Read First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe Online
Authors: Richard Preston
First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (2 page)
Choking back laughter, his colleagues told him they remembered hearing him speak to me quite knowledgeably about Hulk Hogan. The quotes, they said, were faithful.
At one point while I was drafting the book, I decided to enlarge the childhood biography of Donald Schneider, so I telephoned Don’s mother in Nebraska, to get the facts of his childhood. She talked to me for a long time, giving me nice, rich material, as one would expect from a mother. Then she said to me, “I wonder if I could ask you for a small favor. Well, this is a little embarrassing, but I hope you will mention in your book that Don really needs to get married. Some nice young woman could read about him and see what a wonderful person he is.”
I thought, Well, why not? Mothers are often right in these matters. So I added a passage describing how Don Schneider was single and looking to get married.
When Don Schneider read
First Light
, he was appalled that I had broadcasted his desire to get married. We had become friends during the writing of the book, but that did not lessen his annoyance. “It is a frightening thing to be in the hands of a writer,” he said to me.
Then something strange happened. Don received an admiring letter from a young woman in the Netherlands who had read about him in
First Light
. She had never met Don, but she already knew about him from her brother, an astronomer who knows Don. Don wrote to the young woman. She replied to him. This continued for more than a year, during which time their letters heated up into love letters—it was a romance carried on by mail, as in Victorian times—and one day Don flew to the Netherlands and proposed to her. They are now happily married, and have two children, and are living in Pennsylvania.
Two astronomers in
First Light
ended up being famous, but not because of the book. They are Eugene (Gene) and Carolyn Shoemaker, husband and wife, who were using a tiny telescope at Palomar to search for comets and asteroids that could hit the earth. These objects are almost invisible. They are as black as coal and as large as Mount Everest, and they come out of nowhere, booming toward the earth from all angles. When one of them hits the earth it practically burns all life off the planet, enveloping the earth in a holocaust that makes a thermonuclear war look like a Sunday cookout. Fortunately this doesn’t happen very often. But it does happen: everything changed for the Shoemakers when Carolyn, along with two colleagues, David H. Levy and Philippe Bendjoya, discovered a chain of unusual comets floating through space that looked like “a string of pearls.” The comets took a loop around Jupiter and then slammed into the planet, one after the other in a series of violent explosions, during the summer of 1994. Collectively the objects were called Comet Shoemaker-Levy. When they hit Jupiter, the flashes of light were seen by telescopes all over the earth. CNN carried the news live, and the impacts left a string of brown bruises on Jupiter. These impacts were the most spectacular event to occur in the solar system in recorded human history. The Shoemakers became world famous, and they went on a lecturing tour that has not yet ended. As Gene later said to me, “Our lives have disintegrated into chaos. I guess it only happens once, anyway.”
And what of James E. Gunn, the gadgeteer? He is still at Princeton University, where he has embarked on one of the most ambitious projects in modern astronomy, the so-called Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The goal of this $40-million project (Gunn’s gadgets are not so cheap anymore) is to make an electronic three-dimensional map of the universe, in color, using all the techniques that Gunn pioneered in the story told in
First Light
. Gunn and his group are essentially building a huge color scanner to scan the heavens. The scanner will sit in a telescope on a mountain in New Mexico. If it works, the result will be like having an atlas of the world when before all you had was a sketch map drawn by a monk. The map will contain a million quasars and a hundred million galaxies, and it will show the three-dimensional structure of the creation. It will probably reveal new kinds of objects that nobody suspected.
The thing about nonfiction writing is that a book’s characters go on developing after the book is finished. This can be disturbing to the book’s author. I have always envied novelists for the way they can maintain control over their characters. If necessary, they can get rid of them by killing them or sending them to Tibet. The nonfiction writer does not enjoy such luxuries. You can’t control your characters. Therefore you can’t shape the plot. This gives you an unpleasant feeling that your book is out of control. Even so, one of the secrets of nonfiction narrative is its unpredictability, for this gives the book a convincing reality, the fractal surprise of unfolding life. I have always found it difficult to finish writing a nonfiction book, or rather to let the story go, because there always seems to be more to write about, and as you reach the end of the book you begin to perceive that the story will never end. The book must end, but the story flows along like a stream, until it meets other stories of other lives, and they touch and run along together, and merge into the headwaters of history.
—
Richard Preston
1996
Big Eye
W
hen the alarm clock woke Juan Carrasco, the senior night assistant at Palomar Observatory, daylight was streaming through cracks in the black window shades of the bedroom. He got out of bed and tugged at a shade, which came up with a crackling sound. The shade had seen so much use that it had become crisscrossed with zigzag breaks, which he had patched with a type of transparent tape reinforced with nylon threads and known to the astronomers of Palomar Observatory as Palomar Glue, since it is used by them to fix almost anything that breaks. What he should do, he would say to himself, was get some new tape for these shades. Some black tape. To keep out the daylight, so he could sleep better. He found his glasses and looked over a ridge covered with manzanita to the tops of clouds popping up on the far side of the ridge, like torn cotton: a good sign. A sign of clear skies coming tonight. Juan crossed the bedroom, past a photograph of his wife, Lily, and himself taken on the day that Father Girán had married them, and took a leisurely shower.
Then he shaved. In the mirror, as he pulled foam from his face with a disposable razor, broad cheekbones emerged, under brown eyes. Shaving took a long time. He believed, in fact, that he had never properly gotten the hang of the throwaway razors. He was a former barber. He had learned to be very, very careful with a straight razor when working on a customer, and now he could not help being much too careful with a throwaway razor. He had never cut a customer, not even when one of those winos he used to practice on when he was in barber school slumped over in the barber’s chair or began thrashing around. To have a bloody, bellowing
customer in the chair would have hurt his pride, and so he had never let his hand slip. An astronomer could groan more abnormally than a sick wino when there was trouble with the Hale Telescope, and so he tried never to let his hand slip at the controls. He rubbed a little grooming cream on his hair, which had begun to silver at the temples, and parted it on the left.
Juan dressed and went outdoors to examine the weather. He stood for a moment in his backyard, before the wild apple trees. Through their bare branches he saw last night’s snow on Mount San Jacinto, forty miles to the north, gleaming in the oblique sun. The intervening land was covered with a sheet of fog, but the sky above was creamy yet cloudless, the color of an old blue Chevrolet.
Lily was watching the San Diego evening news in the kitchen. She turned down the volume when Juan came in. He poured himself a mug of coffee while she served dinner, and she asked him who he was working with that night.
Juan Carrasco had a formal way of speaking about his job, the job of night assistant. He said that he was working with Dr. Maarten Schmidt, Donald Schneider, and Professor James E. Gunn. He told Lily that those astronomers had been having trouble with their instruments—a new experiment, something never tried before.
Lily noticed Juan’s worry. “Sometimes I wonder,” she once remarked to me, “if Juan hates to make mistakes.” When Juan had been a young father, he had carried his baby daughters around on pillows—he had been that afraid of breaking them. This man had thought you could break a baby just by handling it. This man had been made for handling the controls of great telescopes.
Juan turned up the television for the weather report. Night fog was coming, with marine winds. That was a good sign, and he began to feel that tonight could turn into a clear night for looking at galaxies. At 5:45
P.M
. he fitted his hard hat on his head and picked up his flashlight. “Bueno,” he said. “Ya me voy”—“I’m going.”
“Que te vaya bien,” she said, and kissed him. “That you may go well.”
Juan walked along a road that crossed a shoulder of Palomar Mountain, a long hogback ridge, 5,600 feet high, situated in the
coastal ranges of southern California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. Smelling wood smoke mixed with a tang of Pacific Ocean fog, he walked past a grove of fir trees where small stucco houses were almost hidden, belonging to other members of the mountain staff of Palomar Observatory. The road turned through a field of brown ferns and headed for an ivory dome. Deep stands of cedar, white fir, Valparaiso oak, and leafless black oak covered Palomar Mountain, and grassy meadows unfurled among the trees. On dry, sunny slopes grew chokecherry, blue buckthorn, wild lilac, wild coffee with a poisonous bean, and a type of ragged dwarf oak with spiny leaves, called carrasco—Juan’s last name.
Palomar
means “dovecote” in Spanish, and indeed, the mountain in autumn and spring fills with shoals of migrating birds. No birds sang on the mountain yet, on this night in early March, because at an altitude of more than five thousand feet, spring came slowly to southern California, but the toads had woken up from their winter’s sleep, and in the cold of evening they said
keep, keep
, in voices so halting and tentative that they sounded in pain.
Looking west, Juan saw that the moon had already gone down to its grave. The moonless time of the month had arrived, which the astronomers called dark time. They regarded dark time in spring as the best time for seeing galaxies, because in spring, the Milky Way lay along the horizon, where it would not interfere with the view straight up into the deep. When the Milky Way was high in the sky, it blocked a telescope from seeing into the deep universe. During dark time—moonless nights—in spring, you could point a telescope straight up past the Milky Way into extragalactic space, and there was no moon to wash the blackness from the sky. As Juan rounded a bend and neared the dome, he saw a fog bank hanging over a ridge to the west. He regarded the rising fog as a good omen, as long as it did not cover the mountain. City lights smeared a stain across the sky the color of egg yolk. If the fog socked in the valleys tonight, it would cover the lights of surrounding cities while leaving the skies above the mountain transparent and inky black—perfect for seeing galaxies. The sun had dropped behind the fog, and Juan noted with approval the color of the dying light; it was bluish white—no dust in the air. He knew exactly where
the sun was. Exactly. He saw that in about six minutes the sun would set. Palomar Mountain would roll into the terminator of earth-shadow, and a view of the universe would begin to unfold.
The dome looked like Hollywood’s idea of a Mayan temple. Juan fitted a key into a tall coffered door, and a small service door opened inward. It closed behind him with a bang that echoed among steel piers. It was dark in there. He flicked on his flashlight and climbed a long flight of stairs. He pushed through a door onto the main floor of the dome, at the base of the two-hundred-inch Hale Telescope. Smelling paint and sweet oil, he touched the brim of his hard hat and looked up. He saw that the shutters of the dome were closed, and that the Hale Telescope was pointed straight up, in its normal resting position. It rose seven stories over his head. The Hale hardly looked like a telescope at all to most people: it was a skeleton tube made of struts and girders. Covered with battleship-gray paint, the Hale Telescope looked more like a terrible weapon than a mirror for making images of time gone by. Even after so many years, one still felt a little bit of fear looking up at that instrument; one felt a little bit of fear, always.
Under the telescope an engineer walked back and forth, wreathed in clouds of vapor, pumping Jim Gunn’s camera full of liquid nitrogen, preparing it for the night. Juan opened his locker. His breath steamed in the cold. He pulled out a cardboard box, which filled his arms. He shut the locker and crossed the floor gingerly, mindful of the transparent puddles of oil that bled a little from the telescope most nights. His box read
LA VICTORIA MARINATED JALAPEÑOS
. He had found it in the trash, and although he had prolonged the box’s life by winding bands of clear tape—Palomar Glue—around and around it, the box had grown round and flabby.
The marinated-jalapeños box held Juan’s notebooks, which contained arcane lore diagnostic of the Hale’s innumerable tics. The Hale Telescope had taken twenty-one years to build, from 1928 to 1949. It contained thousands of components—motors and relays, gears and wheels, pipes and pumps—dating from the 1930s. Parts made by companies now bankrupt or merged. Parts unobtainable. Parts no longer understood. Juan Carrasco considered himself to be a small component in an enterprise that seemed to extend beyond
Palomar Mountain, beyond the United States, beyond, perhaps, the world. He doubted his importance to this enterprise. Although he had spent fifteen years climbing all over that telescope, patting it with a dust mop and crawling through hidden rooms inside the telescope, he felt that the Big Eye remained, in certain ways, a mysterious instrument. He felt that if he and the astronomers were to cease to exist, other people would find a use for the Hale Telescope. “Man is dispensable,” Juan liked to say. “Telescopes are not.” Feeling a tiny bit of nervousness, he entered a small room tucked into the wall of the dome, called the data room. There he saw Maarten Schmidt. Schmidt was a tall astronomer with curly, silvering hair. Schmidt smiled and said, “Good evening, Juan.”
“The valleys are filled with fog, Maarten.”
“Ah,” Maarten Schmidt said. “Good.”
“I say it’s going to be clear tonight.” Juan crossed the room and spoke to an astronomer who had a beard and glasses. “Professor James E. Gunn,” Juan said. “Are we going to see galaxies tonight?”
Gunn grinned and said, “I don’t know, Juanito.”
There were two other people in the data room. One was a young astronomer with blond hair and a beard, named Donald Schneider. He sat facing a computer terminal, next to a computer programmer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena named Barbara Zimmerman. She was in her forties, and had brown hair and a broad face, and her hands moved decisively over a computer keyboard. She was hammering out an untested computer program: jazz software. “Hey, Juan,” she said without looking up.
“Hello, hello,” Juan said.
Juan placed his hard hat and the box of marinated jalapeños on a shelf and sat in a swivel chair. Panels surrounded him on three sides, covered with switches and video screens. He hit a switch, and a set of Vickers pumps began to whine, driving Flying Horse telescope oil onto the Hale Telescope’s horseshoe bearing. He checked the temperature of the mirror. It was normal. Tonight the controls of the Big Eye belonged to a man who had once been a barber in San Antonio and Pecos, Texas, himself no astronomer, because nobody in their right mind would let an astronomer touch the controls of one of the most powerful telescopes on earth.
Earlier that afternoon, just hours before his team was scheduled to begin a new phase of its search for the edge of the known universe, the distinguished astronomer James E. Gunn was sitting at a workbench in a room called the electronics shop, in a lower level of the dome of the Hale Telescope. Jim Gunn was dabbing with a soldering iron at a small blue metal box. A curl of smoke went up from the box. He blinked, dragged a handkerchief from his pocket, and sneezed. He blew his nose and threw the handkerchief on the workbench. He said, “I seem to have the East Coast bug.” He snapped a lid on the box. “I don’t know what you’d call this little device,” he said. “It doesn’t have a name.”
The box was a rat’s nest of spare parts, the size of a cigarette pack. It contained resistors, capacitors, and a few semiconductor chips, which Gunn had rooted out of bins in the electronics shop. In Gunn’s universe such a device is known as a kludge. The word rhymes with
stooge
. The box exhibited one toggle switch. Gunn, who had a way of emphasizing certain words when he talked, said, “This
thing
, whatever you call it, will allow us to take data from the Hale Telescope’s camera in a way that’s particularly effective for finding quasars. We want to park the telescope and just let the stars go by as the earth turns. That produces a continuous picture of sky, like a long piece of film. Unfortunately, the camera on the telescope was not designed to do this.”
Astronomers, for the most part, do not look through telescopes anymore. They look at a television screen, which displays an image of the night sky. Virtually all professional telescopes these days have cameras attached to them, and most of those cameras use electronic sensors. The systems required to operate a modern telescope are similar to the systems used to operate a spy satellite. One needs a giant mirror. One needs an electronic camera that focuses large amounts of faint light onto a small, hypersensitive silicon sensor chip. One needs a knowledge of computer programs and of robots. The difference is that astronomers point their sensors away from the earth.
For the last three days Jim Gunn had been getting one or two hours of sleep a night, which dismayed him, because he felt that
he had been sleeping too much, probably because he was running a slight fever. He said, “I can’t do twenty-four-hour days anymore. I’m getting too old.” His other problem, at the moment, was that he had to deal with a reporter. I was taking notes while Gunn worked.
Gunn was then forty-seven years old and slightly under medium height. He has a beard and heavy eyebrows. He has a bold forehead, a fringe of brown hair going thin on top, and alert brown eyes. He is known and admired all over the earth, the recipient of more awards and prizes than he can keep track of or remember. He is a professor at Princeton University. That evening, he wore a brown cable-knit sweater drilled with one or two moth holes, and greasy blue trousers of the style worn by gas station attendants. The pockets of these trousers had been used to carry objects never meant to be put into pockets, and thus were either ripping out or rotting out along the leg seams. On the floor sat his toolbox. Lettering on it read
J. GUNN
. It was a Sears Craftsman toolbox. It was crammed with tape, wire, electronic chips, screws, nuts, gimcracks, and many different types of pliers. On the workbench sat a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses, which were padded around the nosepiece with a wad of electrical tape. He said the tape helped his glasses sit more comfortably on his nose.