Hindus From The United States

"I'm not responsible for any of those equations. ...I'm just your tour guide."

"I give these talks in Hollywood... at the church in the Vedanta center... There are all these monks lying around and... people ask me questions... So I tell them, "I'm just your tour guide. I'm here to tell you where you are and how you got here. If you want to get out, talk to the people in orange.""

"[T]he way I understand it from those old physicists is that there's something underneath which we didn't notice, and... they said... they have an answer for why inertia shows, why gravity shows, why electricity shows. We have no answer at Caltech. We know how things fall... how they coast... how they're electrical. We don't know why. ...[T]hose old physicists gave us a way of looking at this thing that says why. If you mistake one thing for another, the one thing has to show, and they said what's underneath has to be changeless, infinite and undivided... [T]he... [unchanging] that shows through is inertia, the infinite is the electrical energy and... gravity is the undivided showing through."

"It shows through in us too. Everybody runs after peace and security. That's running after the changeless. Everybody runs after freedom. That's running after the infinite, and everybody runs after happiness. We all get married and have children... and you're restricted to the pursuit of happiness, not to its attainment. It's written."

"[I]f this whole thing is due to a mistake, there's a reason why it's made out of frustration. ...My model says that the universe is going to be made out of frustration."

"I was asked to give a talk... [by] the lady at the pretzel farm in Sierra... You understand a pretzel farm, where all those folded s are? ...[T]he lady ...asked me to give a talk on frustration. ...I said I was walking down through ... in Los Angeles in the winter... the rainy season, and there's this little stream of water coming along beside me... I was thinking that the poets say it will be happy when it reaches the sea. But the poets are wrong... The sea is trying desperately to get to the center of the earth, and the rocks are in the way, and it gets frustrated. ...So the rocks are trying desperately to get to the center of the earth, and the iron of the earth's core is in the way, and the rocks get frustrated. And the iron at the earth's core is trying desperately to fall into the sun, and its inertia is in the way, and it goes round and round... 18 miles a second, and it gets frustrated. And the sun is trying desperately to get to the center of the galaxy, and its inertia, the way it goes around 150 miles a second, and it gets frustrated. And the galaxy has been trying to merge with all the rest of the matter of the observable universe, but the expansion is in the way, and it gets frustrated. And the expansion has been trying to reduce the density of the universe, but the recycling is in the way, and it gets frustrated."

"Now if the universe weren't made out of frustration, it couldn't go on like this. Cheer up. There's no way out of it."

"[T]here's nothing invariant about how it [the universe] looks to all of us. There are a lot of us and it looks different to a whole bunch of us... But if you ask... the fundamental questions what's underneath, then I think it comes out the same. ...[T]he changeless, the infinite and the undivided, and if there's no other way to do this except making mistakes, but you're not required to make a mistake. I think it's time to fire me."

"I didn't create a telescope. ...I'm famous for being too retarded to make an . You're supposed to do something to get famous for it! But we... weren't going to do photography. We just wanted to see what's out there and we made a 24 incher, that's more than 13 foot , and we've run it for more than 80,000 miles in the public parks and in Indian reservations, up to Canada and down to Mexico. But we weren't going to do photography. We din't need to track things across the sky, so we never did all that. ...So the people who need to be blamed are the people who invented those equatorial mounts. You should get on their case, not mine, because that's an invention. What we did is not an invention."

"They were going to give me an award for public service in astronomy in the East Bay Astronomical Society, so... they sweet talk you in front of the crowd: "The Dobsonian Revolution..." So I got up and said, "All the previous revolutions were run with the cannons on Dobsonian mounts!""

"We were in the monastary and it must have been in our curriculum to grind telescope mirrors, and these were just gallon jug bottoms, just little 5 1/2 incher things, and I was doing them under water so as not to make a stir... but we had enough stir anyway."

"Why would I need a newer type telescope. Our older type telescopes do everything I need... There are a lot of people who like to invent... harder ways to do things. I let them do it."

"It's high time... that the amateurs did something else besides taking pictures with those 4 and 6 inchers, and looking at the pictures in the daytime with their s. They're not going to see them with their cone cells through the telescope. They're going to see them with their s, and the rod cells are wired the wrong way. For this whole bunch of cells there is only one wire to the brain, and for this whole bunch [in the other eye] there's only one wire to the brain. So your resolution is between this bunch and this bunch... so if you want to see what those pictures look like, take them in the closet and turn out the light, and damn it all, they look just like what you see through the eyepiece. Don't think I don't do all these things. I do."

"It's virtually impossible to entertain me at a . I've had to aim that [24 inch] telescope for the public for... a lot... 4,000 nights... so I've seen most of those things from 7 to 10 thousand feet through a 24 incher... and my eyes are no longer as young as they used to be."

"I used to be able to see the middle star in the through our 24 incher. So we were up on 5,000 ft in the Sierra and there was this young lady and... I noticed her pupils were very big, so I asked her to... see if she could see the central star... So she calls out there are two stars inside and there are two... in the nebulosity, and she calls out the . That's all you see through the 120... [I]t makes a lot of difference what's between your eyepiece and your brain... and I don't have very good eyes."

"When I was in Boston when... 3 years old, some big kid rubbed mud in my eyes till it was behind the eyeballs, and the doctors thought I would be blind. Mother said it took one whole week for the mud to ooze out from underneath my eyeballs. ...So I don't have a straight horizon in my right eye, but my brain reads my left eye. ...I've had 87 years to get used to it, and my brain knows which eye to read. ...But if I'm not careful, I can see, once in a while, this picture intrude ..."

"If the amateurs don't get their telescopes out for the public, nobody will! The professionals make telescopes for the professionals. We sidewalk astronomers make telescopes for the rest of you."

"I was in ... and they've had star parties on the dark of the moon... probably for 100 years... Run off to the wilderness with their telescopes so they can lick their chops and go to bed. And now on the next week, when there is a quarter moon, they have a public star party in the old in Seattle, and they blame that one on me. But they get quite a number of telescopes... and several hundred people looking... A lot of amateurs do this kind of thing now. We sidewalk astronomers used to do it on every clear night, but... I can't do that any more. They run me all over the place in a plane."

"[Y]ou need to make telescopes so you can see what's going on out there. You can't see it any other way. Watching TV doesn't do it. They get all mixed up when they run the TV, and they get you all mixed up if you're not careful."

"[A] side to Dobson’s work that makes... scientists, uncomfortable."

"Dobson believes scientists are making a mistake by limiting themselves to conventional measurements of space and time. Such... he insists, have hit a roadblock. Researchers should, he says, add philosophy and metaphysics into their equations."

"Dobson tried this argument out on the physics department at , referring to his model of the universe... "I’ll admit... this is way out in left field." ...[P]rofessors and students fidgeted through the lecture. Several walked out... Afterward came... "What you’re talking about isn’t physics." "Nobody is going to listen... until you can come up with... numbers.""

"He is portrayed as a galactic Pied Piper, luring followers with enthusiasm and charm, coaxing them on a journey to the heavens."

"Dobson’s original design is fundamentally excellent. What I have done is taken Dobson’s concepts and tried to realize their full potential."

"Dobson is a visionary. With his home-built telescopes, he smashed traditional "small" expectations for amateur instruments. ...John Dobson pointed the way to today’s dream telescopes."

"The true Dobsonian—the telescope held by friction alone—was invented by John Lowry Dobson. Born in China in 1915 to missionary parents, it fell to Dobson to reduce the alt-azimuth telescope to its essentials. ...[H]is family returned to San Francisco in 1927."

"[A] lecture by changed the direction of young Dobson’s life, sending him on a quest for "the reality behind the universe" under the Swami’s instruction. The Swami advised returning to school, and in 1943, Dobson graduated with degrees in chemistry and mathematics. He immediately found work at Berkeley, later transferring to Caltech and then to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory."

"In 1944, Dobson quit his job and entered a monastery as a monk of the . At the monastery, Swami Ashokananda assigned him the task of uniting the ancient thinking of India with and astronomy... that deal most closely with the "first cause" of the universe."

"In 1956, Dobson built his first telescope. The mirror was made from a 12inch disk of glass using the instructions found in Allyn Thompson's Making Your Own Telescope. The sight of the moon through this instrument helped him decide that everyone in the world had to see the heavens through a telescope."

"In 1958, Dobson was transferred to the ’s monastery in Sacramento, where he... surreptitiously built telescopes... At night Dobson trundled his reflectors... around the... neighborhood and taught local children... to build telescopes. But monastery rules forbade leaving the monastery... without permission, and in 1967, after 23 years... Dobson was expelled. ...[H]e had constructed fifteen 12-inch and two 18-inch telescopes from scavenged junk."

"Dobson returned to San Francisco... [E]very clear night, he rolled his 12-inch Stellatrope to the corner... and showed the heavens to anyone who would look. One... passersby... arranged for him to begin teaching telescope making and astronomy at the Jewish Community Center, and later at the and the ."

"[T]wo... friends insisted... he join them in forming... the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers. This club met at [Dobson's same corner] and brought telescopes... During the 70s and 80s, the[y] toured national parks... showing tens of thousands... their universe..."

"Big, thin mirrors, the sling support, Teflon-on-Formica bearings, and the practical alt-azimuth mount are Dobson’s contributions."

"Nearly a million people have looked through Dobson's telescopes, which he constructs from castoff pieces of plywood... scraps of two-by-fours, cardboard centers of hose reels, chunks of cereal boxes and s from old ships."

"Says legendary comet-hunter David Levy, borrowing... from Bob Summerfield... of Astronomy To Go, a traveling star lab: "Newton made telescopes for astronomers to observe the universe; John Dobson makes telescopes for the rest of us.""

"Dobson's invention is... a system of making and mounting one. {...he uses the same type of reflecting telescope devised by Sir Isaac Newton ...) Dobson's mirrors are thin, light and cheap... made from the bottoms of glass gallon jugs instead of optical glass. ...[H]is mount that made weights unnecessary. Where an eight-inch amateur telescope with accessor[ies]... can cost $2,400, a basic eight-inch... can be made... for $200."

"A is just a pile of stuff."

"A park ranger once questioned the appropriateness of the telescopes, saying, "The sky is not a part of the park," to which Dobson replied, "No, but the park is part of the sky.""

"Can we, by now, square science with religion? In particular, can we square relativity and quantum mechanics with Swami Vivekananda's Advaita Vedanta? Since there cannot be two worlds - one for the scientists and one for the mystics - it must be that their descriptions are of the same world but from different points of view. Can we, from the vantage point of the Swami's Advaita (non-dualism), see both points of view? Swami Vivekananda said that science and religion would meet and shake hands. Can we see things from his vantage point? Since the notion of maya or apparition as the first cause of our physics is central to the swami's Advaita, I have chosen as "The Equations of Maya". Can we find them in our physics? According to the philosophy of the Advaita Vedantins, as the swami himself has said, there cannot be two existences, only one. And maya is, as it were, a veil or screen through which that oneness (the Absolute) is seen as this Universe of plurality and change.""

"The importance of a telescope is not how big it is, it's not how well made it is, it's how many people less fortunate than you got to look through it."

"In the absence of time we are left with the changeless, since change can take place only in time. And since smallness and dividedness can exist only in space, in the absence of space we are left with the infinite, the undivided."

"For many years Newton's view swept the field. But why don't corpuscles collide?"

"[A]t the hands of Huygens, Young, and Frensnel, Euler's notion that light might be a ... began to gain ground."

"But how could the ether be sufficiently rigid to transmit the vibrations at the speed of light and yet let the planets pass through it?"

"Then came Faraday... Space was filled with fields, and the fields were filled with energy. ...Maxwell suggested ...light was an electromagnetic wave... through the luminiferous ether."

"Then came Michelson and Morley. ...Then came Planck and Einstein. Light... was quantized... energy... Planck's constant times the (E=hv)."

"[S]peed of the photons... is independent of the observer's motion... So Einstein thought... who needs the ether? The photons, like fish out of water, were without the luminiferous ether..."

"Einstein put time into our geometry with space (where it belongs) so... "Matter tells space-time how to bend and space-time tells matter how to move" [Ref: Wheeler]. ...Swami Vivekananda ...suggested to Tesla ...winter ...1895-96 ...matter is ... (E=m). Matter is wound up against space-time and space-time is wound up against [matter]."

"In the four dimensional... space-time... separation between the emission... and the absorption events of the photons goes to zero, and even the fish are gone. ...What we see as a light-year away, we see as a year ago, because the time comes in squared with a minus sign."

"Energy is... the nature of... underlying existence showing through in space and time... it... remains constant."