Dr. Robert Jastrow, well known astronomer & author, passed away last Friday, Feb 8, and will be laid to rest in Tucson tomorrow, Feb 12, as I understand. That's all that I currently know about it.

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Wow. That's the first I've heard of this. Thanks for passing this along, even though it makes me sad. He was a big influence on me in my younger days.

RIP Robert.

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There are articles on Dr. Jastrow at http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Science...ate_dies/7007/ and http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/sc...rssnyt&emc=rss

Dave Mitsky

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I found this quote of his interesting, from the Wiki link:

"the curtain drawn over the mystery of creation will never be raised by human efforts, at least in the foreseeable future"[1] due to "the circumstances of the big bang-the fiery holocaust that destroyed the record of the past"

Some have criticized his views on the grounds that they open the door to creationist thinking, but I think it is just plain honest science and should be respected as such. It resonates with my own opinion, and which has been espoused by others on this forum too, that it is entirely possible that the origins of the universe will fall outside the realm of questions that science will ever be capable of addressing. He points to the breakdown of physics in the early Big Bang, and to the history-destroying aspects of thermodynamic equilibrium, and to those two extreme problems I would add the more basic problem that none of physics is about first causes, but only cause-and-effect. So I actually think it has always been clear that science cannot address the cause of the universe (or the first cause of whatever caused the universe), but those two other points make it especially problematic in the context of the Big Bang theory. Maybe we should just recognize that scientific thinking was never meant to be all things to all people, but it does have to be true to itself.

I think it was more this quote that people objected to:

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Yes, I was afraid to go there because of the explicit reference to theologians! But you are right, I interpret him as saying that it was common for science to imagine an infinitely old universe (curiously), whereas creation myths always involve a finite age. The Big Bang is a confirmation of sorts of the value of a finite-age model, though one still needs science to infer the age. I completely agree with Jastrow, by the way, and I don't think there's any cause for a flap, it's just the truth. Perhaps the problem was that his remarks could be taken to mean that theologians were not just "lucky" on that one, but that's a slippery slope-- was Einstein also "lucky" that relativity worked? Of course he was.