A group of 20 or so have assembled at the spiritual enclave of the Vedanta society -- a religious order of chaste monks and nuns who believe in a religion inspired by Hinduism -- to learn the art of building cheap and powerful telescopes.
"He's my guru," said Durga Pobre, a retired real-estate saleswoman taking the class. "I love the stars. I love the sky. It's like giving birth to a telescope."
"He is on a spiritual quest as well as a scientific one."
Said James Neff, a computer-network technician in Los Angeles: "It's a whole different feel when you do it yourself."
Despite Dobson's short temper, they are learning from the master. As a younger man, Dobson revolutionized the world of amateur astronomy with his cheap telescopes that were as powerful, sometimes more so, than those that professionals were using. His telescopes use porthole glass, cardboard and other seemingly random items that can either be assembled individually or purchased for a few hundred dollars as a kit.
A living legend among sky-watching enthusiasts, Dobson has inspired skywatchers around the world with his devotion. Since he was a younger man, he spent his nights with friends at local parks, setting up his telescopes to give the public a chance to see the sky. All of this is done without charge, of course. Groups of "sidewalk astronomers" have popped up around the world -- all inspired by Dobson.
"He's an incredibly passionate man, driven to tell the world about the universe," said Blaine Bagget, head of media relations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "He is on a spiritual quest as well as a scientific one. I deeply respect the simplicity of his life, which is played out in the design of the Dobsonian telescope. That was a tremendous achievement."
Dobson, a former Vedanta monk, was thrown out of the order for being absent from the monastery on too many occasions: He was out showing off his telescopes at local parks.
Today, seemingly robust as ever, he relies on the support of friends to sustain his travels around the country. In addition to his fervor for telescopes, Dobson is also a passionate cosmologist, whose theories tend toward the mystical. In cosmological speeches, he insists he is the follow-on to Einstein. His eloquence brings him a cult-like following.
Dobson grew up in China, the grandson of the founder of Peking University. When he was 12, violence led his family to leave on a boat bound for San Francisco.
Growing up poor in the California Bay Area, Dobson said he was a thoughtful child uninspired by the institutions around him, especially school and Christianity.
"I could see that these two notions cannot arise in the same being: 'do unto others as you would that they do unto' and 'if you're not a good boy, its into hell for keeps,'" he said in an interview at the Vedanta monastery in Hollywood, California. "There's no way that these two notions arise in the same being. They must be spoofing us. So I became an atheist, a belligerent atheist. If anybody started a conversation about the subject, I was a belligerent atheist."
For Dobson, an alternative to this dichotomy came in 1944 when he attended a lecture by a monk from the Vedanta order, a spiritual sect that takes its inspiration from Hinduism and instructs its followers to accept all religions as valid. The monk, said Dobson, revealed to him a world he had never seen.
His spiritual conversion came during a tumultuous era. It was during the height of World War 2, and Dobson, then a university student, was working for the U.S. Government assisting with the atomic bomb program. He chose another route: he became a Vedanta monk.
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