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Robert Jastrow (September 7, 1925 – February 8, 2008) was an American astronomer and planetary physicist. He was a NASA scientist, populist author and futurist.
Jastrow was the first chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, which established the scientific goals for the exploration of the Moon during the Apollo lunar landings.
Jastrow was a public figure, prolific author and commentator on a range of topics including the space program, astronomy, earth science, and national security issues. He lectured on CBS and NBC, and his book, Red Giants and White Dwarfs: The Evolution of Stars. was a bestseller
In 1981, Jastrow left NASA to join the faculty of Dartmouth College as professor of Earth Sciences. He left Dartmouth in 1992 to take up duties as director and chairman of the Mount Wilson Institute, managing the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. Jastrow was a member of the NASA Alumni Association. In 1984, Jastrow, together with Fred Seitz and William Nierenberg, founded the George C. Marshall Institute, an organization that assessed scientific issues affecting public policy in Washington, DC. The institute supported U. S. President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), for example in Jastrow's 1985 "How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete". He also became a prominent climate change denier. The George C. Marshall Institute opposed the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming.Naomi Oreskes (2010), "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming" (Bloomsbury) Jastrow acknowledged that Earth was experiencing a warming trend but claimed that the cause was likely to be natural variation.Seitz, F. and Jastrow, R. (Dec 2001) Retrieved Dec 7, 2021 Do people cause global warming?
Jastrow served as Chairman Emeritus of the George C. Marshall Institute until his death.
In an interview with Christianity Today, Jastrow said "Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.""A Scientist Caught Between Two Faiths: Interview With Robert Jastrow," Christianity Today, August 6, 1982
In his book, God and The Astronomers he illustrated his position as: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
God and The Astronomers, 1978, Currently published by Reader's Library and updated as recently as 2000
In a 1995 panel discussion on the PBS show, Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, Jastrow summed up his position on the apparent conflict between science and religion by saying
Religious views
His expressed views on creation were that although he was an "agnostic, and not a believer", Leader U. "Message from Professor Robert Jastrow" it seems to him that "the curtain drawn over the mystery of creation will never be raised by human efforts, at least in the foreseeable future" due to "the circumstances of the Big Bang-the fiery holocaust that destroyed the record of the past".
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Categories: 20th-century American Astronomers, 1925 Births, 2008 Deaths, Columbia University Faculty, Columbia Graduate School Of Arts And Sciences Alumni, Columbia College Alumni, Townsend Harris High School Alumni, Scientists From New York, George C. Marshall Institute, American Agnostics, Fellows Of The American Physical Society
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