Bunch of Amateurs (34 page)

Genet and I struck up a conversation for a moment about encoders. This seemed like an obvious place where a smart thinker could create a great innovation. An encoder solves a basic problem but also creates new ones. If your telescope is fairly heavy and you instruct the motor to turn, then there will be some undesired movement in the system. Like anything, it will wobble as it comes to a standstill. “If you have a really accurate encoder,” Genet explained, “then electronic finesse can make up for mechanical grossness.” He described the current need: an encoder that can figure out precisely which rate of speed to drive the telescope so that when it does slow down, it will
come to rest precisely where it should be. Through several glasses of tea, Genet laid out the basic physics of stiffness and backlash, gear reduction and motor speed. All this real-world messiness, he explained, could be eliminated by some cunning programming at the encoder level.

I was anxious. How have the amateurs been using their bail wire, duct tape, and itchy curiosity to solve this nuanced problem?

“We’re looking at the Heidenhain, one of the largest encoder makers on the planet,” Genet said cheerfully. “They’ve come out with a thirty-three-million-tick-per-revolution encoder for $500. Absolutely amazing.”

So wait. A half afternoon of movement physics, a yellow pad crammed with notes, and a gallon of iced tea, and the answer is: buy it from the largest telescope company in the world? Maybe I hadn’t explained to Genet my purpose for visiting the two-man mobile home park—evidence of an amateur revolution.

For any reporter, there’s a pleasure in delving into a specialty—like telescope making. It’s akin to traveling to a foreign country. The language is weird, the views are uncommon, but the company is always stimulating. The fun typically involves finding some way to carry back from this outpost of human endeavor a sense of the specialist’s zeal and understanding. The hope is to translate some of that into language that a non–telescope maker, even someone with no interest in astronomy, can enjoy as stories.

A little while later, we were talking about direct drive motors. Maybe, here, I thought, I will see the moment of aha!—the lightbulb illuminating overhead. Then, suddenly, Genet described an occasion when one of his collaborators was making this very kind of breakthrough. Most direct-drive motors are composed of magnets set in a circle around a coil of wire—a radial flux motor. One of the original alt-az fiddlers, David Rowe, figured out a way to locate the magnet right on the coil. There was a loss of energy efficiency, but it permitted the motor to respond more accurately.

Closer, I thought. This mild innovation had promise. Had Rowe created a new kind of motor? Would patents be involved? Was it possible for me to understand what the precise mechanics at work here were? And maybe how this innovation came to him, and could we pinpoint just where the imaginative impulse took flight?

Well, um, no. The reality is that this kind of direct-drive motor is not new. (I switched from iced tea to coffee before considering a shift to whiskey.) What Rowe brought to the problem was to turn to an older motor that was easy to come by, if somewhat lousy in energy use.

By late afternoon, I felt hot flashes shooting up my back. Genet and I were walking through some beautiful nearby woods, taking a hike by a nice lake. He began to describe his team, which does meet every year or so but mostly exists in Google groups and Yahoo listservs. His online operation largely involved Genet encouraging other people whose ideas have promise but haven’t come close to paying off. His research process is built around e-mail exchanges with isolated people whose efforts vaguely intersect with his own. A professor in South Carolina named Terry Richardson is a lifelong sky obsessive who has the idea of spinning epoxy glue. The centrifugal force of a viscous liquid creates the parabolic shape needed for a telescope. The idea is to spin the glue in a heated environment and then slowly cool it down so that it hardens in precisely the shape needed. So far, the results have been encouraging but haven’t delivered a decent mirror. Another team member has created a vacuum chamber covered with a thin skin of Mylar. Pull the vacuum in a certain way and the Mylar bows inwardly to create a temporary mirror. Also, cool idea, but not quite workable in terms of actually seeing something.

The innovations are small but steady. Another contributor’s brushless drive improvements were new and had already been adopted by other telescope makers, but still not the Discovery Channel
special—
Amateur Star Trek: To Home Depot and Beyond!
—I was looking for. I left California, as so many do, heartbroken.

Once I returned home, Genet looped me into his e-mail and I experienced the Internet effort up close. There is an unemployed NASA scientist in Florida, named Andrew Arigema, who has been experimenting with different types of glass structures to solve this revolution’s most fundamental problem: A mirror that is, say, fifty inches in diameter will probably weigh more than a thousand pounds and therefore defeat the hope for portable, and probably cheap. Was there some way to create a good mirror that was big and sturdy but didn’t weigh half a ton?

Over the course of months of online chats and more and more nonstop e-mails, Genet focused on a small side team he had created. Arigema would cast mirrors in Florida (by heating them up and shaping them, “slumping” the glass) and ship them to a key member of the group in Oregon, David Davis, who polished them to parabolic perfection and then tested them to see if they captured light well. Essentially, Genet had created, with FedEx’s help, a far-flung testing laboratory.

The e-mail exchanges are often technical and arcane. A dozen e-mails might be devoted to detailed discussions of cutter speeds and feed rates. But then there might surface a very specific solution—could the weight problem be solved by making a very thin mirror out of good glass but then figuring out how to glue some lightweight backing to provide good structure? Even the bonding agent became a lively debate—centering around muffler sealant. Another one turned on mount technologies that relied on the mechanics found in those wall TV swivel units in a motel.

From time to time, in this e-mail ocean of aracana, a thin reed of an idea would bob to the surface and you could feel everybody getting their amateur revolution on. The cheap backing to a thin mirror, it was discovered one day, could be made out of a kind of foam glass
marketed as Earthstone. It was light enough that it could float in water and sturdy enough that Arigema took one of his experimental foam glass mirrors to their annual meeting and proudly dropped it on the floor. It bounced. This particular foam glass is sold as a grill cleaner, but its central ingredient is recycled beer bottles. The Earthstone company is located next to a dump in Arizona and actually uses the landfill’s natural off-gas of methane to power its plant. The idea then is leaning toward making telescopes out of a slumped glass tabletop backed by recycled bottles.

After watching all this happen up close, I realized how little Genet had to do with any innovation. He admits he’s not much of an inventor himself but rather is the guy who, when he first hears about the possibility of, say, recycled beer bottles, calls the CEO and cons him into some “samples” for Arigema. With almost no money to work with, the team relies on Genet’s P. T. Barnum skills to provide free materials and occasional funding.

As the organizer, Genet maintains an unrelentingly cheerful attitude. His e-mails arrive in flurries. There is no beat-down by a participating business type about how “this is not how research is done,” or sour thought about how this might not work out, that isn’t met by his “yup, yup, but what about?” enthusiasm. Genet will pass along a note with his own interstitial comments beaming from inside the text in bright blue or green or yellow fonts, signifying each pass of a commentor. And there are times in the subtle tones of an e-mail—especially one coming from someone who has done real-world R&D—where the reader can sense a participant slightly annoyed with what he or she perceives as the Pollyannaish views of an unsinkable booster like Russ Genet.

This slight agitation with Genet’s can-do-ism prompted a flush of déjà vu for me because one gets this same vibe from people who seem, by and large, fed up with John Dobson. Timothy Ferris’s classic amateur astronomy text,
Seeing in the Dark
, aggressively ignores
Dobson in favor of long interviews with people who are fairly irrelevant—such as a married couple who runs a campground in Arizona where one can bunk for a week in super-dark country. Even in Genet’s e-mail exchange, at one point, Dobson’s name came up and one writer couldn’t resist a little dig about how “it would be too easy to sound like you’re making a hero out of Dobson, and there’s already been enough of that.”

Having spent some time with Dobson, I know how much of a pain he can be. Like anyone who achieves a certain fame in one area, he thinks it permits him to sound off about anything and expect the same acclaim. So Dobson will climb aboard any nearby hobby horse—the structure of the universe is one of his favorites—and he can sound entirely insufferable. He breezily disses the Big Bang and openly mocks Stephen Hawking—all of which marks him in the world of establishment science as a crank.

It’s easy to work up a decent dislike of Dobson, the man. But it’s also true that those who attack him resent his outsized fame (and that monumental adjective, Dobsonian). What one often hears is: Oh, his telescope wasn’t really that much of an innovation. He just figured out a cheap way to grind a lens. Or that he devised a smart box made out of inexpensive plywood and vinyl records that created an ingenious mount, but, really, nothing new, so what? And here’s where it gets interesting: That’s true. If you deconstruct Dobson’s actual achievement, what you have is a clever box, a cheap way to grind a lens, and a streamlined set of instructions that won’t make you insane. Broken down, the great Dobsonian breakthrough looks like a collection of minor and marginal improvements.

It’s not long before I see that Genet’s group is on the same flight path. If Andrew completes his foam glass mirror weighing a few pounds, and the other folks experimenting with lightweight construction devise a super-strong, wind-resistant frame, and if you throw in a cheap motor and an off-the-shelf encoder, you will have something
that can be cobbled together for a few thousand dollars. You will also have a recapitulation of the Dobsonian revolution—and one that doesn’t look at all the ways innovation happens in the
Harvard Business Review
.

Innovation is supposed to happen in one of two ways. There is the Great Galilean Aha!—the instantaneous, practically divine revelation—and the Edisonian Grind, the slow-motion epiphany involving the unending effort of the inventor who lives in the lab struggling through trial and error until he arrives at the answer. Put another way, the two schools of innovation are inspiration and perspiration. In the movies, great leaps forward get depicted as either an inspiring lightbulb moment (“Hey, wait a minute,” says our hero, “what if I mix this with that—why then …”) or images connoting hard work—a series of fast cuts showing our protagonist racing through thousands of versions of his obsession, maybe some calendar pages flapping by.

But amateurs show that there is another path to innovation that doesn’t yet have a movie shorthand—the collaborative, marginal effort that culminates in a Great New Thing. Maybe that’s why Dobson has his intellectual detractors. One won’t find his achievement used as a case study in an airport paperback about entrepreneurial innovation, because Dobson also provided charm and charisma. Dobson traveled the country in his big yellow bus for years. He taught lens-crafting classes, creating an army of amateur astronomers who’ve pushed open the window of our universe one more crack or two. Add to that a lot of small, not so impressive tweaks and you have a thing known as the Dobsonian revolution, not merely a cheap lens or plywood mount.

Genet also wallows in his role as circus barker, the guy who can’t stop e-mailing and introducing people. He is always looking for another, marginal innovation that will continue to add to the cause. He knows that if he can introduce a David Davis to an Andrew Arigema—a union of an Oregon lens grinder and a Florida
slumper—then he may well get his forty-pound, one-meter mirror inside a year. He knows that if he keeps the guys who are devising smart motors in touch with the epoxy glue folks, then maybe something will work out (but probably not, so on to the next e-mail and random chance).

In the time I have known him, Genet has introduced me by e-mail to some two dozen people, hoping that I might get some idea or new thread of inquiry. Almost all of the time, it doesn’t pay off, but Genet is never demoralized. He keeps up with the efforts of his far-strung research team. He scours the Internet looking for new materials and ideas. Then he puts them in front of his people to see if they might fly. Oh, look, here’s some guy making super-lightweight, super-strong foam glass from recycled beer bottles in Arizona. So Russ calls up George Morandin, the CEO of Earthstone. Genet excites him with some all-American patter about redefining the universe and the ultimate act of recycling. “Garbage in, galaxies out,” Genet said to me on the phone one day, a line I suspect George Morandin heard just before agreeing to ship at his own expense a planeload of large foam glass samples to Arigema in Florida.

Amateur R&D has less in common with Archimedes and Galileo or Edison and Jobs than it does with Zeno, the Greek metaphysician whose famous paradox observed that if you walk half the way down a gangplank and then half the remaining distance each time, you never get to the end. This is how Russ’s group proceeds, moving ever closer to the line but perhaps never actually getting there. But often getting closer is close enough.

Unlike a businessman (or Thomas Edison), they aren’t interested in marketability, only workability. With telescopes, you only have to get far enough to see something just a bit better or more focused. One subgroup of Genet’s crew no longer even lusts for a telescope that can focus on an image. They are obsessed with just pulling in as much light as possible so they can analyze it. These folks refer to their cruder version of a telescope as a “lightbucket.”
They literally just want lots of photons from a specific location. Being in focus is not relevant since they want to analyze the light to find out all kinds of things that will elevate their work to, essentially, what the professionals are doing. In other words, what Genet and his crew are proposing now is the contemporary equivalent of old-fashioned—call it nineteenth-century—amateur astronomy. These are individuals who intend to contribute specific findings to the giant pile of professional knowledge. Most of the time when you hear people laud amateur astronomy, they are talking about the amazing contributions that can come from hundreds of people attacking a problem all at once, like the discovery of Green Pea galaxies. But this is different. What Genet is proposing is that those ten thousand people now build a cheap telescope nearly as powerful as those found in universities and then pursue their own individual science projects.