I just heard that astronomer Robert Jastrow died last week. I never met him, but I remember reading his book Red Giants and White Dwarfs when I was a kid; it was a pretty popular book in its day, and I’m sure it influenced me at a tender age.
Jastrow was fairly outspoken on a number of topics, and while I disagreed with him on some of them (particularly his views of science and religion), I’m glad that he was one of the few astronomers who was out there promoting astronomy to the public.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
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February 19th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Religion isn’t the half of it.
February 19th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
How could an astronomer write this?
“But I think the circumstances of the Big Bang-the fiery holocaust that destroyed the record of the past-make that extremely unlikely.”
Destroyed the record of the past? I’m only a neophyte, but it’s quite obvious: given that time, as the 4th dimension, is linked by Relativity laws to matter, there was no “before” the big bang.
and what about this quote ?
“Einstein once said, “The scientist is possessed of a sense of infinite causation.” If there is a religion in science, this statement can be regarded as its principal article of faith.”
Note that the second sentence is not quoted from Einstein. Still, this could cause quite a fuss (maybe it did)
February 19th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I think he’s just speaking in layman’s terms, I wouldn’t read too much into those statements. I’m sure the BA can attest that it’s hard to be technically accurate and still make things accessible to a regular person.
February 19th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Aw man, I loved that book when I was a kid.
February 19th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Destroyed the record of the past? I’m only a neophyte, but it’s quite obvious: given that time, as the 4th dimension, is linked by Relativity laws to matter, there was no “before” the big bang.
There’s all sorts of work being done to determine what caused the Big Bang.
The ekpyrotic/cyclic theory (brane cosmology), the main competitor to inflation theory, stipulates a universe before the Big Bang.
Actually, some inflationary models take a stab at what led to the Bang. Chaotic inflation ponders the nucleation of false vacuums into bubble universes.
There’s the Hartle-Hawking state which is another idea about how it all started.
And, oh, just google it.
February 19th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
to Quiet_desperation : Thanks for the cue.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Actually, I think Jastrow is quite right in that article
(I don’t like the sound of the Marshall Institute business,
but that’s something else). Yes, science might be able to
find ways to approach the “crisis of creation”, like brane
worlds, but frankly to me those sound like grabbing at straws.
If we detach ourselves from the idea that science somehow
guarantees to us that the beginining must have a cause
(whether or not there is any concept of what came “before”),
and just look skeptically at the evidence, the best evidence
at the moment is that it did not have a cause– at least,
not in the scientific meaning of the word. That’s really
all Jastrow seems to be saying.
Is this such a crisis for science? I say no, I say it only
looks like a crisis if you take science for something that
it is not. Just be true to science, and you have no
guarantees of an explanation for everything. Where is
the principle of science that says there cannot be mystery?
Science is not about claiming what it can do, it is about
doing what it can do. I think many people really have
elevated science to the level of religion, simply by not
being true to the rules of science as above all an empirical
art, not a separate avenue to “warm fuzzy feelings” than
other forms of creation myths.