Robert Jastrow
From Philosopedia
Jastrow, Robert (7 September 1925 - 8 February 2008)
Jastrow was a physicist, cosmologist, and astronomer associated with the Mt. Wilson Observatory Hale Solar Lab in Pasadena, California. He was briefly married in 1967 to the former Ruth Witenberg.
Born in New York City, he received his undergraduate degrees at Columbia University and earned his doctoral degree there in 1948. He became Chief of the Theoretical Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, 1958-61) and Founder/Director of NASA's Goddard Institute; Professor of Geophysics at Columbia University; and Professor of Space Studies-Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College.
Harold Urey, who at the time was a Nobel laureate at NASA, encouraged Jastrow's interests in lunar explorations, which included projects such as the robotic probes Pioneer, Voyager, and Galileo, all of which travelled throughout the solar system.
In 1981, Dr. Jastrow left NASA to join the facility of Dartmouth College as Professor of Earth Sciences. He resigned from Dartmouth in 1992 to take up duties as manager of Mount Wilson Observatory.
Jastrow, a popularizer of science, wrote The Evolution of Stars, Planets, and Life (1967), Red Giants and White Dwarfs (1967), Astronomy: Fundamentals And Frontiers (1972, God and the Astronomers (1978, 1992), The Enchanted Loom (1983), and How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete (1985). The latter work supported President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, which was popularly called as the Star Wars missile defense system.
In an installment of Ben Wattenberg’s on PBS television's “Think Tank” Jastrow discussed his philosophy,
- I’m a committed reductionist. I think that the whole is equal to the sum of the parts. But I also know that there is no way within my scientific discipline of finding out whether there is a larger purpose or design in the universe. So I remain an agnostic, and not an atheist. To profess a disbelief in the existence of design or of the deity is essentially, in itself, a theological statement which a scientist cannot make on the structure or on the strength of his own discipline. He can only make it as a personal belief.
In Truth Journal, a Christian organization's newsletter, he discussed his philosophy further:
- Nothing in the history of science leads us to believe there should be a fundamental limit to the results of scientific inquiry. Science has had extraordinary success in piecing together the elements of a story of cosmic evolution that adds many details to the first pages of Genesis. The scientist has traced the history of the Universe back in time from the appearance of man to the lower animals, then across the threshold of life to a time when the earth did not exist, and then back farther still to a time when stars and galaxies had not yet formed and the heavens were dark. Now he goes farther back still, feeling he is close to success - the answer to the ultimate question of beginning - when suddenly the chain of cause and effect snaps. The birth of the Universe is an effect for which he cannot find the cause.
- Some say still that if the astronomer cannot find that cause today, he will find it tomorrow, and we will read about it in the New York Times when Walter Sullivan gets around to reporting on it. But I think the circumstances of the Big Bang - the fiery holocaust that destroyed the record of the past - make that extremely unlikely.
- This is why it seems to me and to others that the curtain drawn over the mystery of creation will never be raised by human efforts, at least in the foreseeable future. Although I am an agnostic, and not a believer, I still find much to ponder in the view expressed by the British astronomer E. A. Milne, who wrote, "We can make no propositions about the state of affairs [in the beginning]; in the Divine act of creation God is unobserved and unwitnessed."
