Word: jastrow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thomas, 66, whose humane writings on biology and medicine in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine became the basis for two bestsellers (The Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail). Others include Physicists Jeremy Bernstein, 50, a regular contributor to The New Yorker; Robert Jastrow, 55, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and Princeton's Gerard O'Neill, 53, the leading apostle of space colonization. There is also the British physician Jonathan Miller, whose medical series The Body in Question is running on PBS and is the basis of a current book. Most...
...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...