First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

by Richard Preston

  Don graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1976, and went to graduate school in astronomy at Caltech. There he stepped into a class taught by Jim Gunn. The subject was cosmology. Gunn had a habit of saying in class, “As you learned at your mother’s knee,” and, turning to the blackboard, Gunn would produce a gigantic mathematical expression describing the subtle curvature of spacetime. Don had learned catechism at his mother’s knee, but this was pretty good stuff too. He eventually wrote his Ph.D. thesis on cannibal galaxies. His prime suspect for cannibalism was a nightmarish object—a pack of nine galaxies in a feeding frenzy, interdevouring one another. He concluded that they would merge into a glob—into a supergiant galaxy—almost immediately, in a couple of billion years. Maarten Schmidt then hired him as a postdoctoral fellow, to help Schmidt study quasars. When Don’s fellowship ran out, he and Schmidt continued to work as collaborators, while Don moved to the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, where he prepared his image-processing program to handle pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

  Don lived in an apartment next to the Institute, which he decorated simply. He put down carpets of computer paper by the front door to keep people from tracking mud around the living room. On the wall he hung some needlework that his sister had made for him, and a small, unobvious crucifix. He stocked a bookcase with novels by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen, and Mrs. Gaskell. He drove an ancient Chevy Nova with a vinyl roof. The car had almost no mileage on it because he walked everywhere he could. He walked to the other side of town to go to Mass and walked back again. His eyes were startlingly blue, as if they had absorbed ultraviolet light from high plains skies. He arranged his days with an almost Franciscan clarity, giving fifty to ninety hours a week to galaxies and quasars for a wage that was manifestly not upscale. That he had gotten off a tractor in order to become an astronomer he regarded as fate, since he had wound up back on a tractor seat at prime focus on the Hale Telescope. One day, as it so happened, he was in Nebraska, walking through a muddy field. It was autumn. Dark clouds were folding and rolling along the horizon, and a strange wind was blowing, which seemed to originate not from the earth. He had lost the Hale Telescope somewhere, which filled him with a sense of terrible loss. There was a white barn in the distance. The wind tugged and pulled at him. He kept walking. He arrived at the barn. He pulled open the barn doors, and there was the Hale Telescope. Then he woke up in his apartment in Princeton. The Hale had entered his dreams.

  During cloudy weather on Palomar Mountain, he finished chapters of novels by Anthony Trollope quicker than you can split an Oreo. Maarten Schmidt said to him once, “You belong in the forties and fifties, Don. And I don’t mean of this century.” Don had fallen in love with Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice. In a thoughtful frame of mind one evening, standing on the catwalk and watching the stars come out, he remarked to me that he had recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday. And, quoting from Jane Austen, he added, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Nevertheless, he had begun to suspect that the sky might more easily yield deep quasars than the earth a suitable wife. So he contemplated the last words of one of his favorite books, The Count of Monte Cristo, which were, “All of human knowledge is summed up in these two words: ‘wait and hope.’ ”

  While Don Schneider was in junior high school destroying farm machinery, Jim Gunn was getting lessons in hand-to-hand combat. The Vietnam War peaked around the time Gunn finished graduate school. “I have always been something of a physical coward,” Gunn once remarked, evidently thinking that he was giving a plausible explanation for why he signed up for paratrooper school at Fort Benning, Georgia. “Boot camp was pure shit,” he recalled. “But the jumping was great.” Great, that is, until the Caltech astronomer Jesse Greenstein heard about the jumping. Jesse got on the telephone. With whom Jesse talked is not known, but he carried influence in the government, and it can be surmised that his words reached the Pentagon. Higher powers sent Gunn back to California, where he wound up a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, doing research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  After being decommissioned from the Army, Gunn went to Princeton University, where he quickly became known as a theorist. In 1970, Gunn returned to Caltech, where he extended his reputation as both a thinker and a skilled observer, while at the same time his hands began to accumulate small scars. He built an electronic camera for the Hale Telescope that used a night-vision tube as a sensor. He built another. Then he built a computerized spectrograph for the Hale Telescope, working with Bev Oke. He built a house for himself and Rosemary. He built quite a lot of the furniture in the house.

  There is a joke among astronomers that goes like this. Question: What is the difference between a theorist and God? Answer: God has only one explanation for everything. As a theorist, Gunn has provided our species with a fair number of explanations for things taking place out there—not that it does us any obvious good to know, but it is nice to get the news. At the heart of the Gunnish view is the idea that galaxies are continually forming and dying, feeding or losing mass, taking in material and vomiting it out. Gunn felt that the Milky Way was still growing, still sucking in material from intergalactic space around it. Gunn felt that the universe was a dynamic system, tending toward involved shapes. “Astrophysics is engineering,” Gunn said. “You try to engineer a galaxy, using some rules of thumb. Nature is almost always more complicated than you think, but if you bang your head against simple models for long enough, you can sometimes figure out what nature is doing.” A galaxy to Gunn was a gadget; and it pleased him to model a universe that worked.

  Around Caltech, where there never seemed to be enough money to pay for chic equipment, Gunn applied his wits to other problems. He and Roger Griffin, an English astronomer, used parts from a child’s toy to build what is known as the Radial Velocity Machine. Griffin bought a set of Meccano motors. (A Meccano set is the English version of an Erector set.) “The motors were perfect,” Gunn said. “They were plastic and they had gearboxes.” Griffin wired up a dozen Meccano motors, and Gunn soldered some circuit boards. They attached the motors to an aluminum frame, added some bolts, some tape, and a Plexiglas lens polished with Brasso metal polish, and what came out was the Velocity Machine, which they installed on the Hale Telescope. It is still in use on the Hale, where it accurately measures the velocities of faint stars whipping in and out of the Hyades, a cluster of golden stars in the constellation Taurus.

  On August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the presidency of the United States. A few weeks later, a United States Congress, nervous about inflation, budget cuts, and the future in general, voted to allow the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—NASA—to spend three million dollars to look into the possibility of building a large space telescope. The vote had been a close call. It brought megascience to the world of astronomy—big budgets, big politics, and big bureaucracies. Thirteen years later the Hubble Space Telescope was sitting in Sunnyvale, California, in a clean room belonging to the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, awaiting launch in the space shuttle Atlantis. (It was eventually launched in 1990.) The Hubble Space Telescope is a complete orbiting observatory. It has a total of five instruments on board. It is four stories tall and weights 25,500 pounds. It cost, ultimately, $2.5 billion, or $6,000 an ounce. The Space Telescope is worth something like sixteen times its weight in gold. The Space Telescope’s mirror is only ninety-four inches across, modest by today’s standards, but since the Space Telescope orbits above the atmosphere, it is seeing things never dreamed of. A pie-shaped box the size of a grand piano is plugged into one side of the Space Telescope. This is the Space Telescope’s main imaging camera, the Wide Field/Planetary Camera. It cost $60 million. The story of how it got there involves Jim Gunn.

  NASA moved slowly into the Space Telescope project at first. A major technical problem turned out to be the lack of an effec
tive sensor for the Space Telescope’s main imaging camera. A group at Princeton University had been experimenting with vacuum-tube sensors—these were similar to night-vision tubes—but the tubes tended to break down. Tubes did not seem reliable enough for the Space Telescope, and after all the trouble with Congress, NASA did not want to ask for a billion dollars for the Space Telescope until a workable camera could be put on the drawing boards.

  Enter James A. Westphal.

  Westphal is an astronomer who grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his father ran an auto-repair shop. When Westphal graduated from high school, he got a job as a “jug hustler” for a seismic crew exploring the Oklahoma panhandle for oil and gas. The jug hustler plants a string of geophones, which pick up sonic vibrations from explosives, and Westphal’s pay was thirty-five cents an hour; for overtime, he got half pay. After a few promotions Westphal managed to save enough money to go to the University of Tulsa, where he picked up mostly B’s, along with a bachelor’s degree in 1954. He went back into the oil industry, where he got a job running a well-logging crew in Mexico. Then he got a job with Sinclair Oil, in Tulsa, to investigate what he calls “unorthodox” methods for finding oil. Westphal pointed sensors at the ground, hoping to pick up gamma rays coming from oil. He pulsed radio waves into the ground, hoping to get an echo from something greasy. With a giant computer Westphal analyzed gravitational warps that might hint of petroleum. Westphal passed word around Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana that Sinclair Oil wanted to talk to any person or persons who knew or believed they knew something about finding oil—and diviners and psychics showed up at Westphal’s lab, to demonstrate their witching wands and their bottles filled with vitamins and hung on strings, bottles that were supposed to wiggle when dangled over oil. The management of Sinclair Oil had little idea of what Jim Westphal was up to, which was all right by him.

  Shortly after the Soviets put up the Sputnik satellite, Sinclair’s management began to wonder if there might be some business opportunities in outer space. Management invited Westphal to a meeting of the board of directors in New York City, to tell them whether Sinclair ought to be in outer space and, incidentally, to tell them what he was doing out there in his lab in Tulsa. After advising the directors to avoid outer space, Westphal placed a small black box on the table. He said that recently his Tulsa lab had had a breakthrough. He would like now to share it with the board of directors. He said that the box wasn’t dangerous, although it could produce mental effects. The atmosphere in the boardroom became hushed. He said, “This is a model of a manager.” He hit a switch on the box. There was a whir. The box’s lid opened. A hand shot out, seized the switch, turned it off, and went back into the box. Westphal said, “As you can see, you put in some input to a manager, and in a little while, why, that’s what happens to your input.” The hush turned into total silence, which was suddenly broken by a choking sound—one man laughing hysterically—the comptroller of the corporation. (The device was first imagined by Claude Shannon, of AT&T Bell Laboratories, who also invented information theory. Westphal heard about Shannon’s idea through the grapevine, and Westphal was probably the first person to actually build the device. Westphal’s Model of a Manager became a popular item in joke shops, although Westphal never made a dime from it.) “We were a bunch of free spirits,” Westphal once said, “and we torqued the system and brought Sinclair Oil kicking and screaming into the new world.”

  After doing that, Westphal landed at Caltech as a laboratory technician. He became, in effect, a jug hustler for Caltech. He proceeded to build a high-pressure aquarium tank capable of holding living marine organisms brought up from deep-sea trenches. He took photographs of the moon and of coral reefs. He became interested in volcanoes and gold mirrors and infrared stars and galloping glaciers in Alaska and the atmosphere of Venus. His problem at Caltech, as he described it, was that “I was never able to figure out what I was supposed to do around here.” Westphal began fooling around with night-vision tubes, turning them into cameras for the Hale Telescope. He and an astronomer named Jerry Kristian built a camera containing a Silicon Intensified Target vidicon—a high-voltage night-vision tube. They took the camera up to prime focus. Prime focus is meant to hold one person. With the help of ten or twenty yards of Palomar Glue, Westphal and Kristian installed their night-vision tube in prime focus, along with a computer, a tape recorder, an oscilloscope, a television monitor, a ten-thousand-volt power supply, a tangle of power cables, and both of themselves. They aimed the Hale Telescope at the Milky Way, and then, just for the hell of it, they charged the night-vision tube with ten thousand volts of electricity—maximum redline power—and let first light fall into the tube. A bunch of stars came up on the television screen. Kristian, peering at a star-finder chart, began to complain. He said that the telescope must be pointing poorly. He said he could not recognize any of the stars. Then Kristian began to scream, and that was when they realized they were seeing stars that had never appeared on any star chart. They had warped the Hale into hyperspace and had zoomed into an unknown neck of the galaxy. Westphal let out an Oklahoma wildcatter’s “Yaa-hooooooooo!” and Kristian laughed until he gasped—“I almost peed my pants,” he said. (With all those high-voltage wires around, that could have killed them both.) Westphal and Kristian’s camera is now in Washington, D.C., in collections of the National Air and Space Museum. Jim Westphal had become a Palomar gadgeteer.

  Meanwhile three engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena—their names are Gerald Smith, Frederick Landauer, and James Janesick—had been investigating CCD sensor chips for use on the Galileo space probe, an unmanned NASA spacecraft then planned for a voyage to Jupiter. Westphal, talking with these engineers, came to understand that a CCD chip would be a good sensor for a ground-based telescope. He passed that rumor along to Jim Gunn. “It dawned on us,” as Westphal tells it, “that if we could improve these chips a little bit, they could just wipe out everything else in ground-based astronomy.” The engineers were saying that a chip could be made one hundred times more sensitive to light than any photographic film. To hang a supercharger like that on the Hale Telescope would be exactly equivalent to building a telescope with a mirror one hundred times larger than the Hale’s, only much cheaper.

  On October 19, 1976, Jim Westphal attended an all-day meeting at Caltech, as an onlooker. The main participants were the members of the Space Telescope’s Phase B group—a NASA team in charge of the early design of the Space Telescope. The question at hand was critical and immediate: What in the world should be done about a main camera for the Space Telescope? Smith and Landauer, from the Jet Propulsion Lab, stood up and talked about CCD chips. Westphal presented some lore on CCDs. Robert O’Dell, the group’s chief scientist, drew a picture on a blackboard of a mirrored pyramid that could be used to break a beam of light into four parts and bounce them into an array of CCD sensors. O’Dell said, “You guys think about that.” By the afternoon, the group had thought about that and had voted to advertise an open competition, hoping to encourage somebody, somewhere, to surface and solve the problem of the main camera on the Space Telescope. A couple of days later, as Westphal tells the story, Jim Gunn walked into Westphal’s office and said, “Jim, we have got to build the camera for the Space Telescope.”

  “What?” Westphal said. “Buzz off, Gunn.”

  Gunn said that he was not joking.

  Westphal started to feel nervous. He said, “No way, Jim! That’s not our style.”

  “If we don’t build the camera, Jim, Caltech will be out of business in astronomy,” Gunn said.

  “So who do you want as Principal Investigator?” Westphal asked, feeling a weird sensation in the pit of his stomach.

  “I want you to be P.I.,” Gunn said.

  “What? Hell, no, Jim! You can cram it,” he said.

  Gunn pleaded with Westphal.

  “There’s just no way,” Westphal said.

  Gunn insisted that there was a way.

  At that point Westphal under
stood that what he, Westphal, needed was a way out. So he said that he would consider the notion—provided that Gunn would agree in advance to be the Deputy Principal Investigator. He felt sure Gunn would not agree to that.

  Gunn agreed.

  “I have been had,” Westphal said. Then Westphal had an idea. He said to Gunn, “Let’s each put three or four names on the blackboard. If we can get half of these people to join us, Jim, why, then I’ll do it.” (“That was my way out,” he would later admit. “Right quick I could think of several people who I just knew would refuse to get into this thing with us.”)

  During the following weekend Gunn and Westphal got on the telephone. Westphal called up Jerry Kristian. “Yes,” Kristian said. Westphal called someone else—he can’t remember now who it was, but he remembers hearing the unfortunate word, “Yes.”

  “I figured I would have to call Roger Lynds, over at Kitt Peak,” Westphal remembered. “I just knew he would bail me out. He said, ‘Hell, yes.’ At which point I knew in my gut I had had it.”