First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

by Preston, Richard

  Copyright © 1987, 1996 by Urania, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  This is a revised edition of a work that was originally published in hardcover by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987 and in paperback by Plume in 1988.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following:

  Juan Carrasco’s notebooks.

  Maarten Schmidt’s notebooks.

  Interview of Maarten Schmidt by Spencer Weart in October 1977, this page–this page, and interview of Maarten Schmidt by Paul Wright on March 10, 1975, this page–this page; both in the collection of the American Institute of Physics.

  Interview of James A. Westphal by David DeVorkin on August 9 and 12 and September 14, 1982, this page–this page, this page–this page, and this page–this page; in the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, Space Astronomy Oral History Project.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81742-6

  Random House website address:

  http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  The desire of the moth for the star,

  Of the night for the morrow,

  The devotion to something afar

  From the sphere of our sorrow.

  SHELLEY

  Foreword: To Readers and Teachers

  THE STORY BEHIND FIRST LIGHT

  First Light is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done—and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize. The book has been out of print and hard to find; this is a revised and updated edition. For some reason, First Light has gotten a reputation as a kind of cult classic about science. I never really intended it to be read as a science book, but books, like children, have a way of choosing their own friends.

  The action centers on the two-hundred-inch Hale Telescope, or the Big Eye. This telescope is a wonder. It sits inside a dome near the summit of Palomar Mountain, in southern California, not far from San Diego. It was built during the 1930s, and is probably the masterwork of the Depression. It is a huge telescope, the heaviest working telescope on earth. Seven stories tall, the Hale Telescope glides so easily on Flying Horse telescope oil that you can move it by hand. It has a mirror two hundred inches in diameter—sixteen feet, eight inches across. The Hale’s mirror took fourteen years to cast and polish. During the final stages, the master opticians polished the glass with their bare thumbs. They made a mirror so smooth that if it were expanded to the size of the United States it would not show any bump more than four inches high.

  The telescope was conceived by an astronomer named George Ellery Hale, who suffered from a mental illness that gave him hallucinations. When Hale was having a bad day, a little man, a kind of elf, perched on his shoulder and talked into his ear, giving him all kinds of advice. This elf would not shut up. After a while, Hale felt as though the elf was beginning to drive him crazy. I like to think that the elf whispered something in Hale’s ear like: “Hale, you have got to build a telescope to end all telescopes.” Whether or not the idea for it came to Hale in this way, his telescope is one of the great achievements of the human spirit. Just to look at it makes one feel a little better about our species. We can do a few things right.

  The main figure in First Light is James E. Gunn, who is regarded by some experts as the leading astronomer of our time. Whatever else he is, Jim Gunn is a genius, pure and simple. He is also a so-called gadgeteer. That is, he builds scientific instruments. Unlike other gadgeteers, he builds his gadgets out of junk parts—Gunn is a cheapskate, but a very clever one. He and his colleagues find some of the parts in dumpsters. On scavenging trips around Los Angeles, the city that was originally Gunn’s base of operations (he is now at Princeton University, in New Jersey), Gunn and his cronies discovered dumpsters that were used by military defense contractors. They were mother-lode dumpsters. If you knew what to look for, you might find a fifty-thousand-dollar sensor lying among slices of moldy pizza, drenched with Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup. If you cleaned the soup off the device, it might work, or you could at least cannibalize it for parts. Gunn also obtained parts from mail-order catalogs and surplus stores. He got parts from his corner drugstore and from Woolworth’s and L. L. Bean. He conned NASA into giving him spaceflight items he couldn’t possibly afford to buy. Then he wired and bolted the stuff together into supersensitive instruments, attached them to the Hale Telescope, and used them to see right to the edge of the universe, discovering things no one had seen before. Gunn found light never meant for human eyes. The expression “first light” is a technical term. To “see first light” means to open the eye of a new telescope, allowing starlight to fall on the mirror and the sensors for the first time. That is when you find out if the thing works. Gunn’s stuff doesn’t always work the first time. Come to think of it, it never works the first time.

  In the course of writing First Light, I climbed all over and through the Hale Telescope, where I found rooms, stairways, tunnels, and abandoned machines leaking oil. My notebooks show tooth-marks where I gripped them with my teeth while climbing around inside the telescope, and the notebooks are stained with Flying Horse telescope oil. At times I had to take notes by starlight, when the moon was down, or in pitch-darkness, writing by sense of touch. I don’t use a tape recorder. I write longhand (very fast) in old-fashioned reporter’s notebooks. Tape recorders always seem to break down at the worst possible moment, and anyway, a tape recorder can’t capture important visual and sensory details of a scene. Eventually I bought an expensive high-tech darkroom flashlight to provide light for taking notes—it had to be very dim, so it wouldn’t disturb the astronomers at their work. This one was the dimmest flashlight money could buy. I had to hold it an inch from the paper just to see what I was writing, but the astronomers complained that it “blinded” them, so I had to turn it off. One night, writing notes by touch in total darkness and in bitter cold, I accidentally turned my notebook upside down. Then I started turning the pages in the opposite direction, unaware that I was writing over my notes. Thus I ended up with two sets of notes in that notebook, one set written on top of the other, running in the opposite direction and upside down. I never was able to read that particular notebook.

  Eventually the astronomers seemed to forget I was there, and so I became like Jane Goodall among the chimpanzees. I was able to watch them without causing a disturbance, while they fed on Oreo cookies or looked at galaxies on television screens, oblivious to the presence of a reporter scribbling in a corner.

  I was surprised to see how chaotic, amusing, and passionate science is. Scientific facts are often described in textbooks as if they just sort of exist, like nickels someone picked up on the street. But science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about mystery and not knowing. It is about taking huge risks. It is about wasting time, getting burned, and failing. It is like trying to crack a monstrous safe that has a complicated, secret lock designed by God. Some of God’s safes are harder to open than others. The questions may be so difficult to answer, the safe so hard to crack, that you may spend a lifetime playing the tumblers and finally die with the door still firmly locked. Science is therefore about obsession. Sometimes there is a faint clicking sound, and the door pulls wide open, and you walk in.

  During the last phase of writing, I put First Light through an intense fact-checking p
rocess. My wife used to be a fact-checker for The New Yorker, and she taught me how to check a manuscript using colored pencils. So I put colored underlining and marks all over the manuscript, showing passages that had been checked or still needed checking. I reinterviewed everyone in the story, running up three thousand dollars in telephone bills. I made constant changes in the text, essentially rewriting the book while grilling my characters over the telephone. Nothing is “made up” in First Light, not even the thoughts of astronomers. When I describe the thoughts that are passing through an astronomer’s mind, it is because I asked him what he was thinking. And later, of course, I checked it with him, to make sure I had described the flow and structure of his thought in a way that he remembered and was able to recognize.

  The astronomers did not always greet my writing style with approval. Maarten Schmidt, an extremely distinguished astronomer—former president of the American Astronomical Society—generally liked the book, but he objected to the way I had described his interest in watching wrestling matches on late-night television. (Scientists don’t think their lives are interesting enough to warrant such detail—but I would disagree.) One day Maarten Schmidt, Jim Gunn, and another astronomer, Donald Schneider, were driving in a car to Palomar Mountain, and they got into a discussion about First Light’s shortcomings. (I heard about it later.) Schmidt blurted out something like, “I just don’t know where Richard Preston got that crazy stuff about my liking to watch TV wrestling! I can’t remember saying it to him! He must have made up the quotes! And what is really terrible is the way I seem to demonstrate such detailed knowledge of Hulk Hogan!”

  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

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Foreword: To Readers and Teachers

  Part 1: Big Eye

  Part 2: The Shoemaker Comets

  Part 3: Gadgeteers

  Part 4: Discoveries

  Appendix 1: Main Characters

  Appendix 2: Glossary

  Credits

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  PART 1

  Big Eye

  When 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, Lil
y, 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.