First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (25 page)

Donnie’s hand shot up. “Mother,” he said, “the moon doesn’t give light. It reflects the light of the sun.”

That did not make catechism any easier.

His father, Donnie Ray Schneider, was a sharecropper and the mayor of Heartwell. He farmed corn, wheat, and sorghum on sections of land around Heartwell that belonged to other people. He worked as hard as any man in Heartwell, and people there say that Donnie Ray Schneider never walked anywhere, he ran. He wanted to save up enough money to buy a farm of his own, but there were times when the crops would fail two years in a row, and then he could barely feed his family, although he continued to buy books for his oldest boy, because Donnie was a reader. Donnie Ray figured that someday Donnie would work alongside him and help him build a farm, until the boy announced that he was going to be an astronomer, which was really all right, since it had already become clear that he was not going to make much of a farmer. Donnie Ray had to carry the boy out of bed most mornings and put him on the tractor and wrap his hands around the steering wheel and turn the ignition key before the boy woke up, which perhaps explains what happened when he left Donnie alone one day on the tractor, pulling a giant disc and harrow. Donnie threw the tractor into gear and began to disc the land. He enjoyed open plains, deep sky, and horizons. The sky was always a presence in Nebraska, where one’s eye could jump to the edge of the world without hitting so much as a tree. The tractor churned along, and then it came time to refuel.

He had never refueled the tractor while pulling a large piece of machinery. It was a tricky job. He had to drive the tractor alongside a pickup truck. The pickup held a tankful of diesel fuel and a hose. He made a slow pass alongside the pickup truck—a practice flyby. He was too far away, decided to circle around again, and gunned the throttle. As Don tells the story, “I heard this tremendous crash. I looked back. All I could see was a cloud of dust and a dancing pickup truck.” He had forgotten about that disc and harrow. They had caught the pickup truck and were discing and harrowing it. “The disc,” Don says, “didn’t even know the pickup was there.” Don unhooked the tractor from the wreckage and drove the tractor
like mad to another field, where his father was cutting wheat. “Dad,” he said, “I think I destroyed your pickup truck.”

The words of the mayor of Heartwell were: “Okay, Donnie, we’ve gotta make hay while the sun shines. I’ll take a look at it later.”

Wheat harvest arrived in July. At the same time they had to begin irrigating the corn. Don would get up with his father before sunrise, load a quarter of a mile of irrigation pipe into a trailer, and then set the pipe in another field, laying the pipe sections by hand. After that his father and his uncle would join forces to start cutting the wheat with combines, and Don would help them. Don’s mother or his aunt would make up a supper in a picnic basket. In the hot evening the men, Don, and his cousins would sit in the shade of a truck and eat while the sun went down, and then they would work into the night with the combines, shining lights into the wheat until the dew rose and they had to stop.

Don’s father finally saved enough to buy a farm of his own. In 1973, the Schneider family moved outside Heartwell to a yellow house surrounded by a picket of evergreen trees, to keep out the high plains wind, but entropy had a way of coming through windbreaks. Don can remember his father picking up a full thirty-gallon drum of oil and putting it into a trailer in a manner that suggested that the barrel contained popcorn. But secretly at first, and then gradually happening in a more apparent way, Donnie Ray’s heart changed into that of an old man. He died of heart failure one April in a hospital in Lincoln, just before planting time. Don was in his second year at the University of Nebraska. The other kids in the family were too young to work machinery, and his mother had never even learned how to drive a car. Don thought that he would have to plant the crops alone, until a crowd of tractors showed up in front of the Schneider farm. Most of the farmers in Heartwell put in the Schneider crops, after which Don and a hired man took over. “That summer,” Don recalls, “I just did what the hired man told me.” Don’s mother learned how to drive a car. By autumn, Eileen Schneider felt that she faced a decision: either her son became a farmer, as his father had been, or he got a college education. Without consulting Don, she auctioned off all of the family’s farm machinery in order to make sure that Don finished college.
She has remarried and now lives modestly but comfortably on the farm, renting the land to other farmers.

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 effective 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.