Word: greenstein
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...have been discovered since the first one was identified in 1960, scientists have been unable to agree on the nature, or even the size or distance of the mysterious starlike objects. Quasar controversies have so rocked the once stable world of astronomy that California Institute of Technology Astronomer Jesse Greenstein has been driven to poetic expression...
...shift in their emission lines and sometimes another in their absorption lines (caused by the passage of their light through cooler matter on the way to the observer), the spectrum of 0237-23 displays three red shifts. In addition to the expected shift of its emission lines, Astronomers Greenstein and Maarten Schmidt (TIME cover, March 11, 1966) have found its absorption lines have two distinctly different and lower red shifts. Astronomer Greenstein believes that they are caused by light from the central body passing through two shells of gas rapidly expanding away from the quasar; the light is thus absorbed...
What bothers most such critics is the cost of making spaceships and space travel suitable for man. Unmanned probes, so the argument runs, would learn far more at much lower expense. Says Caltech's Astrophysicist Jesse Greenstein: "The manned-space program is mainly engineering, concerned with keeping people alive in curious circumstances. This does not advance science very much." Men who feel the same way have insisted for years that manned-space probes cost literally 100 times as much as unmanned, and are not worth it. Says Britain's eminent Astronomer Fred Hoyle: "What has been accomplished...
When Schmidt's interpretation and Oke's proof were published in Nature, the world of science also went into a state of shock. Astronomer Greenstein promptly shelved his own unpublished quasar theory, admitting that "if it weren't for Maarten, I could have been caught with my scientific trousers down." Instead, he turned to a spectrogram that he had taken from quasar 3C 48 and - using Schmidt's redshift key - discovered that 3C 48 was re ceding even faster than 3C 273. By Hubble's law it appeared to be some 4 billion light-years...
Schmidt was warmly accepted in Pasadena. "He was an ideal product of the Dutch school," says Jesse Greenstein. "In this country we tend to stress atomic and nuclear physics in astronomy. Schmidt came to us with more classical training. He had, and still has good sharp eyes at the telescope, an old-fashioned virtue in science...