Julia King | Nov 13, 1988 | 8 min read
In the early 1960s, Robert Jastrow, then a young, adjunct professor of astronomy at Columbia University set out to write his first book—an examination of space science that, as he foresaw it, would stimulate the minds of his academic colleagues but, at the same time, be comprehensible to the general public. His motives were altruistic, he says now. His natural passion for teaching and writing was fired by the strong conviction that even the most esoteric scientific concepts can beR