A Former Monk Keeps Looking Heavenward

Flinging his shirt over the branch of a nearby birch, John Dobson strolls toward the telescopes and the six apprehensive students who built them.

It’s the final inspection by the teacher, a former monk who decades ago revolutionized amateur astronomy with a design for a cheap but powerful telescope.

The telescopes are simple, like the life of their inventor. Simple, maybe. But both the man and his design are challenging.

Stepping among the cannon-shaped telescopes, the bare-chested octogenarian tightens his silver ponytail, removes his orange-tinted glasses, peers through Bob Vian’s telescope and flunks it. The glass mirror that reflects and concentrates light is misshapen.

“So you want me to grind it, especially in this direction?” asks Vian, a high school science teacher in Gervais, Ore., motioning with his hands.

“No!” an impatient Dobson shouts. “You cannot do that, or you’ll wipe out again!”

The class of 44 adults mostly overlook the teacher’s short fuse-- especially the one or two students whose scopes pass muster. After about $300 and a month of occasional night classes last summer, each student had built an instrument that would have cost thousands of dollars in stores.

For 30 years, Dobson has been traveling the world and peddling the universe. He set up his telescopes at parks and on sidewalks, inviting glances at Saturn’s rings, the wispy filaments of a nebula or a galaxy’s spiral arms. And he did it without asking for money, living hand-to-mouth.

“He brought astronomy to the people,” says Steve Edberg, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But why?

“When I see things in the telescope,” Dobson says, “I think everyone should see them.”

His obsession may be rooted in diverse experiences: as an atomic-bomb scientist and as a monastic who spent 24 years reconciling India’s mysticism with Einstein’s relativity.

Dobson pushes science rather than religion: observation, evidence, doubt, critical thinking. Along the way he has taught thousands of people how to build powerful, yet affordable, telescopes. Today, “Dobsonian” telescopes are sold commercially, though Dobson gets nothing. He never patented his designs.

“What is there to patent?” he asks. “It’s like cups or spoons. You’ve had cups and spoons all along.”

Born 84 years ago in China to parents affiliated with Peking University, the young Dobson quickly understood the importance of learning.

“I was raised by a scientist, you see,” Dobson says of his father, a zoologist. “He was a stickler for English. He was a stickler for Chinese, and he was a stickler for physics.”

Political unrest forced the family to San Francisco, where Dobson started questioning his Christian upbringing. While studying at Berkeley, he was drawn to Eastern beliefs.

In 1944, after a brief stint as a chemist on the Manhattan Project, Dobson joined a Vedanta monastery. As World War II ended, he searched for ultimate truth.

Assigned the task of reconciling the philosophy of monks and of physics, he built a telescope of available materials: glass, cardboard, leftover lumber. He pointed it first at a third-quarter moon.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, everybody’s got to see it.’ ”

Before the late 1960s, amateur telescope makers usually built instruments with mirrors less than 6 inches in diameter. Anything larger would be prohibitively expensive and difficult.

Dobson started with Isaac Newton’s design, which concentrates light by bouncing it off a curved mirror rather than through a lens. He worked with cheap glass--chunks from the bottom of milk jugs or porthole glass cast off from ships. He cut grinding time by using five types of abrasive instead of 14.

What’s really revolutionary is the telescope’s mount. Instead of using expensive weights as counterbalances, Dobson anchored it on a rocker and a box that works like a cannon mount. Telescopes built by 30 students in Monmouth do not differ all that much.

“They’re made of junk, and they work better than anything you can buy,” says Garth Eliassen, an amateur astronomer who invites Dobson to Monmouth each year for telescope and cosmology classes.

Frugality appeals to Dobson. After he left the monastic order in 1967, he earned some money by teaching others to build his telescopes. But at times he survived on dog biscuits and the goodwill of friends. For years, an anonymous donor paid his medical insurance. And now, when he’s not traveling, Dobson lives rent-free in a small apartment in San Francisco.

In the late 1960s Dobson founded the Sidewalk Astronomers, a group of stargazers who park their telescopes outside their homes or stores for passersby.

“When you let them look at these things, you give them a peek of what the universe looks like independent of the wool that’s pulled over their eyes,” Dobson says. Some of that confusion, he believes, is man-made.

After the telescopes in Monmouth are close to perfect, Dobson lectures. From the edge of a lab table at Western Oregon University, he announces that modern physicists have it all wrong: The Big Bang theory of creation is a big bust.

“Why must we assume in the absence of the universe and the absence of space and time, that we would have nothing?” he asks. “In the absence of time we’d have the absence of change. You cannot have change without time.”

There are no physicists in the crowd to challenge his views, which start to sound like monkish musings.

“How do you get from the changeless to the changing without changing the changeless?” he asks. “That’s the problem.”

Two hours later, a woman raises her hand: “So what do you think of the Big Bang?”

In his lectures, Dobson has all the answers, though he admits to one uncertainty: What happens when we die?

“I don’t think we go to heaven and get bored.”