The Perfect Machine (67 page)

The complexity of managing and operating such diverse facilities, coordinating the productive efforts of entire divisions of companies like Du Pont, laboratories with hundreds of engineers and scientists, and physical plants with thousands of employees, created a new scale for big science. The world of George Hale had rejected navy captain Sandy McDowell’s flowcharts as too bureaucratic and authoritarian, preferring the easy collegiality of informal meetings in their basement offices. The new science and technology would need men like Gen. Leslie Groves, veteran of building the Pentagon, who had the managerial and bureaucratic skills, and the authority, to clear every obstacle. Some Manhattan Project scientists resented Groves as much as the Palomar and Caltech scientists had resented McDowell. They couldn’t fire him. The needs of wartime research had created a science too big for the scientists to run alone.

Compared to the decade of war that some countries had endured, America’s war was mercifully short. Yet for scientists eager to do astronomy, it seemed an endless hiatus. Young men—there were still almost no women in astronomy and astrophysics—took leaves from graduate school or postdoctoral fellowships to work on rockets at Morris Dam, ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, or fission in Los Alamos, postponing or even derailing their careers. Senior scientists lost the momentum of research projects that were suspended for the duration. Those who had counted on using the big telescope at Mount Wilson or who planned research projects that could only be completed on the unfinished two-hundred-inch telescope waited and dreamed.

There had been no question of continuing the work on the telescope during the war. But even as the unfinished telescope languished, the politics of the telescope wouldn’t sleep.

In 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, Vannevar Bush pushed aside the proposals for joint operation of Palomar and Mount Wilson by saying that under the “present emergency” the details would be difficult to work out. He was wary of Robert Millikan’s insistence that the institution be headed by a committee instead of an individual. Mount Wilson had always been run by a single director—first George Hale, then Walter Adams. And, like other Millikan watchers, Bush knew that for all his insistence on committee and joint decisions, Millikan was not a man ever to allow himself to be overruled. The negotiations to pair Carnegie money with Caltech’s telescope trickled on through 1941 as the two proud institutions worked out the details of what constituted “joint operation.” What names would be on the letterhead? How would the citations on scientific articles based on work at the facilities read? Behind these seemingly frivolous issues lay Mount Wilson and Carnegie Institution fears of Millikan’s “acquisitiveness” and his publicity machine, and Caltech fears that Mount Wilson and the Carnegie Institution were somehow
usurping
their telescope.

War ended the bickering. It also changed the rules of the game. Bush, more than anyone, understood how the war would change the future of science. Government-funded war research had demonstrated the potential of science on a scale no one had dared imagine in the years before the war. Even without a peacetime equivalent to the Manhattan Project, it was clear to Vannevar Bush that government funding for future big science was inevitable, and that institutions like Caltech would be prime recipients. Before the war his bargaining point had been that tiny Caltech was overextended and couldn’t afford to run the telescope. He knew Caltech would be a different sort of place after the war.

By the spring of 1945, as the Allied forces marched across Western Europe and the Marines hop-skipped up the chain of islands toward the Japanese heartland, even pessimists began to think of the end of the war. Bush, who was aware of the secret weapons the United States was developing in Los Alamos, knew that the war would not last out the year. Within a year or two of the conclusion of the war, the two-hundred-inch telescope would be finished. Walter Adams was ready to retire as director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. The joint facilities would soon need a director.

Bush put great store in the role of a director. The Manhattan Project, with the unlikely choice of J. Robert Oppenheimer as director, was flourishing. Oppenheimer was far from a household name outside the world of physics, but at the Manhattan Project the legendary quickness and breadth of his mind attracted first-rate men to the project, and his grasp of the project kept the wildest of the scientists from
going too far afield. The joint directorship of the joint Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, Bush concluded, needed a personality of comparable fame and prestige in astronomy.

He first quietly floated the name of Harlow Shapley. As director of the Harvard College Observatory since 1921, Shapley was something of a dean of American astronomy, at least in the minds of easterners. He worked at a famed circular desk, keeping his many interests distinct on different sections of the desk. Shapley had enjoyed good relations with journalists, from the irascible H. L. Mencken to reporters from the influential
New York Times
, and as a regular participant in programs on the radio, in the newspapers, and at the Harvard College Observatory, he had built a public following, unusual for an astronomer. In the world of big science that Bush knew would follow the war, a widely known director who enjoyed easy rapport with the press and the public would be a strong asset.

Still, Bush wasn’t sure of Shapley. When he solicited views, he found that many thought Shapley lacked “generosity … his own reputation and advancement have often been too keenly in his mind rather than the welfare of his organization or of his colleagues.” Walter Adams shared Bush’s qualms. Shapley’s position in astronomy, Adams pointed out, was due to his early work at Mount Wilson, rather than to anything he had done since. “Hubble and Baade do not rate most of the Harvard work at all highly, and they should be excellent judges.” The strongest argument against Shapley was that he had never been enthusiastic about the two-hundred-inch telescope; indeed, he had done his best behind the scenes to derail the project.

The only other astronomer as well known, among the public and scientists, was Edwin Hubble. In 1936, when it seemed that the engineers were taking over the project, Walter Adams had confidentially urged that Hubble be appointed astronomical director of the Caltech two-hundred-inch-telescope project. From a public relations perspective Hubble was a natural choice. In the news weeklies and science supplements, he was the discoverer of galaxies, the measurer of the universe. His name was mentioned in conjunction with Einstein—science journalists liked to write that Hubble had
proved
what Einstein predicted—and Hubble had done little to discourage the idea that the real purpose of the big telescope was to support his own work. Hubble enjoyed fame; he liked to hobnob and be photographed with celebrities, rarely turned down a chance to be interviewed by a reporter or to appear in a newsreel, and made a point of appearing at Mount Wilson, in his tweeds and with his acquired English accent and pipe prominent, whenever a distinguished visitor scheduled a tour of the observatory. Robert Millikan, who had never been known to turn down publicity for Caltech, made no secret of his own preference for Hubble as the director of the joint observatories, where Hubble’s adeptness with the press might help Caltech as well as Mount Wilson.

In the agreement for joint operation of the observatories, Millikan had ceded the right to appoint the director of the joint observatories to Bush, probably because he assumed that Hubble was such an obvious choice that Bush had no options. But Millikan hadn’t checked first with the astronomers and physicists. Hubble was not popular among his colleagues. They found him pompous, arrogant, self-centered, and narrow in his perspectives toward astronomy. His wartime assignment to the Aberdeen Ballistics Lab, far away from the other astronomers who stayed in Southern California, was welcomed by many.

The harsh opinions of Hubble weren’t strictly personal. Many astronomers did not share Hubble’s enthusiasm for his proposed survey of galactic expansion, which he considered the primary mission for the two-hundred-inch telescope. In the years before the war, astrophysicists had begun exploring stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis, the processes and stages by which stars transform themselves. Hubble’s interest had been purely cosmological; he had sought evidence for a geometry of space. A new generation of astronomers and astrophysicists wanted to go beyond his goals, to explore the sequences of stars within globular clusters and galaxies and thence to understand the entire evolution of the universe. The key to unlocking those secrets would be the superior light-grasp of the two-hundred-inch telescope. If time on the new telescope were monopolized for Hubble’s measurements of red shifts, other avenues of research would be closed or at least hobbled.

Bush had spent enough time around academics to ignore much of the backbiting between astronomers and physicists. The one man whose opinion he trusted was Walter Adams. Adams was a quintessential New Englander: tall, slender, reserved, with a strong Protestant ethic of work and propriety. He worked hard as both an administrator and astronomer and admired those who worked hard and observed the proprieties and manners of the observatory and science. He thought Hubble a bad choice as his successor. Hubble, he explained to Bush, was not interested in administration and did not have a “friendly interest” in other members of the observatory, from the scientific staff to unskilled workmen. Adams’s delicate language did not hide his feelings, and Bush had administered enough science and visited enough observatories to realize that while the position could tolerate a prima donna, the close life of a mountaintop observatory didn’t leave room for a snob.

By midsummer Bush had decided against Hubble. He was confident that Hubble would not leave if not appointed, but to make sure he recommended that a new position of chairman of the Committee on Scientific Programs be established for Hubble, with a salary comparable to that paid the director of the institute.

Bush’s final choice of director was a surprise to many. Turning down other well-known astronomers, he picked Ira Bowen, a spectroscopist
and longtime member of the physics faculty at Caltech. Some astronomers quietly protested. Bowen was a physicist, a student of Robert Millikan. He had done some superb work identifying unknown lines in the spectra of gaseous nebulae—an achievement Walter Adams identified as one of the most brilliant astronomical discoveries of the early twentieth century—but Bowen had done his work on a laboratory spectrograph, not at an observatory.

Still, Bowen was a superb physicist, well respected by colleagues, and free from the posturing and politics of Hubble or Shapley. Though he had spent limited time in observatories and on telescopes, he was an excellent optician, well equipped to supervise the completion of the two-hundred-inch mirror and the other optics for Palomar. The easterners and the Californians at Caltech thought of Bowen as an unmistakable midwesterner. He was serious and often could not understand a joke. He had little sense of fashion, in his dress or manner. For years he wore a hideous necktie made of some synthetic material he claimed was stain-proof, until it literally fell apart; he was apparently unaware of the quiet grins of others when he bragged that the marvelous tie, no matter how many times he wore it, was as good as new. He was penurious with faculty salaries and supplies. When one astronomer needed to use a paper recorder for an experiment, Bowen asked how much paper the experiment would use. The astronomer said, “One thousand feet per week.” Bowen finally approved the experiment, “but only if you use every inch of the paper.” Waggish astronomers would ask, “Do you know the difference between Ike Bowen and a brick wall? If you push long enough on a brick wall you can move it.”

Walter Adams had been an admirer of Bowen’s research, and he eagerly supported the appointment. Adams, at the compulsory retirement age of sixty-five, was no longer officially on the Mount Wilson staff after Bowen’s appointment. Eager not to cramp Bowen’s style, he moved his own office to Hale’s old solar laboratory when Bowen took over.

Not every astronomer welcomed Bowen’s appointment. Hubble tried to put a good face on his disappointment, writing that he welcomed the prospect of research without the responsibilities of administration. “On the other hand,” he reminded Bowen, “the appointment of a physicist as director of the astronomical center of the world will not be welcomed by astronomers if it involves actual control and direction of research…. I will expect to have a free hand … in the field you call cosmology. Some of us have given much thought to the big problems in that field, and have rather definite notions on the methods of attack.”

Hubble was used to a prewar world of astronomy, where the director of an observatory could function as a benevolent dictator on his mountain. The war, the growth of big science, and the complex institutional relationships that were needed for facilities like the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories changed all that. Astronomy, a profession
of gentlemen, had yielded to
astrophysics,
in which thirty was old. As Paul Dirac had once written in an end-of-term sketch:

Age is of course a fever chill

that every physicist must fear.

He’s better dead than living still,

When once he’s past his thirtieth year.

Jesse Greenstein, who would later come to Caltech as the first chairman of the astrophysics department, witnessed the transformation: “The world changed. The characters in the play changed. Instead of the gentlemen, we have as the ideal the brilliant, aggressive young genius interested in everything, careless of whose feet he steps on and very anxious to make the discovery of the week or the year or whatever. It’s a loss, and it’s a gain.”

Twenty years before, Edwin Hubble had been the brilliant aggressive young genius. Now, a younger generation was waiting in the wings. One afternoon late in 1945, a group of astronomers and physicists, including Bowen, Tolman, Baade, and Adams, met at Hale’s solar laboratory to make preliminary plans for the allocation of research time on the two-hundred-inch telescope. They reviewed the work in progress among astronomers at Mount Wilson and at other institutions and concluded that the world’s biggest telescope, and especially the priceless “dark time” when the moon was absent and the telescope could be used for research on faint objects at the limits of the observable universe, was too valuable to be monopolized by Hubble’s “rather definite notions” and methods. Hubble would get some observing time on the telescope, but nothing like the free hand he expected.