This dome atop Mount Wilson houses the telescope used by Edwin Hubble when he discovered the general expansion of the universe. Along with Mount Palomar to the south, Mount Wilson was also the principal facility in which Allan Sandage did much of his work. Mount Wilson was perhaps the principal and most familiar feature of my natural environment. I saw it nearly every day of my childhood and youth.
(NASA public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I grew up fairly near to Pasadena\u2019s California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and typically drove by it, with my parents and then on my own, at least once or twice a month and probably, on average, just about every week. \u00a0There was, in my mind, a sense of almost mystical awe around the place. \u00a0Not terribly much further, though it wasn\u2019t part of my neighborhood the way Caltech was, was the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in La Ca\u00f1ada Flintridge, right on the edge of Pasadena, which is owned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and which is operated on behalf of NASA by Caltech. \u00a0We would occasionally drive by it enroute to this or that destination in the high desert and elsewhere. \u00a0One of the bishops of my teenage years was an engineer and rocket scientist at JPL.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
These things influenced me in multiple ways, and probably go at least some distance to accounting for my continuing fascination with space and cosmology. \u00a0As I\u2019ve said here before, I might well have become an astronomer had my eyesight not been so bad; at a certain point, seeing the stars as no more than blurs (before I realized why, and that others didn\u2019t) blunted my ambitions in that direction.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons. . . . \u00a0The explorations of space end on a note of uncertainty. \u00a0And necessarily so. . . . \u00a0We know our immediate neighborhood rather intimately. With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary\u2014the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation. \u00a0(Edwin Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae<\/em>)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Allan Sandage (1926-2010) was one of the most influential astronomers of the twentieth century. \u00a0A graduate of the California Institute of Technology and the leading prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Edwin Hubble, he discovered the first quasar and was the first to determine reasonably accurate values for the \u201cHubble constant\u201d and for the age of the Universe. \u00a0I learned only too late (since I would have loved to meet him), that he was a neighbor of mine in San Gabriel, California, where I grew up.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 1983, in his late fifties, Dr. Sandage announced that he had become a Christian.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is what Sandage said. \u00a0This is what Allan Sandage said:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It is only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 I grew up fairly near to Pasadena\u2019s California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and typically drove by it, with my parents and then on my own, at least once or twice a month and probably, on average, just about every week. \u00a0There was, in my mind, a sense of almost mystical awe around the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3814,3820,62,3817,138],"class_list":["post-71203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hubble","tag-mount-wilson","tag-religion-and-science","tag-sandage","tag-science-and-religion"],"yoast_head":"\n
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