University Of California Berkeley Alumni

"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.""

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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 ."

"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."

"[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..."

"S^2 = x^2 - t^2S is zero only if x is equal to t. If x is equal to t then S is always zero. ...[O]ur evidence that the universe is out there and inde-god damned-pendent of us, is that we look out there and see it... [T]he equation says that... the separation of every event that you've seen... and your seeing of that event has always been zero. ...[W]e knew it was like that when we're dreaming. We didn't know that it's better than that when we're awake."

"[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."

"[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."

"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."

"One of the troubles of the Big Bang is they invented the initial conditions so that it would come out like this. Well, that's not usually the name of the game. ...You're supposed to look to see what the initial ingredients might have been. ...I don't take seriously dark energy and dark matter. Dark matter, as I see it... we already know that we see only a little bit of the universe that's out there. Vera Rubin measured it a long time ago. We know where it is, and I have a good idea what it is."

"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.""

"I have a feeling... that the physicists are going to have to learn to read, because the... physicists have taught... that thisE = mmeans that matter can be converted to energy... and that's not this equation. That would be E + m = \text{a concept}. If mass goes down the energy goes up. If the energy goes down, the mass goes up. There's only one way to write that E + m = k, and that's not Einstein's equation... and Einstein never took it the other way. He always took it the way he wrote it. ...I don't think he ever saw how it was taught in school. If you were teaching... and Einstein is visiting... are you going to talk relativity?"

"[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."

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

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

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

"Einstein never changed it, the way he put it in his words. He said toward the end of his life, ..."Matter had fallen out of the physics... as a fundamental concept." We're left only with energy. ...That's going to have to be cleaned up. The physicists can't be this retarded permanently."

"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."

"All we see is that things are moving away from each other, but if you see from the center of an observational universe, as seen by you they're going away from you. ...[R]edshift is not an actual thing. This is not an actual model of the universe. It's not a model of an actual universe, it's a model of an observational universe... [T]hat's the difference between this model and all of the other cosmological models. All the other cosmological models have taken the universe to be actual. What do we mean by actual? We mean that it arises by a process in physics. Since universes are fairly well known not to arise by processes in physics, I don't think that we have any actual universes. I think we're stuck with observational physics. I think this stuff that we wrote on the board is about an observational universe, not about an actual universe."

"I asked 3 astronomers in the last 25 or 30 years... When a cluster of stars is formed out of a cloud of dusty , what proportion of this stuff makes into the stars, and what proportion is blown away by the stellar wind? ...[T]he first 2 ...said they don't have an immediate answer... but they thought that between 1 and 10% would make it into the stars, and between 90 and 99% would be blown away. ...[T]he 3rd man ...in more recent time ...said 95% ...is blown away, and in some cases more and in some cases less. So... what is all this ? It's blown away from when the stars were formed. ...[W]hen a galaxy is formed, it's just a cluster of stars and 99 or 95%... of this stuff is going to be blown away. Now that's what we see. Vera Rubin measured this for ... around it is all the rest of this stuff which is 10 times as much as we see in the galaxy... So the is perfectly ordinary matter..."

"[I]n recent times we've discovered... that about 1/2 of the neutron stars that we know about have from the galaxy. ...Now these are neutron stars with a density of 100,000 battle ships in a one pint jar, and they're about 10 or 12 miles in diameter and they weigh a hell of a lot, and they're leaving the galaxy, and they're , and they're too bloody small for you to find. ...They're not going to shine for you."

"So if you ask what's beyond the observable universe, and the observable universe... is due to a mistake... and you want to know what's beyond the mistake, it's the changeless, the infinite, the undivided."

"Long ago there were some physicists who said that the whole universe was made out of energy. We Europeans were so retarded that we didn't notice... energy until 1845. But there were some physicists who... probably 5,000 years ago said the whole universe is made out of energy, and their name for the universe was... "the changing"... [T]hey said if the universe is the changing, there has to be something with respect to which it changes. So there has to be a changeless underneath, and if it's not in time it can't be in space, so it has to be changeless, infinite and undivided. Then their problem was, if what exists is changeless and what we see is changing, how the hell do you do that? ...[T]hey said it could only be by mistake. You can't change the changeless, but you could mistake the changeless for the changing. So they said, we'll have to study mistakes."

"In order to mistake one thing for another you have 3 things to do. ...[Y]ou have to fail to see what it was. That's the veiling power of your mistake. Then you have to jump to the conclusion that it was something else. That you do on your own hoofs. That's called the projecting power of the mistake. But... you had to see the thing in the first place, or you would have never made the mistake that way. In order to mistake your friend for a ghost, you had to see your friend. Your friend shows through in the ghost. So those old physicists said the changeless has to show through in our physics. That's inertia. The infinite has to show... That's the in the miniscule particles. And the undivided has to show... and that's why they all fall together by gravity."

"I think that the is ordinary matter. I don't think we need any fancy stuff like the Big Bang people need. The Big Bang people needed all that fancy stuff because their inflationary models said that it has to be in there... [T]hen they ran into this difficulty... If there's all that extra stuff in here, out of which and could be made, then the Big Bang model is wrong. ...If all this extra matter is ordinary matter, then the helium abundance is not ok for the Big Bang model! So then they had to invent that this dark matter responds only to gravity. I was having dinner with a physicist... I said in that case why didn't it fall into the galaxy? ...[H]e said, "It can't fall into anything without getting rid of its gravitational energy, and it has no way to do that." So what's the use of the dark matter? It can't do anything. ...[T]hat's the problem with the dark matter..."

"Now it's not as though we Europeans had another explanation for any of this. We don't! ...We have only an explanation of how things fall, not why they fall; and how they coast, not why they coast; and that they are made of electricity and not why they're made of electricity. Those old physicists had the why answer on this."

"There's another problem. The Big Bang people always thought that the background radiation that... Penzias and Wilson discovered in 1965 was the proof of their theory. Well, you can't prove a theory. You can disprove it, and it's been disproven several times."

"[H]ow do I get the background radiation? It turns out that way out near the border, where the mass of the particles is very low, all radiation going through a field of low mass particles gets so often picked up and re-radiated that it gets thermalized to 3°K. ...[T]he amount of 3K background radiation that we get in this model corresponds to what we measure, and the Big Bang gets about 1% of what they predict."

"[T]he dark matter that they invented said that the universe should be not expanding so fast. ...So then they had to invent the to make it speed up. ...[I]f you want to invent all these things you can get out of any model."

"The fun part is this. We have a rule against machines... because the entropy tends to a maximum. ...Entropy is a measure of the scrambledness of the energy... and it's easier to scramble an egg than to unscramble it. ...So the rule is that entropy, the scrambledness of the energy tends to go up, and does not tend to go down, and for that reason you can't have a perpetual motion machine that takes energy in a more scrambled state and runs it out in a less scrambled state. It always goes the other way. It gets it in a less scrambled state and dumps it out scrambled."

"[I]n recent times we found there's... dozens of galaxies that are only a few hundred million years old, and they couldn't possibly be as old as the Big Bang theory says they should be. ...So there's a lot of observational evidence... on my side that says no to the Big Bang model."

"[I]n my model the stuff recycles from the border as brand new spaced all out... and that's the lowest state of entropy known to man. Hydrogen all spaced out is the lowest state of entropy, and then it falls together by gravity and the entropy goes up, and all these other things happen and the entropy keeps going up and going up. ...[W]hen it recycles from the border the negative entropy is back in."

"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."

"\triangle x\;\triangle mv \ge \hbarThis we got from Heisenberg in 1927, but he blames it on Einstein. Heisenberg says, ....for more than three ...months they tried to describe the track of an electron across the , which they can see. They tried to describe it in quantum mechanics, and they couldn't ...These are the biggest shots in quantum mechanics, and they couldn't do it. Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger... couldn't do it. ...[H]eisenberg said, then I remembered and suggested what Einstein had ...[said] earlier, "Theory must first say what can be observed" and when I looked at the problem from that side, I had the uncertainty relation."

"\triangle x\;\triangle mv \ge \hbarSo what this says is that the product of our uncertainty in where something is [\triangle x], and our uncertainty in what it's doing, [\triangle mv] its momentum, can never be less than this little guy [\hbar] whom we don't have to know anything about... because he doesn't get bigger or smaller... 2 doesn't get bigger or smaller and π doesn't get bigger or smaller in flat space. ...[W]hat this says is that our uncertainty here [\triangle x] multiplied by our uncertainty here [\triangle mv] cannot go to zero. ...Your uncertainty can't go to zero. ...So if you know where something is, you can't know what it's doing, and if you know what it's doing, you can't know where it's doing it. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"Now back to the border... where the radiation as seen by us approaches zero. The energy of the particles approaches zero. If the energy of the particles approaches zero, [E = m] the mass of the particles approaches zero. If the mass of the particles approaches zero, [\triangle x\;\triangle mv \ge \hbar] the momentum of the particles approaches zero. The momentum is the mass multiplied by the velocity... If the momentum approaches zero, our uncertainty in the momentum approaches zero. You can't have a big mistake about nothing. ...If the uncertainty in the momentum approaches zero, the uncertainty in where they are [\triangle x] goes to totality, and they can recycle back anywhere. I don't see any way to avoid that, understanding physics the way we understand it now. You would have to change the physics to get out of the mess."

"E = mSo this... says that what we call matter, was just potential energy. Now we got both these [spacetime and energy equations] in 1905."

"Now what Einstein's geometry pointed out is that the time comes in squared with a minus sign. ...[R]emember ...Euclid's geometry... every time you square something it's got a plus sign. No, it's got a minus sign. ...You have to subtract the time separation from the space separation, and if they're equal, this [S] goes to zero."

"[I]f a light beam can get from here-now to there-then, or from there-then to here-now, then the distance [x] between here and there is equal to the time [t] between now and then, and the total separation goes to zero."

"So as I see it, the stuff recycles from the border."

"E = mNow this is E = m. You already heard it with the c^2 on there, but that's just how many s equals a . When Einstein found out they were measuring the same thing in grams as in ergs, he has to know how many ergs makes a gram, and an erg is the kinetic energy of a 2 gram beetle walking 1 centimeter per second and running into your shoe. ...The gram is the energy of the Hiroshima bomb, and he had to know how many beetles... to get rid of Berkeley. ...[T]hat's what the c^2 is all about, 9 times 10^{20}. ...The kinetic energy of 9 times 10^{20} 2 gram beetles walking 1 centimeter per second would vaporize Berkeley."

"S^2 = x^2 - t^2This is Einstein's 1905 geometry. All he noticed was that distances are not objective. How far it is from New York to Chicago depends on how fast you're going by when you look at it. And lengths of time are not objective. What you call a minute or an hour depends upon how fast you're going by when you look at the clock."

"Suppose we have two space ships [travelling opposite directions]... These people see those clocks [in the other spaceship] are spinning around too fast. These people [in the opposing spaceship] see those clocks [in the first spaceship] are spinning around too fast. After they've passed each other these people see those clocks have slowed down, and those people see those [other] clocks have slowed down. Now whose clocks have slowed down? There is no such thing as how fast a clock is going."

"I know. You'll say, "I'm going to go along with the damned clock. That's entirely arbitrary, and the rest of the universe is not going along with your damned clock anyway."