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John Dobson (amateur astronomer)

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John Lowry Dobson (2002)

John Lowry Dobson (14 September 1915 – 15 January 2014) was an American amateur astronomer and is best known for the Dobsonian telescope, a portable, low-cost Newtonian reflector telescope. He was also known for his efforts to promote awareness of astronomy (and his unorthodox views of physical cosmology) through public lectures including his performances of "sidewalk astronomy". Dobson was also the co-founder of the amateur astronomical group, the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers.

Quotes

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  • A Dobsonian telescope is just a pile of stuff.
    • As quoted by David Kriege, Richard Berry, The Dobsonian Telescope (1997) Ch. 1, p. 5.
  • 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."
    • As quoted by by Don Moser, "35 Who Made a Difference: John Dobson" (Nov. 1, 2005) Smithsonian magazine.
  • 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.
    • As quoted by Jeff Delmas, "Telescope Buyer's Guide for New Observers" (2021) Von Braun Astronomical Society.
  • 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.


Photons? (1984)

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Original article (1984) with statement "could be copied and distributed for educational purposes" A Source published (Oct 22, 2004) by Sidewalk Astromers
  • 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?
  • [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...
  • 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.

Entropy (1995)

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Original article (1995) A Source published (Oct 22, 2004) by Sidewalk Astromers
  • Energy is... the nature of... underlying existence showing through in space and time... it... remains constant.
  • [O]nly the quality of the energy... usableness... gets degraded. ...[E]ntropy is a measure of this ...
  • When you panic stop... the kinetic energy of your... moving vehicle gets scrambled to heat by friction in... brake drums... brake shoes... tire[s] and road. ...[I]f, instead... the energy had been run into a flywheel... you could... use... it to restart your car.
  • [O]rganisms live in this cascade of increasing entropy by directing... the increase through their forms. ...[N]egative entropy is food.
  • [F]ormation of galaxies and stars would [also]... be impossible except in this cascade of increasing entropy.
  • Galaxies are formed when clouds of hydrogen fall together... The clouds, unlike the stars, are large with respect to the spaces between them... So the [cloud] particles of each collide... and... scramble their motions to heat. ...energy of falling is transformed to heat. ...[T]he entropy has gone up.
  • Stars are not hot because of nuclear fusion... [but] because [of]... energy of falling... transformed to heat. The heat [of]... fusion... keeps them from collapsing farther and... getting too hot. But it's... temporary.
  • The observable Universe has a border... fifteen billion light years distant in all directions, imposed... by... "the expansion." ...At [the border distant objects] ...are estimated ...receding at the speed of light. ...[T]his apparent "expansion" ...imposes a border ...because things receding faster than ...light are not observable. ...[I]f the rate of expansion ...increased, the border would ...be closer.
  • [R]adiation... through a field of low-mass particles would be so often picked up and reradiated that it would be thermalized to 3° Kelvin and... appear as the background radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965.
  • [I]f the mass of the particles approaches zero, their momentum must... approach zero... [B]y Heisenberg's uncertainty principle... if we... know the momentum... we cannot know that it's at the border... its position.

John Dobson at the 2005 NOVAC Star Gaze (Oct 1, 2005)

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Alternate Title: The Legendary Sidewalk Astronomer: John Dobson. A Creative Commons License Youtube video from the "Northern Virginia Astronomy Club" channel, posted: (Jan 28, 2014) NOVAC 25th Anniversary, C.M. Crockett Park, Faquier County, VA
  • I like to make fun of the Big Bang. I'm allergic to the Big Bang.
  • The Big Bang people wanted to get everything out of nothing. They want us to believe that nothing made everything out of nothing.
  • You can't persuade a kid that nothing made everything out of nothing. ...It's impossible to get everything out of nothing.
  • [E]ven if you did get nothing to make everything out of nothing, you still have the difficulty that it's in a black hole. Getting it out of a black hole is the second impossibility. We now have impossibility squared.
  • [T]here's a 3rd impossibility. In order to get this stuff out of a black hole, it's going to come out half matter and half antimatter, because the... fireball has to be all radiation, and when radiation cools off to material particles... 50/50 matter and antimatter. ...So now it's impossibility cubed. Do I need to any further?
  • [W]e used to consider that no matter how many evidences in favor of your model, [if] you have... one evidence against you, and you're dead.
  • So I have to replace the Big Bang. ...[L]et's confine ourselves to the observational evidence, and since there is no observational evidence for Creation, we'll leave it out. Now that leaves out the Big Bang people, the mini bang people, the steady-state people, The Bible Belt people... almost everybody.
Absorption spectral lines
  • So if we confine ourselves to the observational evidence... all those distant galaxies appear to be running away from us, and the farther away we look, the faster they appear to be running away... [A]lthough the simplest explanation is long ago there was this explosion... all we know is... the redshift... something that happens in radiation.
  • But if you don't know about that... when a fire engine is coming toward you the bell has a high pitch, and when goes past you it goes away with a low pitch. Ding, ding, ding... The reason that it slurs like that, is because the fire engine missed you.
  • So radiation does a similar thing. If something is coming toward you, the spectral lines are shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum. That's the high energy end of the spectrum, which corresponds to the high pitch of the bell on the fire engine... [W]hen it goes away, the radiation is shifted to the lower end... the red end of the spectrum. That's called redshifted.
  • [W]hat we see... is that... the radiation from all those distant galaxies is redshifted, and the farther away they appear to be... the more redshifted... [T]he usual interpretation... is that they're going away. ...So that they would be approaching the speed of light ...at about 15 billion light-years away. About 15 billion light-years away... their radiation would go to zero energy because of redshifting.
  • Now if we consider the region just... this side of where they would go to zero energy... we see... the redshift of the radiation means that the energy of the particles is extremely low. The way we find... the energy of a particle is... its radiation...
  • The reason we write equations... is because it's just as easy to translate them into Japanese, or Russian... German... French or English, and I'll translate them into English.
  • S2=x2−t2
    This 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.
  • Einstein knew that distances... and lengths of time are not objective, and he wanted to know what is objective. The S, this is objective
    S2=x2−t2
    The spacetime separation between here-now and there-then is objective. The spacetime separation between two events, here-now and there-then. That's objective. So this [x] is the distance between here and there, and this [t] is the time between now and then.
  • 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.
  • E=m
    Now this is E=m. You already heard it with the c2 on there, but that's just how many ergs equals a gram. 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 c2 is all about, 9 times 1020. ...The kinetic energy of 9 times 1020 2 gram beetles walking 1 centimeter per second would vaporize Berkeley.
  • E=m
    So this... says that what we call matter, was just potential energy. Now we got both these [spacetime and energy equations] in 1905.
  • △x△mv≥ℏ
    This 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 cloud chamber, 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.
  • △x△mv≥ℏ
    So what this says is that the product of our uncertainty in where something is [△x], and our uncertainty in what it's doing, [△mv] its momentum, can never be less than this little guy [ℏ] 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 [△x] multiplied by our uncertainty here [△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, [△x△mv≥ℏ] 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 [△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.
  • So as I see it, the stuff recycles from the border.
  • So there is this question which... everybody fails to ask me about it. How come it recycles as hydrogen and not as iron? ...As seen by us, if the mass is going very very low, then the size of the particles has to get very big because things are wound up against electricity by being small, and if their size goes bigger then their mass goes down, or if their mass goes down, their size gets bigger. So way out there, as seen by us, the mass is going down, the sizes are getting bigger and the molecules can't hold together. The atoms can't hold together, and they come back as protons and electrons.
  • I'm going to give you my one-liner. The universe is made out of protons and electrons. It talks French and knows how to spell it. I really don't think that people who believe in intelligent design have even smelled the problem. It's made out of protons and electrons, and it talks French and knows how to spell it.
Quasar 3C 273 imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys
  • [W]hat is the evidence that it recycles from the border? There's a lot of evidence now. ...The Hubble telescope was asked to look to see about the Lyman-alpha forest between 3C 273... 3C 273 is a quasar... close enough to us so that the ultraviolet light reaches us... and can't get into the atmosphere, so we asked [the Hubble telescope] to look at it and see if there are any clouds of hydrogen between 3C 273 and ourselves that are going away from us at different speeds... [T]he Hubble telescope said that there are a whole block of clouds of hydrogen between 3C 273 and ourselves going away at different speeds, and so each one makes a shadow in the spectra and there are a whole lot of shadows. That's called the Lyman-alpha forest. So that's an old piece of evidence, and the Hubble telescope also said that there's more than enough hydrogen in the intergalactic voids to make all the known galaxies.
  • [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.
  • [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.
  • The fun part is this. We have a rule against perpetual motion 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 my model the stuff recycles from the border as brand new hydrogen 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.
  • 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 electrical energy in the miniscule particles. And the undivided has to show... and that's why they all fall together by gravity.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 hydrogen, 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 dark matter? 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 NGC 4565... around it is all the rest of this stuff which is 10 times as much as we see in the galaxy... So the dark matter is perfectly ordinary matter...
  • [I]n recent times we've discovered... that about 1/2 of the neutron stars that we know about have escape velocity 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 dark matter, and they're too bloody small for you to find. ...They're not going to shine for you.
  • I think that the dark matter 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 hydrogen and helium 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...
  • [T]he dark matter that they invented said that the universe should be not expanding so fast. ...So then they had to invent the dark energy to make it speed up. ...[I]f you want to invent all these things you can get out of any model.
  • 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.
  • I have a feeling... that the physicists are going to have to learn to read, because the... physicists have taught... that this
    E=m
    means that matter can be converted to energy... and that's not this equation. That would be E+m=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?
  • 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.
  • S2=x2−t2
    S 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.
  • 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 yogis are? ...[T]he lady ...asked me to give a talk on frustration. ...I said I was walking down through Griffith Park... 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 equatorial mount. 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 focal length, 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 cone cells. They're not going to see them with their cone cells through the telescope. They're going to see them with their rod cells, 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 star party. 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 Ring Nebula 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 position angle. 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 Seattle... 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 Gas Works Park 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.

Quotes about Dobson

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  • A specific type of Alt-Az mount is called a Dobsonian mount, named after John Dobson... a cofounder of the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers in 1967 and an avid promoter of bringing the wonders of astronomy to the people. ...The Dobsonian mount is simple (two basic pieces - tube and base), stable, and low cost.
    • Jeff Delmas, Telescope Buyer's Guide for New Observers (2021) Von Braun astronomical Society

Star Struck: Astronomy (Jan. 23, 1991)

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: John Dobson’s passion is to bring the heavens to ground level with his low-tech telescopes by David Wharton, Los Angeles Times
  • [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 Occidental College, 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.

The Dobsonian Telescope (1997)

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by David Kriege, Richard Berry
  • Dobson’s original design is fundamentally excellent. What I have done is taken Dobson’s concepts and tried to realize their full potential.
    • Foreword, p. v.

Ch. 1 Large-Aperture Dobsonians

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  • 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 Swami Ashokananda 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 1956, Dobson built his first telescope. The mirror was made from a 12inch disk of porthole 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 Vedanta Society’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 Lawrence Hall of Science and the California Academy of Sciences.
  • [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.

35 Who Made a Difference: John Dobson (Nov. 1, 2005)

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by Don Moser, Smithsonian magazine
  • 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 portholes 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.

See also

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Wikipedia
Wikipedia
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