Part 7. San Francisco and Hollywood, 1974 to 2008: what he believed about the universe, and what scientists made of it

In February 1937 he had gone to a lecture of Swami Ashokananda’s as an atheist and come out reasoning that either something lay under the universe that he had missed, or the man at the front of the room was not there, and he could see the man. In the monastery, by his own account, the Swami set him and another monk to put science and Vedanta together. “I don’t know what your problems are, but that was mine,” he told his friends.66.Memoir 3; Stavig 2019, p. 7; SRV Association 2014.his own accountMemoir 3: John Dobson, “Memoir 3”, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).a later writerStavig 2019: Gopal Stavig, “Ramakrishna-Vedanta in Southern California”, part VIII, “John Dobson” (2019).his own accountSRV Association 2014: SRV Association, “In Memoriam: John Dobson”, srv.org, 2014.

On the class tapes he says that two pieces of the answer came to him years before he had an equation for them. In a time of hard practice, when he sometimes went several days without eating, the world went flat on him: “this whole thing looks two-dimensional, looks like a picture.” All our evidence for depth, he reasoned, is two flat pictures, one on each retina. And in the monastery he wrote himself a note, which he had since come across in his own handwriting: “I wrote it down that space and time must be opposites.”77.Cosmology class 9, at 00:08:17, 00:09:27; Cosmology class 4, at 00:23:16, 00:23:25. Recorded: “this whole thing looks two-dimensional, looks…” (Cosmology class 9, 00:09:27). Recorded: “I wrote it down that space…” (Cosmology class 4, 00:23:25).his own accountCosmology class 9: John Dobson, cosmology class 9, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 4: John Dobson, cosmology class 4, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

The equation came about 1974, and it was Einstein’s. In class he came at it from a distance everybody thinks they know, the mile from where they sat to a spot in Golden Gate Park. An astronaut going by fast enough, he said, would not agree about the mile, or about how long the clock took to get from 8 to 9. So relativity measures something else, the separation between two events, a here-and-now and a there-and-then, and it gets that number by putting the distance and the time together under one square-root sign.88.Cosmology class 4, at 00:23:03, 00:05:51, 00:09:50; Cosmology class 9, at 00:10:05.his own accountCosmology class 4: John Dobson, cosmology class 4, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 9: John Dobson, cosmology class 9, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

He had taught the same class years before for the University of California, and a man there had called out, “you can’t put time under the radical with space like that.” Like adding apples and oranges, Dobson suggested, and the man said yes. School had taught him you couldn’t add those, Dobson said, but when he grew up he found that “you call it fruit salad you get by with it every time”. The time does not go in the way the distance does, though. It is subtracted.99.Cosmology class 4, at 00:09:41, 00:09:50, 00:10:07, 00:23:03. Recorded: “you can’t put time under the…” (Cosmology class 4, 00:09:50). Recorded: “you call it fruit salad you…” (Cosmology class 4, 00:10:07).his own accountCosmology class 4: John Dobson, cosmology class 4, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

The equation and its minus sign are textbook physics. A standard university text calls the quantity the space-time interval: the distance between two events, squared, less the time between them, squared, with the time counted as the distance light travels in it. The interval, the text says, “is invariant under the Lorentz transformation”, which means that every observer in steady motion gets the same number for it. For light the number is zero. A lamp flashing and somebody seeing the flash are two events with no interval between them, whoever does the measuring.1010.University Physics 2016.a later writerUniversity Physics 2016: Samuel J. Ling, Jeff Sanny and William Moebs, University Physics, Volume 3 (OpenStax, 2016), section 5.5, “The Lorentz Transformation”.

What follows is Dobson’s reading, not the textbook’s. He had always presented the equation another way, and about 1974 he saw what the minus sign meant to him: space and time are in it as opposites, as his old note had said, so that an equal amount of each comes to none of either. Einstein’s own book pauses at the zero to say what it does not mean: not that the two events are in the same place, only that a light signal can connect them. Dobson read the passage to the class out of his copy, where he had once written a word in the margin, chicken. He lost that book for 5 years and bought another before the first one turned up again, with the word still in the corner.1111.Cosmology class 4, at 00:23:03, 00:23:25, 00:12:50, 00:17:09, 00:17:16.his own accountCosmology class 4: John Dobson, cosmology class 4, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

Einstein, he said, would not take his own equation at its word, and Dobson would. To him the zero meant what it said: nothing separates the one who sees from the thing seen. “I didn’t see that until 1974,” he said in class. He had found only one physicist, he said, who read it his way. The person he would most have liked to have in the room, he told his students, was Einstein.1212.Cosmology class 4, at 00:17:09, 00:22:14, 00:27:52; Cosmology class 9, at 00:10:05. Recorded: “I didn’t see that until 1974” (Cosmology class 9, 00:10:05).his own accountCosmology class 4: John Dobson, cosmology class 4, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 9: John Dobson, cosmology class 9, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

He took all this to mean that the universe we see is an appearance. Vedanta has an old picture for it, a rope that is taken for a snake: the snake is what is seen, and the rope is what is there. Advaita Vedanta’s word for that kind of cause is Vivarta, and the English name he chose for it was “apparitional causation”. The mistaking itself is called maya. “I like plain English,” he told a reporter, and he called it the mistake.1313.Einstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980; Vivekananda and the Einsteins 1998; Apparitional Causation 2006; Eugene Weekly 2004.his own accountEinstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980: John Dobson, “Einstein’s Physics of Illusion”, lecture at the Vedanta Society, Berkeley, 12 October 1980 (reprinted in The Vedanta Kesari, May 1988), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountVivekananda and the Einsteins 1998: John Dobson, “Vivekananda and the Einsteins”, signed Hollywood, February 1998, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountApparitional Causation 2006: John Dobson, “Apparitional Causation”, signed Hollywood, 17 May 2006, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountEugene Weekly 2004: “Seeing Stars”, Eugene Weekly, 15 July 2004.

If the world is an appearance, he reasoned, something has to be under it, and that something cannot be in space or in time. His words for it were changeless, infinite and undivided. The rope and the snake are Vedanta’s, and the physics he matched to them is his own. In a lecture at the Vedanta Society in Berkeley in October 1980, *Einstein’s Physics of Illusion*, he said how the real thing shows through the mistake: “The changeless shows as inertia, the infinite as electricity, and the undivided as gravity.” Ten years on he was calling the three of them fossils: inertia of the changeless, the electric charge on the smallest particles of the infinite, gravity of the undivided.1414.Complexifications 1995; Einstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980; The God Factor 1990.his own accountComplexifications 1995: John Dobson, “Complexifications” (1995), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountEinstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980: John Dobson, “Einstein’s Physics of Illusion”, lecture at the Vedanta Society, Berkeley, 12 October 1980 (reprinted in The Vedanta Kesari, May 1988), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountThe God Factor 1990: John Dobson, “The God Factor: Fossils”, reply to an article in Astronomy, March 1990, quanta-gaia.org.

Relativity, he wrote, leaves nothing of light but two events, one where it is given off and one where it is taken in, and the conclusion he drew was that “the dream is in the dreamer”. People sometimes asked him what lay beyond this huge world, he said at the end of a film on telescope building, and that was the answer he gave them. He had a second line for classes, since the body is part of what is seen: “I always say on that last day when they put this body in a box, I’m not getting in there.”1515.Photons? 1994; Telescope Building film, at 01:27:50; Cosmology class 9, at 00:05:31. Recorded: “I always say on that last…” (Cosmology class 9, 00:05:31).his own accountPhotons? 1994: John Dobson, “Photons?” (1994), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountTelescope Building film: Telescope Building with John Dobson, instructional film, about 1992 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 9: John Dobson, cosmology class 9, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

Relativity and quantum mechanics, he wrote in 1993, both point to an apparitional universe. If a physicist as famous as Wheeler or Hawking noticed that, the news would be around the world in a week. He used to hope it would be Richard Feynman, “but he is gone”.1616.Origins 1993.his own accountOrigins 1993: John Dobson, “Origins”, answers to the questionnaire of the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, quanta-gaia.org.

The theory that prevailed among astronomers gave the universe a beginning. The universe is expanding uniformly, which makes it “tempting to assume”, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences put it in 1978, that it was created in a cosmic explosion, the Big Bang. That year Penzias and Wilson shared in the Nobel Prize in physics for finding the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has the spectrum of a body 3 degrees above absolute zero, and the Academy called that solid support for reading the radiation as the “fossil remains” of the explosion. It allowed, both times, that other explanations were possible. Dobson had one.1717.Oregonian 2003; Nobel press release 1978.a later writerOregonian 2003: Richard Hill, “Telescopic Visionary”, The Oregonian, April 2003.a later writerNobel press release 1978: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, press release on the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics, 17 October 1978, nobelprize.org.

His universe had no beginning and needed none. It had always been going on the way it is, “in kind of a steady state”, as he put it to a reporter, with new matter and energy coming into being as the expanding universe reaches its outer limits.1818.A Sidewalk Astronomer, at 00:45:12; Perlman 2000.his own accountA Sidewalk Astronomer: A Sidewalk Astronomer (film, dir. Jeffrey Fox Jacobs, 2005), from the distributor’s published transcript (paraphrased).his own accountPerlman 2000: David Perlman, “A Star Among Astronomers”, San Francisco Chronicle, about December 2000 (reprinted on sidewalkastronomers.us).

The steady-state people, as he called them, had a problem: if the universe goes on expanding and its density never changes, where does the new hydrogen come from? His answer was the border of what we can observe. Seen from here, he argued, matter near that edge has its energy redshifted away toward zero, and its mass and its momentum go with it. As he gave Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the better we know a particle’s momentum, the less we can know about where it is. A particle with no momentum at all could be anywhere, and so, he said, the hydrogen comes back in. If matter recycles at the edge, he wrote, the entropy of the whole need not rise.1919.Cosmology class 5, at 00:43:57; A Handful of Original Ideas 2006; Entropy 1995.his own accountCosmology class 5: John Dobson, cosmology class 5, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountA Handful of Original Ideas 2006: John Dobson, “A Handful of Original Ideas”, signed Hollywood, 8 June 2006, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountEntropy 1995: John Dobson, “Entropy” (1995), quanta-gaia.org.

The principle is Heisenberg’s, and taking it out to the edge of the universe was Dobson’s own idea. His late list of original ideas has 16 of them, running from Vedanta to Hubble, and that one is the last, signed “Dobson 1990.” He told the class what a physicist would say to it. Go out to the border and the particles there are perfectly fine, and they are not going to recycle back in whatever JD says. His reply was that nobody can go there, because every observer is at the center of the universe that observer can see, and that nothing in Heisenberg’s principle lets you put it in the subjunctive. He called it his crazy view.2020.A Handful of Original Ideas 2006; Cosmology class 5, at 00:43:57, 00:03:40.his own accountA Handful of Original Ideas 2006: John Dobson, “A Handful of Original Ideas”, signed Hollywood, 8 June 2006, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCosmology class 5: John Dobson, cosmology class 5, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

He loved, he told a class, “to make fun of the Big Bang people”, and he had a one-sentence version of their theory that was all his own. Up in Oregon once he told a room of “these little tiny kids”, second- and third-graders, that the Big Bang people want us to believe nothing made everything out of nothing, and a boy said you can’t make anything out of nothing. It’s a grown-ups’ idea, Dobson told them. A Wall Street Journal reporter heard the same sentence at a planetarium in Eugene in 2004, where he also threw fliers into the crowd.2121.Cosmology class 3, at 00:15:13, 00:17:35, 00:17:48; Campbell 2004. Recorded: “to make fun of the Big…” (Cosmology class 3, 00:15:13). Recorded: “these little tiny kids” (Cosmology class 3, 00:17:35).his own accountCosmology class 3: John Dobson, cosmology class 3, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).record from the timeCampbell 2004: Brett Campbell, “The Father of Street-Corner Stargazing”, Wall Street Journal, 1 September 2004, p. D10.

The Big Bang, as he read it, assumes that if there were no space and no time there would be nothing at all, and he did not grant that. On this point, he wrote, he had to side with the mystics: existence is what the observations oblige him to take as given. He wore the short version on a button, “Nothing doesn’t exist.” In September 2000 the same 3 words were on his birthday cake, in icing.2222.How Much Do We Take For Granted? (essay); The Equations of Maya 1993; Jones, club page; Sullivant 2001, p. 73.his own accountHow Much Do We Take For Granted? (essay): John Dobson, “How Much Do We Take For Granted?”, undated essay written after 1987, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountThe Equations of Maya 1993: John Dobson, “The Equations of Maya”, written for the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions (printed in Cosmic Beginnings & Human Ends, Open Court, 1995), quanta-gaia.org.someone who was thereJones, club page: Morris Jones, “On The Sidewalk With John”, about 1999-2000 (posted 2004), sidewalkastronomers.us.someone who was thereSullivant 2001: Rosemary Sullivant, “On the Road with John Dobson”, Astronomy, September 2001.

One night around 1989, with the telescopes out on the sidewalk, a young man came up wanting to talk cosmology and demanded to know how a steady state got around creation from nothing. Before long he was asking whether Dobson believed in God. That was not their problem, Dobson told him: what the two of them had to go on was evidence, not beliefs. The essay he wrote out of that night ends with tests. If the universe turns out to have a net charge or a net momentum, he wrote, or if the proton is ever shown to decay, the suggestion has failed.2323.Creation Ex Nihilo 1989.his own accountCreation Ex Nihilo 1989: John Dobson, “Creation Ex Nihilo or from Wheeler’s Pregeometry?” (copyright 1989), quanta-gaia.org.

He believed the idea had come into physics out of Vedanta, and he told that history for more than 20 years. Swami Vivekananda, in his telling, asked Nikola Tesla at a party of Sarah Bernhardt’s in New York on February 13, 1896, to show that matter, as we call it, reduces to potential energy, and Tesla failed to show it. From Tesla, he wrote, the idea went to a close friend of Tesla’s, Mileva Marić, a physicist and Einstein’s first wife, who wrote the papers of 1905 for her husband, and in one essay he said her name was on the relativity paper.2424.Einstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980; Vivekananda and the Einsteins 1998; Entropy 1995; Energy 3 (2004).his own accountEinstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980: John Dobson, “Einstein’s Physics of Illusion”, lecture at the Vedanta Society, Berkeley, 12 October 1980 (reprinted in The Vedanta Kesari, May 1988), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountVivekananda and the Einsteins 1998: John Dobson, “Vivekananda and the Einsteins”, signed Hollywood, February 1998, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountEntropy 1995: John Dobson, “Entropy” (1995), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountEnergy 3 (2004): John Dobson, “Energy 3”, signed San Francisco, 28 February 2004, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

In everything we have read, each link of that chain is in his own essays and nowhere else: the question at the party, Tesla’s failure, the friendship, the authorship. The relativity paper as Annalen der Physik printed it in 1905 carries one author’s name, A. Einstein. On his list of original ideas, the one about a world made of energy is signed “The Einsteins 1905.”2525.Vivekananda and the Einsteins 1998; Energy 3 (2004); Annalen der Physik 1905; A Handful of Original Ideas 2006.his own accountVivekananda and the Einsteins 1998: John Dobson, “Vivekananda and the Einsteins”, signed Hollywood, February 1998, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountEnergy 3 (2004): John Dobson, “Energy 3”, signed San Francisco, 28 February 2004, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).a later writerAnnalen der Physik 1905: A. Einstein, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper”, Annalen der Physik, 1905, pp. 891-921 (publisher record via Crossref).his own accountA Handful of Original Ideas 2006: John Dobson, “A Handful of Original Ideas”, signed Hollywood, 8 June 2006, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

He went on lecturing in Vedanta’s halls, and its journals printed him. In December 1981 he was the first speaker at the Vivekananda Vedanta Society of Chicago’s symposium on science and religion, and Prabuddha Bharata, the Ramakrishna Order’s monthly, reported him as the author of a book, *Advaita Vedanta and Modern Science*. In the Society’s chapel there the next May he carried his scheme over to how people treat each other: doing something for somebody else, he said, answers to kinetic energy, and loving somebody to gravitational energy. He told a class years afterward that he used to be very embarrassed to talk about that part, because it is not hard-number science. The monthly printed two articles of his in 1985 and 1986, and The Vedanta Kesari six more by 1996.2626.SRV Association 2014; Prabuddha Bharata 1982-88; Bhavan’s Journal 1982; Cosmology class 7, at 00:44:45; Stavig 2019, p. 7.his own accountSRV Association 2014: SRV Association, “In Memoriam: John Dobson”, srv.org, 2014.record from the timePrabuddha Bharata 1982-88: Prabuddha Bharata, reports and notes on John Dobson, May 1982 to December 1988 (Internet Archive).record from the timeBhavan’s Journal 1982: “Science and Vedanta”, report of his talks in Michigan and Chicago in May 1982, Bhavan’s Journal (Bombay), vol. 28 no. 23, July 1982.his own accountCosmology class 7: John Dobson, cosmology class 7, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).a later writerStavig 2019: Gopal Stavig, “Ramakrishna-Vedanta in Southern California”, part VIII, “John Dobson” (2019).

In 1993 he answered a questionnaire from the Parliament of the World’s Religions on where the universe came from. “I feel that religion and science should meet and shake hands,” he wrote.2727.Origins 1993.his own accountOrigins 1993: John Dobson, “Origins”, answers to the questionnaire of the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, quanta-gaia.org.

During his stays with the Vedanta Society in Hollywood he gave series of cosmology classes that ran for more than a month. He also taught the cosmology in the same class as the telescope. In the week his students rough-ground their mirrors, one of them, Jim Shields, wrote, the homework was to say what the universe is made of and what makes it run. A month later, when they were polishing and putting mounts together out of hardware-store parts, it was what space is, what time is and why we don’t fall through the floor.2828.Stavig 2019, p. 7; Shields, club page.a later writerStavig 2019: Gopal Stavig, “Ramakrishna-Vedanta in Southern California”, part VIII, “John Dobson” (2019).someone who was thereShields, club page: Jim Shields, “Astronomy for Children Under 80 - Adventures with John Dobson”, undated, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

He was careful in class about whose ideas were whose. A friend had warned him, he said, to make it plain that results like these were Einstein’s craziness or Heisenberg’s, since he was crazy enough himself. Of his own notion he said, “I used to think this was nuts too,” and it made him feel better to know that Planck had feared the same of his idea, and that even Einstein had. At the end of one evening he let the class go and remembered that he had cookies to serve them, and at the end of the course he asked them back: “if you can go through this thing again, please do”.2929.Shields, club page; Cosmology class 5, at 00:03:40; Cosmology class 7, at 00:01:14; Cosmology class 3, at 00:30:41; Cosmology class 9, at 00:17:22. Recorded: “I used to think this was…” (Cosmology class 7, 00:01:14). Recorded: “if you can go through this…” (Cosmology class 9, 00:17:22).someone who was thereShields, club page: Jim Shields, “Astronomy for Children Under 80 - Adventures with John Dobson”, undated, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCosmology class 5: John Dobson, cosmology class 5, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 7: John Dobson, cosmology class 7, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 3: John Dobson, cosmology class 3, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 9: John Dobson, cosmology class 9, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

While he taught, the case for the Big Bang was getting stronger, and he knew the argument. Graduate students in New Mexico had put it to him a few weeks before one of the taped classes: the wrinkles the COBE satellite had found in the background radiation support the Big Bang very well, and without them it would have been a goner. He told the class he could not take variations of millionths of a degree very seriously. His own account of the radiation was the border again: starlight that reaches it, he said, passes through matter that, seen from here, has almost no mass left, and it comes back evened out to 3 degrees, and the amount we measure is the amount all that starlight would make.3030.Nobel press release 2006; Cosmology class 7, at 00:53:35, 00:49:52, 00:50:12.a later writerNobel press release 2006: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, press release on the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, 3 October 2006, nobelprize.org.his own accountCosmology class 7: John Dobson, cosmology class 7, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

The Academy read the same measurements the other way, and by 2006 it had dropped its allowances. That year the physics prize went to John Mather and George Smoot for what COBE had measured, and the Academy’s statement said the results gave “increased support for the Big Bang scenario”, which it called “the only scenario that predicts” radiation of the kind COBE found. With them, it said, cosmology became “a precise science”. When Dobson died, his obituary in the Los Angeles Times called the steady state “widely discredited” and said that many establishment astronomers had dismissed him for his loyalty to it.3131.Nobel press release 2006; LA Times obituary 2014.a later writerNobel press release 2006: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, press release on the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, 3 October 2006, nobelprize.org.a later writerLA Times obituary 2014: Elaine Woo, obituary of John Dobson, Los Angeles Times, January 2014.

Years before, he told the class, he had gone to a physics symposium at the University of California on the background radiation and raised a question from the floor: “at what temperature does the intergalactic dust radiate? It caused one hell of a stir.” Nobody in the room could say who had done the work on the dust, and the next time he turned up at a colloquium there he heard somebody say that Dobson was back. After the vote at Berkeley in 1976 an astronomer letting him out of the hall had told him he was mean, since professionals of that standing do not get asked to put their hands up, and Dobson thought the man had a point.3232.Cosmology class 7, at 00:49:52, 00:50:12; Anecdotes. Recorded: “at what temperature does the intergalactic…” (Cosmology class 7, 00:50:12).his own accountCosmology class 7: John Dobson, cosmology class 7, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountAnecdotes: John Dobson, “Memories” (anecdotes), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

In February 2005 the Sidewalk Astronomers’ website posted a paper called Observational Cosmology. Its authors were Ruth Ballard and John Dobson, and in class he had spoken of Ballard as “my friend”. The paper opens by asking for a model of the universe built “strictly on the basis of observation, and without the introduction of singularities”, one that would account for the red shift, for the background radiation, for where the hydrogen comes from, and for the galaxies.3333.Ballard and Dobson 2005; Cosmology class 6, at 00:41:24. Recorded: “my friend” (Cosmology class 6, 00:41:24).his own accountBallard and Dobson 2005: Ruth Ballard and John Dobson, “Observational Cosmology”, posted 17 February 2005, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCosmology class 6: John Dobson, cosmology class 6, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

Eleven years after the dinner in Berkeley he put a question to Allan Sandage. He had framed it on the plane to Pomona, where the Astronomical Society was holding its summer meeting in 1987: is it warranted to assume that if space and time were taken away, nothing would be left? Sandage got the question because of his talk on the Hubble constant, “such a lovely talk” that Dobson gave up the speaker he had meant to ask. Then Dobson offered what might be behind the universe in place of nothing, the changeless, the infinite, the undivided. “That remark brought that discussion to an end,” he wrote.3434.How Much Do We Take For Granted? (essay); Whence This Hydrogen? 2005.his own accountHow Much Do We Take For Granted? (essay): John Dobson, “How Much Do We Take For Granted?”, undated essay written after 1987, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountWhence This Hydrogen? 2005: John Dobson, “Whence This Hydrogen?”, signed 23 December 2005, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

Don Moser, who wrote about Dobson for Smithsonian in 1989, has what looks like the same exchange from Sandage’s side: the same question, put to him at a conference a couple of years before, and no reply. “I didn’t understand what he was saying,” Sandage recalled.3535.Moser 1989, pp. 102-110.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.

He asked Hawking and Feynman too, by his own account. Some time after Pomona Stephen Hawking was in Berkeley, and Dobson got the chance to ask him whether any observation counted for one side or the other. Hawking went to the trouble of answering through his machine: “I’m not sure it’s a meaningful question.” Richard Feynman he counted as one of his giants, and what he asked Feynman was the cuckoo-clock question, whether the rest mass of the proton could be understood as the energy of its gravitational separation from the rest of the universe. The answer he reported came with a condition: “If the mass of the Universe is the critical mass, it looks as though you’re right.” It was an answer to that one question and not a verdict on the cosmology.3636.How Much Do We Take For Granted? (essay); Whence This Hydrogen? 2005; TYCHO (essay); Einstein’s Geometry (essay).his own accountHow Much Do We Take For Granted? (essay): John Dobson, “How Much Do We Take For Granted?”, undated essay written after 1987, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountWhence This Hydrogen? 2005: John Dobson, “Whence This Hydrogen?”, signed 23 December 2005, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountTYCHO (essay): John Dobson, “TYCHO”, undated essay, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountEinstein’s Geometry (essay): John Dobson, “Einstein’s Geometry”, undated essay written after 2004, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

We have not found a scientist’s critique of his model anywhere in print. The newspapers printed verdicts. His ideas ran against the prevailing theories of mainstream astronomers and had drawn criticism from many scientists, The Oregonian wrote in 2003, and beside that it quoted the man hosting his classes that summer, who said Dobson backed his views with up-to-date information. Cosmologists dismissed the theory as “misguided and unsubstantiated”, the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2005, and credited what else he had done for astronomy. Fred Watson, astronomer in charge at the Anglo-Australian Observatory, told the paper that for a telescope so cheap and easy to make, “John Dobson is worth his weight in gold”.3737.Oregonian 2003; LA Times 2005.a later writerOregonian 2003: Richard Hill, “Telescopic Visionary”, The Oregonian, April 2003.record from the timeLA Times 2005: Hugo Martin, “Astronomer a star in his profession”, Los Angeles Times, 2005.

The crowd at the Riverside Telescope Makers Conference in 2001 followed his cosmology talk closely and thought too highly of him to be anything but respectful, wrote Bonnie Bilyeu Gordon, the editor of Astronomy. He had perhaps earned his say, the column allowed, on a theory that almost no one accepted. Gordon had heard the talk twice without following all of it, and wrote that most of the listeners were of the same mind. Sue French, a contributing editor at Sky & Telescope, was thrown by his line that in the absence of nothing there must be something. His talks, French said, were becoming “like a Rocky Horror Picture Show where you could bring the props”.3838.Gordon 2001; Space.com 2000.someone who was thereGordon 2001: Bonnie Bilyeu Gordon, “Behind the Scenes: Meeting John Dobson”, Astronomy, September 2001, p. 6.his own accountSpace.com 2000: Space.com profile of John Dobson, May 2000 (reprinted on sidewalkastronomers.us).

On the radio in 1991 Terry Gross told him that many academic astronomers thought he was out of his depth, and that a few had walked out of his presentations. “Well, I’m not very orthodox,” he said, for one thing because he doubted the observational evidence for the Big Bang. Then he went further: “I don’t care really whether the universe is a Big Bang model or whether it’s a steady-state model”. The big problem was why we see a universe at all, and because he was willing to look at problems like that one, he said, the scientists called him a metaphysician. Later he told a reporter it was only a matter of time until he was recognized as a genius. He told Smithsonian, chortling, “Hundreds of years ago they would have already burned me at the stake.”3939.Fresh Air 1991, at 00:03:46, 00:04:55, 00:08:04; Space.com 2000; Moser 2005. Recorded: “Well, I’m not very orthodox” (Fresh Air 1991, 00:03:46). Recorded: “I don’t care really whether the…” (Fresh Air 1991, 00:04:55).his own accountFresh Air 1991: Fresh Air, Terry Gross, “Sidewalk Astronomer John Dobson”, NPR, 1 May 1991 (recording).his own accountSpace.com 2000: Space.com profile of John Dobson, May 2000 (reprinted on sidewalkastronomers.us).his own accountMoser 2005: Don Moser, “35 Who Made a Difference: John Dobson”, Smithsonian, November 2005.

By his own report, a woman came up to him after a talk in February 2003 and told him it was the best lecture of her life. He had been speaking to the astronomy club at Leisure World, about 80 people, some of them his own age, and he had gone carefully. They laughed while he made fun of the Big Bang and put his recycling model in its place, and they laughed again at the rope and the snake.4040.Leisure World talk 2003.his own accountLeisure World talk 2003: John Dobson, untitled report of his talk to the Leisure World astronomy club, headed Hollywood, 26 February 2003, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

He was a month short of 90 when he lectured on cosmology in Monmouth, Oregon, on a Friday evening in August 2005, from the top of a chemistry lab table, to about 40 astronomy buffs who sat riveted, the reporter wrote. Somebody asked whether he believed in God. “Yes, but I don’t have her number,” he said.4141.LA Times 2005.record from the timeLA Times 2005: Hugo Martin, “Astronomer a star in his profession”, Los Angeles Times, 2005.

“I’m allergic to the Big Bang,” he said in a talk on September 14, 2008. It was a line he had been giving reporters since 2000. Asked there about his interest in Vedanta, he answered with the cosmology: the Vedantins, he said, were the only people he knew of whose cosmology starts from a mistake.4242.PATS talk 2008, at 00:10:23, 00:33:17; Space.com 2000; Sullivant 2001, p. 73; Oregonian 2003; Sky at Night 2006. Recorded: “I’m allergic to the Big Bang” (PATS talk 2008, 00:10:23).his own accountPATS talk 2008: John Dobson, “Einstein’s Geometry”, talk at the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show, 14 September 2008 (recording).his own accountSpace.com 2000: Space.com profile of John Dobson, May 2000 (reprinted on sidewalkastronomers.us).someone who was thereSullivant 2001: Rosemary Sullivant, “On the Road with John Dobson”, Astronomy, September 2001.a later writerOregonian 2003: Richard Hill, “Telescopic Visionary”, The Oregonian, April 2003.his own accountSky at Night 2006: Interview with John Dobson, BBC Sky at Night Magazine, December 2006.

Swami Ashokananda, who had given him the job, died in December 1969, two years after Dobson left the order. Late in life Dobson wrote the assignment down in a memoir. “Swami never knew that I had gotten that job done,” he wrote. “That’s very sad. Very sad.”4343.Vedanta Society of Sacramento; SRV Association 2014; Memoir 3.a later writerVedanta Society of Sacramento: Vedanta Society of Sacramento, “Our Story” and “Resident Swamis” (web pages).his own accountSRV Association 2014: SRV Association, “In Memoriam: John Dobson”, srv.org, 2014.his own accountMemoir 3: John Dobson, “Memoir 3”, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

1. Whose words these are. The 1980 lecture is given as a Vedanta journal reprinted it in 1988; the essays run from 1989 to 2007. The classes, the 1991 radio interview and television series, the telescope-building film and the 2008 talk are recordings. His recorded words are quoted only where several independent speech-recognition systems (different engines, run separately) heard the same words; where they did not agree, he is paraphrased and the note gives the time in the recording. His class explanations (the cuckoo clock, the astronaut, opposites, Einstein’s passage, the border, the radiation) are from the tapes, in our words. He does not name Einstein’s book; we think it is The Meaning of Relativity. Of the 1982 Bhavan’s Journal report, a badly damaged scan, we use only the Chicago lecture.4444.Einstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980; Creation Ex Nihilo 1989; Negative Entropy 1 (2007); Cosmology class 9, at 00:17:22; Fresh Air 1991, at 00:03:46; The Astronomers 1991, at 00:34:46; Telescope Building film, at 01:27:50; PATS talk 2008, at 00:10:23; Cosmology class 1, at 00:06:39; Cosmology class 4, at 00:12:50, 00:17:09; Cosmology class 5, at 00:43:57; Cosmology class 7, at 00:53:35; Bhavan’s Journal 1982.his own accountEinstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980: John Dobson, “Einstein’s Physics of Illusion”, lecture at the Vedanta Society, Berkeley, 12 October 1980 (reprinted in The Vedanta Kesari, May 1988), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountCreation Ex Nihilo 1989: John Dobson, “Creation Ex Nihilo or from Wheeler’s Pregeometry?” (copyright 1989), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountNegative Entropy 1 (2007): John Dobson, “Negative Entropy 1”, signed San Francisco, 16 December 2007, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCosmology class 9: John Dobson, cosmology class 9, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountFresh Air 1991: Fresh Air, Terry Gross, “Sidewalk Astronomer John Dobson”, NPR, 1 May 1991 (recording).his own accountThe Astronomers 1991: The Astronomers (KCET/PBS, 1991), episode 1, “Where Is the Rest of the Universe?” (recording).his own accountTelescope Building film: Telescope Building with John Dobson, instructional film, about 1992 (recording).his own accountPATS talk 2008: John Dobson, “Einstein’s Geometry”, talk at the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show, 14 September 2008 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 1: John Dobson, cosmology class 1, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 4: John Dobson, cosmology class 4, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 5: John Dobson, cosmology class 5, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 7: John Dobson, cosmology class 7, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).record from the timeBhavan’s Journal 1982: “Science and Vedanta”, report of his talks in Michigan and Chicago in May 1982, Bhavan’s Journal (Bombay), vol. 28 no. 23, July 1982.

2. When the idea came. One class puts the days when the world looked flat around 1940, 34 years before 1974. Another has him writing the note on space and time in the 1940s, while still in the monastery (he entered in May 1944), and then counts nearly 25 years from about 1950. So the body gives 1974, on which both agree, and nothing earlier. He says he has seen the note in his own hand; we have not.4545.Cosmology class 9, at 00:10:05; Cosmology class 4, at 00:23:03, 00:23:16, 00:23:25, 00:23:38; Levy 1995.his own accountCosmology class 9: John Dobson, cosmology class 9, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountCosmology class 4: John Dobson, cosmology class 4, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).a later writerLevy 1995: David H. Levy, “Walden of the Sky”, Sky & Telescope, September 1995, p. 84.

3. The two papers. The Mexico trip report dates the Ensenada meeting to May 1975 and lists the cuckoo-clock paper without naming its author; his memoir says it was his and calls the Berkeley talk similar. The memoir puts Berkeley several years later, but the journal volume it cites, 88, is 1976’s. We have not read the printed item; its form and argument rest on his word and its title. The vote, the crossed-off sign, the furor, the astronomer at the door and Sandage’s words come from the memoir alone, which does not say which equation’s sign he crossed off.4646.Mexico report 1975; Anecdotes.record from the timeMexico report 1975: “The 24 Incher to Mexico”, Sidewalk Astronomers trip report, May 1975, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountAnecdotes: John Dobson, “Memories” (anecdotes), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

4. Sandage, Hawking and Feynman. An undated essay puts the Pomona question in the summer of 1987, says Sandage would not take it up, and has Hawking in Berkeley several months later. The essay of December 2005 says several years, so the body gives Hawking no date. Moser names no place or year, but the question he prints is almost word for word the one in the 2005 essay, so we take it for the same meeting. For Feynman, an essay written after 2004 has the conditional answer, an undated one has him simply agreeing, and a note of 2007 cites the idea as “Feynman 1980”. All are Dobson’s accounts, most written long afterward; Sandage’s one sentence is the only word we have from the three.4747.How Much Do We Take For Granted? (essay); Whence This Hydrogen? 2005; Moser 1989, pp. 102-110; Einstein’s Geometry (essay); TYCHO (essay); Negative Entropy 1 (2007).his own accountHow Much Do We Take For Granted? (essay): John Dobson, “How Much Do We Take For Granted?”, undated essay written after 1987, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountWhence This Hydrogen? 2005: John Dobson, “Whence This Hydrogen?”, signed 23 December 2005, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.his own accountEinstein’s Geometry (essay): John Dobson, “Einstein’s Geometry”, undated essay written after 2004, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountTYCHO (essay): John Dobson, “TYCHO”, undated essay, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountNegative Entropy 1 (2007): John Dobson, “Negative Entropy 1”, signed San Francisco, 16 December 2007, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

5. Vivekananda, Tesla and Mileva Marić. He told this history from 1980 to 2006, with growing detail: around 1895 in the Berkeley lecture, the winter of 1895-96 in a 1994 essay, Sarah Bernhardt’s party by 1996, the day in 1998. Only his essays give us the Tesla story. The 1998 essay quotes a letter in which Vivekananda expects the demonstration; we have not read the letter, or Tesla’s papers. Marić writes the 1905 papers in his pieces of 1998, 2001 and 2004; in 2002 she is a link in a chain; the 2006 list gives a shared credit. The 1905 relativity paper’s single author is from the publisher’s record, which shows only whose name was printed.4848.Einstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980; Photons? 1994; Something Deeply Hidden 1996; Vivekananda and the Einsteins 1998; A Note to the Vedantins 2001; Energy 3 (2004); Physics and Vedanta 2002; A Handful of Original Ideas 2006; Annalen der Physik 1905.his own accountEinstein’s Physics of Illusion 1980: John Dobson, “Einstein’s Physics of Illusion”, lecture at the Vedanta Society, Berkeley, 12 October 1980 (reprinted in The Vedanta Kesari, May 1988), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountPhotons? 1994: John Dobson, “Photons?” (1994), quanta-gaia.org.his own accountSomething Deeply Hidden 1996: John Dobson, “Something Deeply Hidden”, signed October 1996, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountVivekananda and the Einsteins 1998: John Dobson, “Vivekananda and the Einsteins”, signed Hollywood, February 1998, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountA Note to the Vedantins 2001: John Dobson, “A Note to the Vedantins”, signed Hollywood, 2001, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountEnergy 3 (2004): John Dobson, “Energy 3”, signed San Francisco, 28 February 2004, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountPhysics and Vedanta 2002: John Dobson, “Physics And Vedanta” (copyright 2002), sidewalkastronomers.us.his own accountA Handful of Original Ideas 2006: John Dobson, “A Handful of Original Ideas”, signed Hollywood, 8 June 2006, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).a later writerAnnalen der Physik 1905: A. Einstein, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper”, Annalen der Physik, 1905, pp. 891-921 (publisher record via Crossref).

6. The standard physics and the reception. The space-time interval is given from one university textbook and the Big Bang from the Academy’s announcements: the one of 1978 says twice that other readings were possible, the one of 2006 does not. The reception comes from reporters, who report criticism and dismissal without naming a critic; one prints “Physicians and cosmologists”, which we read as physicists. We have found no review of the 1976 paper or of his cosmology books. In 1991 he said he did not really care which model was right, and from 2000 that he was allergic to the Big Bang; the 1991 interview has him doubting the evidence too, so we read a change of tone, not of mind.4949.University Physics 2016; Nobel press release 1978; Nobel press release 2006; Oregonian 2003; LA Times 2005; LA Times obituary 2014; Anecdotes; Fresh Air 1991, at 00:04:55, 00:03:46; Sullivant 2001, p. 73.a later writerUniversity Physics 2016: Samuel J. Ling, Jeff Sanny and William Moebs, University Physics, Volume 3 (OpenStax, 2016), section 5.5, “The Lorentz Transformation”.a later writerNobel press release 1978: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, press release on the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics, 17 October 1978, nobelprize.org.a later writerNobel press release 2006: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, press release on the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, 3 October 2006, nobelprize.org.a later writerOregonian 2003: Richard Hill, “Telescopic Visionary”, The Oregonian, April 2003.record from the timeLA Times 2005: Hugo Martin, “Astronomer a star in his profession”, Los Angeles Times, 2005.a later writerLA Times obituary 2014: Elaine Woo, obituary of John Dobson, Los Angeles Times, January 2014.his own accountAnecdotes: John Dobson, “Memories” (anecdotes), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountFresh Air 1991: Fresh Air, Terry Gross, “Sidewalk Astronomer John Dobson”, NPR, 1 May 1991 (recording).someone who was thereSullivant 2001: Rosemary Sullivant, “On the Road with John Dobson”, Astronomy, September 2001.

7. The book, the film and the Order’s journal. Gopal Stavig dates Advaita Vedanta and Modern Science to 1979; a 1988 article cites a Chicago printing of 1983, and by January 1985 it was in a second edition. Prabuddha Bharata reported that at the 1981 Chicago symposium he showed how near Einstein’s physics comes to Vedanta’s idea of oneness; in January 1985 its editors called the concepts of his article *Einstein and Vivekananda* original, and a December 1988 article quoted the book in its own argument. These are a religious journal’s notices; none weighs the cosmology as physics. The 2004 documentary Universe: The Cosmology Quest includes him with Hoyle, Arp, the Burbidges and Narlikar; nothing we have read says what they made of his model.5050.Stavig 2019, p. 7; Prabuddha Bharata 1982-88; Club biography; Club news 2004.a later writerStavig 2019: Gopal Stavig, “Ramakrishna-Vedanta in Southern California”, part VIII, “John Dobson” (2019).record from the timePrabuddha Bharata 1982-88: Prabuddha Bharata, reports and notes on John Dobson, May 1982 to December 1988 (Internet Archive).a later writerClub biography: “John Dobson: A Brief Biography”, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).record from the timeClub news 2004: “Sidewalk Astronomers Hold Film Premier”, club news item on the first showing of Universe: The Cosmology Quest, 2004, sidewalkastronomers.us.