First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (7 page)

Jim Gunn took off his glasses and knuckled his eyes and then stared at the screen in silence. As far as Gunn was concerned, he would have to be taken out of the dome in an ambulance before he would give up a night of watching galaxies. Every hour or so, Don Schneider went downstairs and removed a tapeful of sky from the computer. Over time, a cardboard box in the data room filled with tapes.

Juan Carrasco watched galaxies slide up a video monitor in his control panel. He leaned over to speak to the Principal Investigator. He said, “You have a good night on your hands, Maarten.”

Maarten grinned.

Don turned to Juan. “Do you like these kinds of nights, Juan?”

“Oh, yes. Nothing to do but look.”

“The days are worse than the nights,” Don said. “You should have been here this afternoon, Juan. Haven’t you noticed my receding hairline?” He pulled a fistful of hair back from his forehead, and Juan laughed. “These have been days of infamy,” Don added. Something caught his attention on the video screen. “Here’s an unhappy galaxy,” he said.

Maarten took off his glasses and squinted at it. “Ja. It’s strange-looking, Don, I agree.”

“It’s giving birth.”

“Ha! To a quasar!”

Later a shotgun-blast of galaxies crossed the screen. “Whoa,” Don said. “A big, rangy cluster. Some of these rich clusters have a thousand galaxies in them.”

“This movie really should be in color,” said Maarten.

“Uh-uh, black and white,” Don said. “I’m a conservative. Look at that one, Maarten. That’s a poor excuse for a galaxy.”

“It really is. And what is this object?” Maarten said, pointing to a pair of hazy dots.

“I suspect that’s a galaxy with a friend,” Don said. The telephone rang again. Don kicked the floor with a pair of black sneakers, and his chair rolled backward across the room to the telephone. “Big Eye,” he said into the receiver. “Hello, John! Yes! We are transiting! I know. I know—I was skeptical, I would be the first to admit it.”

Schmidt tapped the television screen with his cookie. A huge crowd of galaxies had appeared. He leaned over to speak to the night assistant. He said, “Now there you go, Juan. Three big ovals—a spiral; three more ovals—an irregular.” More galaxies appeared. “Look here, we’re not done yet!”

Juan pointed to a galaxy. “There’s
a very
strange spiral, Maarten.”

“Ja, a barred spiral. Nice.” Maarten stood up and walked around the data room for a while. Suddenly he wheeled toward the screen and pointed at two disk galaxies locked in an embrace. “Ho! These are in collision!”

“Can you hear these people?” Don raised his voice into the telephone. “We have two interacting galaxies going by.” 4-shooter had imaged a pair of galaxies in flagrante delicto, spinning through each other and spraying off stars. The ecstasy would last for a hundred million years. Don finished his conversation, and then the astronomers watched in silence, until perhaps the thought of these fields of galaxies buried in lookback time drew the conversation to time travel. Don said to Maarten, “Did you ever see that
Star Trek
, the one where Captain Kirk ends up back in New York in the 1930s?”

“Oh, is that the gangster one?” said Maarten. “I love that gangster one!”

“No, you’re thinking of ‘A Piece of the Action.’ Where Kirk and Spock land on this planet full of Chicago gangsters.”

“Right!” Maarten said. “Spock in a gangster suit!”

“Yes, they called him Spacco,” Don said. “But actually, the one I was thinking of is ‘The City on the Edge of Forever.’ Where they
have to investigate this time disturbance. And Kirk runs through this doughnut.”

“Ah—do I remember that one?” Maarten wondered.

“And Kirk ends up in New York during the Depression,” Don said. “With this fantastic woman—”

“Yes!” Maarten said.

“Joan Collins!”

“Right!”

“Kirk falls in love with her, and who wouldn’t. But it turns out she’s the leader of a pacifist movement and that she is going to prevent the United States from entering World War II. Then Kirk finds out that she is going to be hit by a car. He could save her, but he has to let her die.”

Jim Gunn leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

Later Don Schneider said, “I think we need music for this movie.”

The night assistant agreed. Juan Carrasco crossed the room and turned on the stereo. Instead of music, he got the news: “The price of gold jumped thirty-five dollars an ounce today, in hectic trading.”

The announcer moved on to the local headlines. Apparently reading from hot copy, he continued: “A San Diego man was indicted today on charges of—oh. Uh—sexual things.”

The astronomers were startled. “Juan! What is that?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Juan turned the dial to KFAC Los Angeles, and Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
came up, conducted by Seiji Ozawa. “Spring” added a touch of grace to the galaxies streaming past, as the violins called to each other like birds. The screen filled with blotty things, a snow flurry. Suddenly at least two hundred galaxies spattered the screen. The core of an unnamed, unknown supercluster of galaxies was coasting through the Hale Telescope’s field of view.

G
eorge Ellery Hale was a solar astronomer who invented clever machines for studying the sun. He also had a talent for extracting money from tycoons, which he applied to the creation of telescopes. He had a powerful imagination. It overpowered not only him but also everyone around him; and as he talked and wrote of bigger telescopes, he drew businessmen, politicians, and scientists into his precognitions of giant glass. First came the forty-inch Yerkes Telescope, at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, finished in 1897—a refracting telescope that uses lenses to gather light. A Chicago industrialist and expert stock-waterer named Charles Yerkes paid for it. In its day it was the largest telescope on earth. The next of Hale’s telescopes was the sixty-inch reflecting telescope, finished in 1908, which is on the summit of Mount Wilson, overlooking the city of Pasadena. Hale’s father paid for the mirror, while Andrew Carnegie paid for the rest of the telescope. For a time it was the largest on earth. The third was the one-hundred-inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson, also once the largest on earth and mostly paid for by a Los Angeles hardware king named John Hooker. Hale became the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, located on Santa Barbara Street in Pasadena.

Hale paid for his telescopes with broken nerves. He suffered from a New England family background, a culture in which nervous and physical diseases can no more be separated from one another than a photon can be separated into a wave or a particle. Hale radiated a boyish energy through oval spectacles, and ladies found him charming. He used to jog up Mount Wilson along miles of steep switchbacks, reciting Italian poetry. When in the grip of his
overheated imagination, Hale had a peculiar habit of holding his hands rigidly outward from the middle of his body and gazing into the distance. He had a slight body that seemed always in motion, except when it was confined to bed, which was often. He suffered from violent headaches, physical prostration, frantic excitement, insomnia, ringing ears, tingling feet, indigestion, and a general sense that his mind was whirling out of control. Later in life he gave this galaxy of symptoms different names. He called it the “Americanitis,” because he felt that Americans had a tendency to let the wings of their ambition drive them to insanity. Or he called it “the whirligus.” One night, when Hale was forty-two years old, he was sitting up in his bedroom enduring the whirligus when a little man materialized before him. That was the first appearance of the elf. The elf gave Hale some advice on how to run his life. Hale appreciated the advice and thanked the elf, and the elf went away. When (in succeeding months) the elf started coming back, Hale began to worry. Hale would hear a ringing in his ears, heralding the arrival of the elf, who would materialize and deliver some advice. Hale was naturally reluctant to tell his family and friends about the elf, even when the elf began to follow Hale around during the day. At night Hale would walk in circles around his bedroom under the spell of malignant dreams, during which, according to one of his friends, “in his tormented half-sleep [he] would try to climb the picture frames on the wall.” The elf may have urged Hale to seek psychiatric help. In any event, every now and then Hale would buy a train ticket to the East Coast and check into a sanatorium in Maine, where he would stay for a few months. There he would saw and split a few dozen tons of wood in order to calm himself. He bought a three-wheeled motorcycle. Riding on it through Pasadena one day, he noticed two men on motorcycles. He shouted at them, “Want to race?” and gunned his motorcycle. Then he heard the sirens—he had failed to notice that they were policemen. He tried to give the cops the whirligus, but they arrested him, the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. In 1922, Hale’s nerves became so bad that his doctors feared he was heading for a major nervous breakdown. They persuaded him to take a trip abroad for his health. He chose to go to Egypt.

With his wife and children, he sailed up the Nile in a lateen-rigged
yacht, to the Valley of the Tombs near Luxor, where Howard Carter was just then opening the tomb of Tutankhamen. Hale visited the excavation and watched while the archaeologists pulled a procession of golden treasures from the underground rooms. Tutankhamen had been the son of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who had attempted to establish the worship of the sun god, Aten, throughout Egypt. Hale’s biographer, Helen Wright, in her book
Explorer of the Universe
, said she believed that the sight of King Tut’s tomb may have produced effects in Hale opposite from what Hale’s doctors had hoped when they had urged him to travel. Death, eternity, and the Nilotic sun festered in Hale’s brain, until all he could do was sit in a shady corner of his yacht and stare across the river at yellow cliffs, which to Hale seemed “pierced with the doorways of rifled tombs,” as he wrote in a letter. Hale’s resignation as director of the Mount Wilson Observatory soon followed.

When he returned to the United States, he went into partial seclusion at his home in Pasadena, to carry on his own researches into the sun. He built a private solar laboratory on a piece of land that had once been part of the original grounds of the Henry Huntington estate, and equipped the building with mirrors. The building’s doorway was of carved wood and stone, arched over with hieroglyphs and an image of the rayed sun, copied from a tomb at Thebes; and the building had an underground room where Hale brought a shaft of sunlight into his instruments, and where he hoped to spend the rest of his days. But he could not keep his mind from a mirror, around which his imagination had been turning since the end of the Great War. Hale had not severed his contacts with friends and colleagues, nor with the Mount Wilson Observatory. He took the oxymoronic title of Director Emeritus, which suggests that some kind of force-field emanated threads of energy from his solar laboratory across the city of Pasadena to the headquarters of the Mount Wilson Observatory on Santa Barbara Street. In fact Hale continued to be a strong influence there during the early 1930s. Hale, in turn, may have been under the influence of the elf. Helen Wright, Hale’s biographer, learned about the elf from a certain Dr. Leland Hunnicutt, who was a friend of Hale and who had listened sympathetically to Hale’s descriptions of the elf. Wright does not say exactly what kind of advice this elf was
giving to Hale, although she says that the elf “became almost a mascot.” For all we know, the elf may have had in mind a two-hundred-inch telescope, which raises the possibility that one of the great scientific instruments of the twentieth century may have been built partly on the advice of an elf.

When Hale felt well enough to face the rigors of contact with humans, he received visitors in the library of his solar laboratory. There, stabilized in an armchair that had a book rest and a writing table attached to it, beside a fireplace that displayed a bas-relief of Aten riding his chariot into the sun, Hale talked and wrote about a giant mirror until he gave everyone the whirligus. At that time the one-hundred-inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson was the world’s largest. Hale pointed out that a mirror two hundred inches in diameter would have
four
times the surface area of a hundred-inch mirror; four times the light-gathering power. “Starlight is falling on every square mile of the earth’s surface, and the best we can do at present is to gather up and concentrate the rays that strike an area one hundred inches in diameter,” he wrote in 1928, in an article for
Harper’s
magazine. These words struck a chord with the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, which after consulting with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., decided to provide funds for Hale to build a two-hundred-inch telescope.

Hale naturally wanted the money to go to the Mount Wilson Observatory. But the Mount Wilson Observatory was funded by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which had been endowed by Andrew Carnegie. The Rockefeller trustees did not like the idea of giving Rockefeller money to a Carnegie observatory. The resulting negotiations nearly pitched Hale into bed, but he managed to work out a compromise. The Rockefeller Foundation gave six million dollars to the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, while at the same time Hale secured an agreement between the California Institute and the Mount Wilson Observatory to cooperate with each other in the building and operation of the telescope.

When the money had been pledged, Hale established various committees to plan the telescope. John Anderson, a Mount Wilson astronomer, was appointed executive officer of the project. Various sites on mountains throughout southern California were tested for
dark skies and good seeing. “Seeing” refers to turbulence in the atmosphere. Viewed through a large telescope, stars appear to waver and tremble, as if they were near a radiator. Poor seeing causes stars to twinkle. Hale wanted to find a mountain where the stars did not twinkle. In the spring of 1934, Hale and Anderson drove up Palomar Mountain in a Pierce Arrow touring car, along a winding dirt road. (Two years earlier, on the occasion of Albert Einstein’s first visit to Pasadena, the Mount Wilson Observatory had blown a small fortune on this automobile, in order to put Einstein in a luxury car.) Hale and Anderson went from one end of the long mountain to the other, comparing sites for the telescope, until they chose a fern meadow at an altitude of 5,600 feet. The meadow was accessible, yet far from city lights, and something about the meadow’s topography muted the air above it, calming the stars into points during many nights of the year. The site had water too—a ravine opened to the north, where Horse Thief Spring trickled from beneath oaks that had been growing a century before Isaac Newton was born. The San Luiseño Indians had called the place
Poharup
—Noise of Falling Water.

The major responsibility for designing the telescope went to John Anderson and a committee of astronomers and engineers. They tested and discarded a number of designs for the tube and mounting of the telescope before they hit upon what is now known as a yoke-and-horseshoe mounting. The telescope’s tube swings between the arms of a fork, which resemble the arms of a tuning fork and are called a yoke. As the tube tracks the stars from east to west, the tuning fork rotates around its handle; the arms of the yoke turn. The tube of the telescope weighs heavily upon the yoke, and so the ends of the yoke rest for support on a gigantic horseshoe bearing—a lazy C, which slides on its back, floating on a layer of Flying Horse telescope oil. The tube is a scaffold made of I-beams, fifty-five feet long, designed by a structural engineer named Mark Serrurier. Serrurier’s design is called the Serrurier Truss. The truss flexes under strain, as does a bridge. Both ends of the tube are free to sag by up to a quarter of an inch, and yet the tube holds the two principal mirrors—the sixteen-foot primary mirror and the four-foot secondary mirror at the top of the telescope—in perfect parallel alignment to within a hundredth of an inch, no matter
where the telescope points, and thus keeps the stars in focus. “I was given a job nobody thought could be done,” Mark Serrurier told me. “That’s where I got my satisfaction.”

During the summer of 1936, work crews blasted and dug a circle of holes in the fern meadow. Caltech students hauled rock out of the holes by hand, using wheelbarrows. The dome was designed by committee. Russell Porter, an artist, explorer, and amateur telescope maker, may have elaborated some of the Art Deco decoration on the dome, although even these details seem to have been worked out by the committee. Porter noticed that the dome’s size was within two feet of the diameter and height of the Pantheon in Rome. The committee had evidently not planned that.

The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, in South Philadelphia, cast and machined the tube, the yoke, and the horseshoe bearing. A workman named William Ladley put the last rivet into the Serrurier Truss, before a crowd of dignitaries in South Philadelphia, including Albert Einstein. Tube, yoke, and horseshoe bearing traveled to California through the Panama Canal, chained to the deck of a freighter. Those parts were assembled on the mountain, inside the dome, under the direction of a master engineer named Byron Hill, who later became the observatory superintendent. I found Byron Hill in a double-sized mobile home on top of a hill in Tuolumne, California, with his wife, who was in poor health. He spends his mornings feeding birds on the patio and drinking coffee, and does not spend a lot of time congratulating himself on what he did to improve the vision of the species. “I get a little older every day,” Byron Hill said. “I object to it.” During his days as superintendent of the observatory, the astronomers sometimes referred to Palomar Mountain as Byron’s Hill. They regarded him as a tough customer; he used to wear a leather jacket and aviator’s glasses. He once threw an astronomer out of the dining room for wearing Bermuda shorts—“His legs
shocked
the housekeeper,” he explained to me. On another occasion a night assistant parked his truck inside the Hale dome, where Byron thought it did not belong. Byron fitted a chain around the truck, hoisted the truck up to the top of the dome, and let it dangle next to the Hale Telescope. About the tube, yoke, and horseshoe bearing he said, “The things fitted together beautifully.”

The mirror-blank was cast at Corning Glass Works, in Corning, New York. George McCauley, a master of Pyrex, directed the work. McCauley was a taciturn man. Asked how he planned to cast the glass, he said, “It will be no different than making a bean pot, except in the methods employed.” The methods included building an igloo-shaped oven and casting a series of disks inside the igloo, in molds that resembled waffle irons. McCauley started with small disks and worked his way up to two hundred inches. His methods produced a mess during the first casting of a two-hundred-inch disk, when pieces of the mold broke off and floated away in a mulligatawny of hot Pyrex. Asked what he planned to do next, McCauley snapped, “We’ll just make a new disk.” On December 2, 1934, McCauley’s men ladled about forty buckets of white-hot Pyrex into another waffle mold. The Pyrex was thick stuff and oozed out of the buckets in glops, like refrigerated honey. McCauley kept the melt in the oven for ten months, gradually cooling it, letting the glass anneal.