“All the data gathered by our senses,” says the man with the silver ponytail, “tells us the universe is ‘out there.’” I slip into the pew as stealthily as possible in a place where little goes unobserved. “Yet when we sift that data,” he continues, “we find we’re looking at a phantom.” John Dobson, 88, maverick physicist and peripatetic teacher of street-corner telescopy, makes no effort to conceal the wicked glimmer in his eye. “Now, if you want to know God’s idea of a practical joke . . .”
The setting is the Vedanta Temple on upper Vine Street, and it’s the first of Dobson’s yearly talks on the “Apparitional Universe,” the verbal equivalent of a peyote trip. When he turns to etch on the blackboard his best rendering of a cloud of primordial hydrogen, I look around at the lumpy mix of dewy-eyed seekers and bleary-eyed netheads gathered tonight. Almost everyone has come unaccompanied. It’s quickly clear that this would not be the place to show off for your date. Dobson frequently tosses out cosmological koans, which are not designed to elicit A-student answers so much as Socratic questions.
“I was born rude,” he apologizes to the group, after excoriating one wise guy. “And I’ve kept on working at it.”
A certain amount of veneration is in order, not just because Dobson’s writings on relativity were once prescribed along with those of Einstein and Gamow, or even because the Vedanta Temple is the L.A. outpost of the Ramakrishna Order, but because there is real history here. Where Dobson stands, once stood Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts. In these pews gathered a budding Tinseltown intelligentsia. “When you first entered the temple,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in 1939, “you didn’t at all feel you were caught in a religious spider’s web.” Not a detail of his depiction — down to the pictures on the wall — has changed. In fact, it’s as if the place, perched in paradoxical serenity over the Hollywood Freeway, is eternally fixed in that era when artists and intellectuals still thought of Hollywood as a New Athens, if not quite a New Jerusalem.
In those days, Hollywoodland came in SRO crowds to the golden dome of the temple to hear the likes of Huxley expound on Eastern mysticism in a place friendly to Western science. Robed swamis presided, but nary a mantra was chanted, and no one looked askance if you failed to leave your shoes at the door. It’s still that way. Only the smaller crowds evidence the passage
of years and the sad demise of Hollywood’s salon culture.
Once a year in winter, Dobson — who can probably make Einstein clearer to the average Joe than anyone alive — breaks from his peregrinations and migrates to the Hollywood temple (he’s lecturing there on Sundays and Mondays through March 22). Remarkably lithe for his 88 years (he once belonged to a dance troupe), Dobson has been fighting a rear-guard action against the prevailing orthodoxy of the Big Bang theory for the last half-century. Although he spent two decades in a Vedantist monastery, he didn’t arrive at his heretical cosmology by way of mantras alone. He maintained a long correspondence with Nobel laureate Richard Feynman and, after flying the monastic coop in 1966, became the paradigmatic scientist who makes the world his laboratory. He is paterfamilias of the Sidewalk Astronomers, a confraternity of citizen stargazers who build telescopes out of scrap. Sputtering across ’60s-’70s America in a school bus they called Starship Centaurus, Dobson and his Merry Prankster–like followers taught poor kids how to grind lenses from Coke bottles, leaving behind telescopes like Johnny Appleseed left trees. Somewhere along the line, Sky & Telescopedubbed him “the Thoreau of the skies.”
Telescope making is Dobson’s evangelism: He figures the bigger eyes we have to see the curdling clouds of hydrogen that compose most of the visible universe, the better to spot God’s trick of the light. “There’s hydrogen first,” he ends the lecture, “then helium and stardust. The rest is collateral. The one question that matters is: How did the hydrogen come to be?” By Dobson’s reckoning, the answer is both more and less than meets the eye.
—A.W. Hill
