"Oh, I have to tell you a story!”
Brimming with energy, wit and enthusiasm, astronomer John Dobson spent the weekend in Traverse City and captivated 80 people during a three-hour lecture Saturday night. Held at the Hagerty Center and co-sponsored by the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society and the Sunset Astronomical Society of Midland, his talk was a free-wheeling trip around the universe according to Dobson. The 92-year-old expounded on everything from black holes, hydrogen clouds, entropy and the Big Bang theory to more earthbound subjects of global warming and his colorful biography, fielding questions and laughs with equal aplomb.
"I was born in the usual place, China,” joked Dobson, who was entranced by the heavens at an early age.
The legendary astronomer who created the sidewalk telescope, or Dobsonian telescope, also attended a public open house at the Rogers Observatory Sunday night and visited the Leelanau School on Monday.
Spending three decades as a monk and trained as a chemist, Dobson never quite fit and eventually segued his life into bringing astronomy and science to the people. His innovate, simple and sturdy telescope design revolutionized the science and brought the stars into focus for generations of enthusiasts.
Including Grant Traverse Astronomical Society president Scott Anttila of Kalkaska, who helped coordinated Dobson's visit to the region.
"I came across these plans on how to make the Dobson on the Internet so I decided to build one to the exact specifications,” said Anttila, whose goal is to build a Dobsonian telescope for the society to use in education and outreach. "The functionality of the telescope was so good and the plans were laid out so well, before I would always be struggling with the instrument itself, with traveling, focusing and wobbling.”
"When I got his telescope it worked perfectly and I was no longer worried about the instrument and could concentrate on the sky,” he added of the instrument he built using a half sheet of plywood, spare plumbing parts and some shingles for the body. "It was that simple.”
Living legend? John Dobson may be one but he is not going to admit it. With a salty tongue and fierce beliefs that buck many accepted scientific principles of the day, he is nevertheless an astronomical Pied Piper thanks to his magnetic personality and simple telescopes. And the sidewalks and mountains and public parks he puts them in, drawing crowds and sparking imaginations.
"I was a chemist and I knew the universe was made of hydrogen and held together by hydrogen and, damn it all, I wanted to watch it,” recalled Dobson, who began building telescopes after he left the monastery in the late 1960s and soon founded Sidewalk Astronomers. "[People ask me] how do you make a telescope — carefully. How do you grind the glass — furiously!”
He used porthole glass as the starting point for lenses, he told the crowd, at one point buying 4.5 tons of ship's windows that he then sold to others.
"That's a dollar a piece,” Dobson said. "I didn't sell them for that price, I stayed alive on that purchase for 20 years.”
A serious student of cosmology as well as astrology, Dobson shared his theories about the universe and it's beginning, development and recycling. He thoroughly dissected the Big Bang model of the universe during his talk Saturday night, sharing what nearly all scientists consider heresy about what most believe is settled science. Dobson countered that scientific research and theories have changed to fit the model instead of the model fitting the science.
"You can make a telescope in a week but we've been studying the problems of the universe for thousands of years,” he noted. "They're just not comparable problems.”
For more information on upcoming programs of the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society, see their Web site at www.gtastro.org.