Lyle Jacobson
Vital statistics and important milestones in his life
Childhood
Lyle Jacobson was born in the Los Angeles suburb of Southgate in 1931. His father, Norman Leroy Jacobson, was of mostly Danish ancestry. He started a feed store business in his early years and later worked as an inspector with the Emsco Derrick & Equipment Company. He also operated ‘Jake’s Ice House’ as a side business. Young Lyle worked there for his father after school from the age of thirteen. The family moved to nearby Bell Gardens where Lyle attended Elementary, Junior High, and High School.
Norman later became very successful in real estate and land development. He was an important part of the development of “Black Meadow Landing” on Lake Havasu in California.
Lyle’s mother, Ida Ruth Bartee, died when Lyle was only 2 ½ while giving birth to his brother David. While her ancestral background isn’t certain, she was probably French and Irish. Two years later, his father married Alice Pearl Belnap. Alice became a loving stepmother in raising little Lyle and David and the couple later had three more children together -- Wayne, Norma and Dale. Alice was also a strong supporter and helpmate to Norman. Alice would run Jake’s Ice House while Norman worked. Later they both obtained their Real Estate licenses together and, along with a Real Estate business, they created a successful car insurance business. They worked hard and became financially successful.
Education
As a student, Lyle had difficulty reading and earned only average B- and C+ grades. His Grade Six teacher influenced Alice to coach Lyle in reading with phonics. It worked like magic and after three months, he became excited about reading books and thereafter spent many hours at the local library. Subsequently, reading became Lyle’s lifelong passion.
Due to the Jacobson family being devout Mormons, Lyle’s childhood was dominated by religion. His main sports activities were football, basketball (in which he excelled) and track. As a younger child, Lyle’s primary passion was shooting his ‘Red Ryder’ BB gun and adventures exploring the L.A. River flood control system near the family home. This passion was later replaced by books. He also enjoyed fishing, camping and the outdoors.
In his late teens, between high school and college, he was sent on a two year ‘mission’ in Kansas and Arkansas. This is a typical assignment for most male Mormon youths.
Lyle’s formal education consisted of attending Pasadena City College and one year at the University of Utah. His early major was engineering but he later switched to Dentistry at the USC School of Dentistry where he earned his D. D.S. Degree.
Early Influences
Like most college and university students, Lyle took various part-time menial jobs to supplement his tuition and living costs during vacations and summer time off. He hung sheet rock, delivered mail and did lab work during the last two years for other practicing dentists. It took him his first 10 years in practice to repay the money that he had borrowed to get him through Dental School. He also worked in the main Post Office over two successive Christmas holidays sorting large volumes of mail. It was here that he first met Charles Lee, a fellow temporary postal worker and art student. During long, boring hours hustling sacks of mail, the two young men exchanged philosophical and intellectual views about life, religion and their basic values. Charles recommended he read Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’, a popular and philosophical novel at the time. Reading Rand’s controversial thoughts on freedom, altruism and living for one’s self proved to be a pivotal and life changing experience for Lyle.
The Turning Point
Over the following months, Lyle carefully read and re-read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ twice. It was a very thick book – over a thousand pages. After much serious thought and painful deliberation, he shocked and horrified his young wife, Elfreda, when he announced to the local Mormon bishop that he could no longer live his life for the church and others but for himself, and ‘there would be no more church for him!’
Elfreda, a graduate dental hygienist from USC, also had a very strong Mormon religious background. Lyle did his best to encourage her to follow him but she was unable to do so. It was unfortunate because Elfreda had worked hard to financially help Lyle through school. But for Lyle there was no turning back. Elfreda soon asked Lyle to leave. Their marriage of five years that had produced a daughter, Jody Lynn born in 1959, was over!
Career in Dentistry
Lyle had decided on a career in Dentistry because he could be his own boss and earn a comfortable income. Getting into USC dental school was a ‘shoo-in’ for him because his brother-in-law was head of the crown and bridge department. Lyle had also been accepted at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in San Francisco. Dentistry proved to be a satisfying profession, once he learned, through his own research, how to prevent dental problems rather than just treat them.
Other Marriages
In 1962, Lyle met Barbara Bert Hardcastle and they were married in Ensenada, Mexico. His divorce from Elfreda was not yet final and Barbara was pregnant with a son, Craig.Scott. Lyle and Barbara had another son, Todd William, and a daughter Stacy Carolyn. This second marriage lasted fifteen years.
In 1980, Lyle married for a third time to Jo Dean Larsen and remained with her for five years. There were no children from that union.
Major Influences
As a result of discovering books as a boy, Lyle Jacobson became acquainted with many important thinkers and innovators. Ayn Rand was a major influence. In the late ‘60s, he met and studied with a dynamic astrophysicist, Andrew J. Galambos, for about seven years, From him, he learned that physical principals were applicable to the social domain and, through Galambos’ ‘Theory of Volition’, that an understanding of and protection of ‘Property’ was the rational alternative to the destructive behavior of humanity. Through Galambos, he also discovered heroes from the scientific world – intellectual giants who had made significant contributions to man’s body of knowledge and survival over past centuries.
When Lyle was 42 years old, he was stricken with a physical condition in which he lacked colon control. He read the work of Dennis Burkitt, the discoverer of the cause and cure for colon cancer. Burkitt’s advice caused Lyle to become a vegetarian and promptly solved his health problem. He has since spent nearly a lifetime attempting to find answers for maintaining and keeping good health.
In 2005, he was introduced to ‘The China Study’ a major book by T. Colin Campbell and the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted (27 years of research) and the startling Implications for diet, weight loss and long-term health. This led Lyle to real answers related to heath, diet and disease, which in turn, led to Dr. John McDougall in Santa Rosa, California, who has operated a successful ‘lifestyle’ medical practice for more than 30 years based entirely on educating and curing chronic diseases and obesity through a plant-based diet.
All of these and other influences fit perfectly with Jacobson’s personal passion for discovering and linking ‘cause and effect’ approximations to reality.
Going to Sea
After 25 years as a practicing dentist and two failed marriages, Lyle decided to sell his lucrative practice and pursue another of his personal passions – sailing. In 1984, at age 54, Lyle left dentistry, built a 42’ steel-hulled schooner called ‘Contrast’ and went to sea with his third wife Jo Dean. After a year of cruising, Jo Dean decided this was not the life she wanted. However, sailing without a companion proved to be fortuitous for Lyle. The solitary lifestyle of a lone sailor on the vast expanse of the world’s oceans for more than 20 years provided a lifestyle and an unusual opportunity for reflection, serious thinking and writing about the things he had a passion for.
From the beginning he appreciated and enjoyed this new way of living and sharing his adventures with his friends when sailing or mooring in the company of other boats. Most of his years were spent in the Bahamas, Virgin, Leeward and Windward Islands, Trinidad and Venezuela.
He did take his two teenaged sons (Craig 16 and Todd 14) on a 3-month cruise off the coast of Mexico, explored the island of Guadalupe, Baja California and into the Sea of Cortez where they sailed as far north as La Paz. This was a rewarding voyage for father and sons.
Satisfaction
Lyle says of his years as an active sailor: “It’s satisfying to know you can take your home with you wherever you go. There is always a combination of respect and fear for the forces of nature at sea. Successfully accepting and attempting to meet the challenges nature presents makes one feel good. Above all, it gets your attention and you are never bored. Whether at sea or in a quiet port, your thoughts can discover more about the world, and your social times with fellow travelers are more intense and meaningful.”
About ‘Nothing’
Lyle credits his teacher Andrew J. Galambos with introducing him to two powerful concepts – The Scientific Method as a tool for determining the rightness of new ideas that add to our knowledge of nature, and Ockham’s razor -- the concept that if you want to add to knowledge, you use fewer facts to say more about nature.
Armed with these two powerful tools Jacobson searched for the simplest facts that would explain this world of energy and motion. He posed this question: “What is all around us that allow us to observe our world?” The answer seemed obvious to him – “The physical world of mass and matter.” Then, he thought about how he observed the physical world. How did things have shape and form? Then came a ‘Eureka’ moment – a moment of insight, discovery and clarity. He realized that the physical of things can only be observed because of the non-physical. The Nothing of the nonphysical gave the necessary contrast for identifying the borders that give shape and form for the physical world. “What did that mean?” he asked himself. Slowly, the realization that this ‘no thing’ was what we commonly refer to as ‘nothing’ became important in an entirely new context. ‘Nothing’ now became an integral and essential part of human observation.
Lyle began to ponder this new view of reality. It became an obsession. It was about this time that he came across the story of the oriental philosopher and ‘the bowl’ (see Discovery page). Suddenly, Jacobson saw a multitude of spatial, geometrical relationships everywhere he looked. It was a different world than the conventional one he had been taught. He then concluded that man’s building process is one of constructing, encapsulating and organizing nothing (through the use of the physical world) for the sole purpose of ‘filling’ and ‘emptying’ this space. “What’s more”, he thought, “the rest of nature is doing the same thing.”
He spent the next several months utterly fascinated by this new view of the world. He felt as though he were a newborn child staring at nature for the very first time.
The Book
Lyle recognized his discovery was a universal innovation when he realized that it explained human observation, human action, and projected into the entire rest of the universe. It was a classic example of both the scientific method (he has found no exceptions although the search goes on) and the principle that less (fewer) facts about nature gives rise to more knowledge of the world. It simply explains universal cause and effect in a simple and obviously observable way.
Unfortunately, not everybody shared Jacobson’s enthusiasm and conviction for his observations and conclusions. In fact, nobody did! This was very frustrating and disturbing for Lyle. In the late 1980s, thinking it must be his limited ability to express his ideas verbally, Jacobson decided to document his concept and its meaning in written form. The idea for a book emerged later when he concluded that there was enormous value in being able to better understand and explain the true nature of universal cause and effect.
The reader is encouraged to purchase discovery of nothing or click here to download the FREE 53-page illustrated Abstract of his principles and judge for yourself.