Word: jastrow
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...such confirmation occurred? Robert Jastrow, director of NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has published a small and curious book called God and the Astronomers, in which he suggests that the Bible was right after all, and that people of his own kind, scientists and agnostics, by his description, now find themselves confounded. Jastrow blows phantom kisses like neutrinos across the chasm between science and religion, seeming almost wistful to make a connection. Biblical fundamentalists may be happier with Jastrow's books than are his fellow scientists. He writes operatically: "For the scientist who has lived...
Isaac Asimov, the prodigious popularizer of science, reacts hotly to the Jastrow book. "Science and religion proceed by different methods," he says. "Science works by persuasive reason. Outside of science, the method is intuitional, which is not very persuasive. In science, it is possible to say we were wrong, based on data." Science is provisional; it progresses from one hypothesis to another, always testing, rejecting the ideas that do not work, that are contradicted by new evidence. "Faith," said St. Augustine, "is to believe, on the word of God, what we do not see." Faith defies proof; science demands...
...about creation, because that's going outside the empirical. The whole idea of empirical science is that you have data. Theologians have no data on God." There comes a point, somewhere short of God, at which all computers have no data either. With the Big Bang theory, says Jastrow, "science has proved that the world came into being as a result of forces that seem forever beyond the power of scientific description. This bothers science because it clashes with scientific religion-the religion of cause and effect, the belief that every effect has a cause. Now we find that...
...scientists." Adds Geoffrey Burbidge, director of Kitt Peak National Observatory: "Principles and concepts cannot be measured. A question like 'Who imposed the order?' is metaphysical." Still, virtually everyone -both scientists and laymen-is taken by the sheer unthinkable opacity of the creation and what preceded it. Says Jastrow: "The question of what came before the Big Bang is the most interesting question...
...action on other fronts: the losing battle to keep Singapore from the Japanese, the winning campaign to take Africa back from the Germans. For the war's most painful and harrowing catastrophe, the Nazi destruction of Europe's Jews, Wouk employs the deepening distress of Natalie Jastrow Henry, Submariner Byron's Jewish wife. With her baby and her uncle Aaron Jastrow, a famous American Jewish author, Natalie is caught in Italy when the U.S. declares war. The trio's journey, a war-long struggle to escape, is dramatically paired with the agonies of Cousin Berel...