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Jesse L. Greenstein
(15 Oct 1909 - 21 Oct 2002)
American astronomer who was a co-discoverer of quasars, and studied over 500 white dwarf stars.
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Science Quotes by Jesse L. Greenstein (4 quotes)
At the age of three I began to look around my grandfathers library. My first knowledge of astronomy came from reading and looking at pictures at that time. By the time I was six I remember him buying books for me.
I think I was eight, he bought me a three-inch telescope on a brass mounting.
So, as far back as I can remember, I had an early interest in science in general, astronomy in particular.
— Jesse L. Greenstein
Oral History Transcript of interview with Dr. Jesse Greenstein by Paul Wright (31 Jul 1974), on website of American Institute of Physics.
In a certain sense I made a living for five or six years out of that one star [υ Sagittarii] and it is still a fascinating, not understood, star. Its the first star in which you could clearly demonstrate an enormous difference in chemical composition from the sun. It had almost no hydrogen. It was made largely of helium, and had much too much nitrogen and neon. Its still a mystery in many ways
But it was the first star ever analysed that had a different composition, and I started that area of spectroscopy in the late thirties.
— Jesse L. Greenstein
Oral History Transcript of interview with Dr. Jesse Greenstein by Paul Wright (31 Jul 1974), on website of American Institute of Physics, about his research on strange shell stars. As quoted in J. B. Hearnshaw, The Analysis of Starlight: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Astronomical Spectroscopy (1986, 1990), 362. Hearnshaw footnoted that Berman earlier analysed the peculiar star R CrB (1935).
In a sense Shapleys telling me that space was transparent, which I shouldnt have believed, illustrates a fundamental problem in science, believing what people tell you. Go and find it out for yourself. That same error has persisted in my life and in many other peoples. Authorities are not always authorities on everything; they often cling to their own mistakes.
— Jesse L. Greenstein
Oral History Transcript of interview with Dr. Jesse Greenstein by Paul Wright (31 Jul 1974), on website of American Institute of Physics.
Knowing how hard it is to collect a fact, you understand why most people want to have some fun analyzing it.
— Jesse L. Greenstein
Quoted in Fortune (May 1960), as cited in Maxine Block, Anna Herthe Rothe and Marjorie Dent Candee, Current Biography Yearbook 1963 (1964), 161.
See also:
- 15 Oct - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Greenstein's birth.