. Especially when we saw special things like eclipses and comets. We've come to the wrong conclusions A LOT but the important thing is, we were and still are driven to ask questions.

We saw patterns in the stars and created stories around them. My own constellations are science and culture ones,including: the contributions of Halley and Newton, the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything and a homage to ye olde coffee houses in London in Newton's time, where curious minds would gather to pontificate.

And just as the stars drove us humans to ask big questions and eventually find answers to some of them, so did Halley drive Newton to rewrite and publish his Principia. This is why the comet, if you zoom in, is actually an apple. A small joke, symbolising their collaboration.