Dr. Robert Jastrow founded the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1961 and was GISS Director for 20 years. For his 80th
birthday, 7 September 2005, I wrote the following story about him and
we dedicated the 2005 GISS Research Publications document to him.
Dr. Jastrow persuasively advocated the value to NASA of what became
known as the "GISS formula" for a research organization. Key
ingredients: a small permanent research staff, an academic environment,
post-docs and students, ability of staff to teach courses for student
recruitment and work with university faculty and researchers, and public
outreach to make results of NASA research understandable and available
to the public.
The GISS formula is designed to yield high research productivity and a
flexibility that allows research directions to shift as NASA objectives
develop. Thus an initial emphasis on astrophysics and lunar and
planetary science has evolved into a focus on understanding the causes
and consequences of global climate change on Earth, of direct relevance
to the first objective in NASA's mission "...to understand and protect
our home planet."
GISS research productivity, measured by peer-reviewed publications, must
rank among the best in the nation, with a rate of at least three papers
per scientist maintained for several years. In 2005, 73 publications by
17 civil service staff members are supplemented by 29 papers by other
GISS researchers, including two emeritus staff members.
Robert Jastrow, with A.B. and A.M. from Columbia College in 1945 and
Ph.D. in 1948 in nuclear physics, was a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden
University, Netherlands in 1948-49, and a member of the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton in 1949-50 and 1953. His work at Princeton
led to discovery of the "Jastrow Potential" for interactions between
protons and neutrons. Dr. Jastrow has described his time at the
Institute for Advanced Study thus:
“I went to the Institute at the invitation of Robert Oppenheimer. The
emphasis then was on neutrons and protons, nuclear physics and particle
physics, and nuclear forces. One day a visitor gave a seminar describing
an experiment in which protons and neutrons were bounced off one
another, so-called neutron/proton scattering. What he reported was this:
neutrons and protons are known to attract one another, so when you fire
a proton at a neutron, or vice versa, it goes through and comes out the
other side, with only a moderate deflection. But he found that
sometimes the neutrons and protons bounced right back as if they had hit
a brick wall.
So in the question period I got up and said, ‘Maybe the reason is that
inside the nuclear force of attraction, which holds nuclei together,
there's a very strong short-range repulsive force, like a little hard
sphere inside this attractive Jell-O, and when the neutrons and protons
hit this strong force, they bounce back as if they've hit a billiard
ball.’ Well that violated basic ideas of the theory of relativity, or at
least so it seemed, because it selected the space dimension in a way
that didn't fit into the four-dimensional continuum of Einstein's ideas.
I'll never forget, Oppenheimer got up, he liked to needle the young
fellows, and said very dryly, ‘Thank you so much, we are grateful for
every tiny scrap of help we can get.’ But I ignored his needle and
pursued my idea, and calculated the scattering of neutrons by protons. I
showed that it fit the data very well. Oppenheimer read my paper for
the Physical Review and took back his criticisms. This work became a permanent element in the literature of physics.”
Dr. Jastrow had stints as Research Associate at the University of
California and Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale, after which he
was a consultant at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C.,
where he became fascinated with the budding American space program. At
the inception of NASA in 1958 Dr. Jastrow was invited to head the
Theoretical Division of Goddard Space Flight Center. A better
description comes from words of Dr. Jastrow:
“I was working on the Vanguard Project at Naval Research Lab trying to
figure out a quick and easy way to determine where satellites would come
down when they re-enter the atmosphere. In the meantime Khrushchev, as
part of the Cold War, claimed that the rocket casing of Sputnik had come
down in Alaska and we had it and he wanted it. I went to a meeting in
Moscow and presented results that showed, from the last radar sightings
of its height, that it had actually come down somewhere in an arc
between Siberia and China. This drew the attention of people who,
unbeknownst to me, were at that moment planning to set up a U.S. space
agency. They asked me to join NASA, which I did the month it was formed.
That was October, 1958.”
Dr. Jastrow was Chairman of NASA's Lunar Exploration Working Group from
1959 to 1961, an exciting period in NASA history described in his book Journey to the Stars.
The first location of his theoretical division was over a furniture
store in Silver Springs, Maryland, as Goddard was just being built. In
1961 he convinced NASA management on the merits of locating his division
in New York City, in the vicinity of Columbia University, where he
founded the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Dr. Jastrow has been a frequent commentator on science news, having
appeared on more than 100 CBS-TV network programs on space science, as
well as having many appearances on the Today and Tonight shows. His
articles have appeared in New York Times, Reader's Digest, Foreign Affairs, Commentary, Cosmopolitan, Atlantic Monthly, Natural History, Scientific American, and Psychology Today.
Of Dr. Jastrow's several best-selling books, perhaps the favorite is one
mentioned by our own Michael Allison: "I first heard of the Goddard
Institute as a college sophomore in, of all places, a course on science
and religion, where I read Red Giants and White Dwarfs. What an
epiphany it was to learn that we and our world are made of the
nucleosynthetic remnants of exploded stars!" Dr. Jastrow, with Malcolm
Thompson, also wrote a pioneering textbook Astronomy: Fundamentals and Frontiers, and he has just completed, with Michael Rampino, an astrobiology text Stars, Planets and Life: The Evolution of the Universe.
Dr. Jastrow taught at Dartmouth and was at the Marshall Institute in
Washington, D.C., after leaving GISS. He was Director and Chairman of
the Board of Trustees of Mount Wilson Observatory from 1992 to 2003,
where he oversaw the refitting of the 100-inch telescope with
state-of-the art adaptive optics that allowed unprecedented observing
from a ground-based telescope. Today, Dr. Jastrow continues to write and
lecture on science and public policy as Chairman Emeritus of the Board
of Directors of the Marshall Institute.
It has been 25 years since I succeeded Dr. Jastrow as GISS Director, yet
we still see his influence through more than the "GISS formula".
Recently, after I twice declined to speak at a conference on renewable
energy, the organizer shamelessly came back a third time with the story:
"In 1967 shortly after the publication of Dr. Robert Jastrow's book, Red Giants and White Dwarfs,
a skinny high school student from Long Island with an abiding interest
in astronomy was moved to seek out the author's career advice. He took a
bus and subway to upper Manhattan, made his way to the Goddard
Institute for Space Studies over Tom's Restaurant, and found Dr.
Jastrow's office location on the lobby directory. Upon reaching a
secretary in an outer office, he announced that he was there to see Dr.
Jastrow to speak with him about a career in astronomy. "Do you have an
appointment?" she asked. 'No,' the student replied, 'but I read Dr.
Jastrow's book and I'm interested in astronomy, and....' At that point a
voice boomed from an adjacent office, 'Send the young man in!' Dr.
Jastrow spent a half-hour speaking to the student, and then called in
other scientists to give him a tour of the Institute. Needless to say,
this left a lifelong impression on the young man. Thirty-eight years
later, I find myself once again approaching the Director of the Goddard
Institute with a request..."
...and so I am packing my bags to speak at a conference on renewable energy.
—Jim Hansen
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200624_SophiePlanet13.pdf
An improved draft of Chapters 19 & 20 of Sophie’s Planet is available at Sophie’s Planet #13, but additional improvements are likely before the book is finished.
I opened a Twitter account @DrJamesEHansen, (https://twitter.com/drjamesehansen), but I had better finish this book instead of tweeting.
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