First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

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 process. 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!”