First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe Read Free Page B

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 thathe 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