The Perfect Machine (57 page)

Astrophysics could hardly wait for the telescope. In the years since the project began, remote galaxies, the “island universes” of the Washington debate, and the expansion of the universe had become the focus of much astronomical research. Hubble had finished a book on the nebulae, detailing his morphological scheme for classifying nebulae, the famous tuning-fork diagram that looked as if it demonstrated an evolution of types of galaxies. Hubble’s work got onto the covers of the newsmagazines. His discoveries not only attracted attention to astronomy, astrophysics, and the telescope project but drew students to Caltech, even though Hubble did not accept students.

While Hubble’s observations were great fodder for the magazines, the evidence he and Milton Humason found was disturbing. Hubble’s observations that other nebulae (the term
galaxy
was not used in the Mount Wilson offices until after Hubble died, in 1953) were receding from one another seemed incontrovertible, but the consequences of Hubble’s and Humasons evidence troubled the cosmologists and other critics of the new astronomy.

From the Hubble-Humason evidence, it seemed that the remote galaxies Hubble had photographed and recorded on his spectrographs were all much smaller than the Milky Way. M33 in Trapezium was, from Hubble’s data, one twentieth the size of the Milky Way. Our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, was one fifth the size of the Milky Way. Why? Failing a good reason, the cosmologist likes to believe that the universe is uniform, regular. It was possible that our own galaxy was uniquely large, but the differences in size of the galaxies, without an explanation, were troubling.

Hubble had derived the distance of the Andromeda and Trapezium galaxies from the period of Cepheid stars—the same celestial yardstick Shapley had used for globular clusters. If Hubble’s distance figures were correct, the intrinsic luminosity (absolute magnitude) of the globular clusters he had photographed in the region of the Andromeda nebula were much too faint compared to those he had calibrated in the Milky Way. Cosmologists like to believe that objects of the same type have fairly uniform luminosity, anywhere in the universe. If the globular clusters around Andromeda were the same as those in the Milky Way, Andromeda must be twice as far away as had been thought previously—a scale that didn’t fit Hubble’s measurements. No one had a better scale for the universe, but Hubble’s nonetheless seemed fishy.

Even more disturbing was the apparent contradiction between Hubble’s derived age for the universe and the age geologists had derived for the earth. From the few galaxies for which he had calculated
distances, and from his calculated
rate
of expansion of the universe—the exact number changed, as he and Humason refined their observations—Hubble was able to run the expansion of the universe backward to the beginning, the not-yet-named “big bang,” deriving an age of the universe. It was heady, mind-boggling science, using the red shifts on tiny spectra of distant galaxies to derive a geometry of the universe and then using the distances to the nearest of those galaxies to convert the geometry to a time scale since the Creation. Even if they understood only fragments of what Hubble was doing, journalists loved it.

When Hubble did his calculations, the age he derived for the universe was under 2 billion years. Geologists, working from rock samples with various dating techniques, believed that the earth was closer to 4–5 billion years old, twice as old as Hubble’s universe. Hubble and Humason accumulated more red-shift data, refined their figures for the rate of expansion, rechecked their calculations. No matter what they did, the age they came up with for the universe was
less
than the age geologists had derived for the earth. How, the skeptics asked, could the earth be older than the universe?

A few cosmologists offered theories to explain the contradiction. “After all,” de Sitter wrote, “the ‘universe’ is an hypothesis, like the atom, and must be allowed the freedom to have properties and to do things which would be contradictory and impossible for a finite material structure.” Hubble wanted no part of the sleight-of-hand explanations:

We face a rather serious dilemma. Some there are who stoutly maintain that the earth may well be older than the expansion of the universe. Others suggest that in those crowded, jostling yesterdays, the rhythm of events was faster than the rhythm of the spacious universe today; evolution then proceeded apace, and, into the faint surviving traces, we now misread the evidence of a great antiquity. Our knowledge is too meager to estimate the value of such speculations, but they sound like special pleading, like forced solutions of the difficulty.

Hubble’s answer to the dilemma was more observations, looking ever further into space, cataloguing and measuring the red shifts for more galaxies, until somehow the discrepancies could be resolved. “The next step will be to follow the reconnaissance with a survey—to repeat carefully the explorations with an eye to accuracy and completeness.” With the completion of the two-hundred-inch telescope and the Schmidt camera, which would survey likely areas in preparation for the deep probes by the telescope, the answers would emerge. Hubble planned to map the universe. The new telescope would be his tool.

Hubble wasn’t the only astronomer with plans for the big telescope.

In 1931, the year Hubble met Albert Einstein, Walter Baade arrived at Mount Wilson from Hamburg, bringing not only Schmidt’s idea for the wide-angle deep-space camera, but a remarkable skill at observing with large telescopes. Baade had spent 1926 at the Mount Wilson Observatory as a Rockefeller fellow, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do on the big telescopes. He would leave the discovery of ever-more-distant nebulae to Hubble; he wanted to know more about the nebulae. In photographs, even with the biggest telescopes, the nucleus of even a close nebula like Andromeda was a glowing mass. A few, like the nebula in Draco, gave off a bright line spectrum, as if they were a glowing gas. Others, like Andromeda, emitted what appeared to be a continuous, or “white,” spectrum, as if the nucleus were a glowing liquid or solid, or perhaps a collection of stars packed tightly together. No one had succeeded in resolving the nucleus into individual stars.

Baade was a small, lively man, with a limp in one leg, a reluctance to publish until he was absolutely sure of his material, and a generosity of spirit that stood out in an increasingly competitive field of astronomy. He didn’t like the midnight snacks that the observatory provided, so he brought his own cheese and sausages, which he would share with the night assistants. Baade was a dark-time man, who observed when the moon was down. The light-sky men, those who got time when the moon was up, used their spectroscope gratings to analyze stars. Baade hoped for a lucky black night of clear weather and still skies, the superb seeing that would let him stretch the resolving power of the telescope to an even fainter image. “Those spectroscopists,” he said. “They don’t know how to eat, how to drink, how to love.”

For a few years in the mid-1930s, Baade collaborated with Fritz Zwicky, who was using the eighteen-inch Schmidt camera on Palomar to find supernovas. It seemed a natural partnership: They both had German as a native language (Zwicky, though born in Bulgaria, was Swiss), and they shared an interest in the edges of cosmology, questions like the sequence of evolution of stars that would lead to supernovas and other extraordinary celestial happenings. Their agreement was that when Zwicky found supernovas with the Schmidt camera, Baade would follow up with a study of the light curves with the large telescopes on Mount Wilson. The collaboration worked for a while, and they did some promising work together, including pioneering investigations of the concept of neutron stars. But Zwicky, who got along well with secretaries and night assistants, couldn’t work with a coequal for long. He accused Baade of reneging on his part of the research and stealing credit for Zwicky’s own work. For good measure Zwicky threw in an accusation that Baade was soft on Hitler. Before
long Zwicky’s verbal threats became so intimidating that Walter Baade refused to be alone with his former colleague. Baade later told other astronomers he was physically afraid of Zwicky.

At Mount Wilson Baade was safe from Zwicky. Working as many dark-time nights as he could get telescope time, Baade searched for the secrets of the distant galaxies. Harlow Shapley had argued that the nuclei of the galaxies were only a glowing gas, but in one photograph taken with the sixty-inch telescope in 1920, Baade thought he could almost see individual stars in the nucleus of M33. He and Joel Stebbins, who had pioneered work with photoelectric devices to measure the intensity of light, refined the accuracy of measuring star brightness, and Baade began a long program of observing M31 in Andromeda. He was an extraordinarily careful observer, and before long he had photographs of the outer region of the nucleus that registered star images with the smallest angular diameters yet recorded. Yet, no matter what emulsions, corrector lenses, or tricks he tried on the one-hundred-inch telescope, the resolution of stars in the nucleus of Andromeda eluded him. It was, everyone agreed, a task for a bigger telescope. Baade joined the queue of astronomers eagerly awaiting the two-hundred-inch telescope.

The dream of resolving the nucleus of Andromeda was only the first step of Baade’s ultimate goal. Hubble had searched for the geometry of the universe. Baade wanted to understand stellar evolution. He wanted to break down the populations of stars in the distant galaxies, to document and understand their evolution, and ultimately to be able to age-date the stars and the universe. Elsewhere chemists and nuclear physicists were exploring the complex reactions at the core of stars, the processes of nucleosynthesis that created the energy of the stars and the elements of the universe. Hans Bethe, a physicist, was exploring a theory of stellar energy, showing how almost all the energy generated by the most brilliant stars stems from a fusion reaction in which hydrogen is the fuel and carbon the catalyst. The theoreticians seemed to be outstripping the observers. In the Monastery at Mount Wilson and in the laboratories and seminar rooms at Pasadena, talk about the progress on the two-hundred-inch telescope was daily fare.

The anticipation of the new telescope was much accentuated when Max Mason sent around a memorandum to the astronomers asking their thoughts on the idea of setting up facilities at the new observatory to permit an astronomer to be accompanied by his wife. There had been a long-standing debate on whether the astronomers’ residence at Mount Wilson was called the Monastery because of three early astronomers who had worked there: Monk, Abbot, and St. John; or because of George Hale’s rules that the accommodations remain strictly bachelor quarters. The newly married Harlow Shapley had put up with the then-difficult commute from Pasadena instead of accepting free accommodations in the Monastery, and astronomers making
long runs on the telescopes had routinely griped about the too aptly named Monastery.

Fritz Zwicky, taking advantage of the lack of rules at Palomar, had taken his wife for his runs on the “little” Schmidt camera and said he thought it had been a good idea. Walter Baade, agreeing for a change with Zwicky, urged breaking “occasionally from the tyrranic
[sic]
rule of the monastery…. For individuals like myself it would be a decided improvement over the present system as being practiced on Mount Wilson.” Not everyone agreed. Milton Humason, who had put in his time on the mountain as a mule driver and staff worker before he began observing, noted that if wives were there, observers would not make maximum use of the telescopes. He and Walter Adams opposed having more than one cottage available for use by an astronomer bringing his wife. No one raised the question of facilities for unmarried women, or a woman observer bringing her husband for an observing run. Women observers were still virtually unknown at Mount Wilson.
^*

Mason decided to provide one cottage for observers, along with the residence facility. The name “Monastery,” brought over from Mount Wilson, stuck even before Russell Porter had finished his designs for the building or the site, nestled in a wooded grove at some distance from the big dome, was chosen. The residence was solidly built, with metal studs, metal lath, and plaster walls. George Hale put in his voice on the furnishings, urging that the simplest furniture would be the most appropriate. “On Mount Wilson we never used window drapes, though rolling window shades are necessary.”

The original design called for a copper roof, but the redheaded woodpeckers on the mountain found the copper inviting, punched holes to store their acorns, and later returned to harvest insect larvae from the acorns. The result was leaks in the roof, which ultimately had to be replaced with composite shingles. The woodpeckers also dropped acorns down the toilet vent pipes, so that the waste pipes were soon clogged with oak roots.

The eighteen-inch Schmidt telescope, a few hundred yards down the slope from where the dome for the two-hundred was going up, was the only working telescope at Palomar, but astronomers from Mount Wilson and other observatories visited, marveling at the size of the new dome and the caissons that would support the mounting of the
telescope. They had talked about the Big One for years, studied the drawings, discussed myriad details. Seeing the dome going up, visiting a site crawling with workmen, and the reality of a residence for astronomers, increased the anticipation.

Palomar was still a wild, undeveloped spot. The climb up the mountain was difficult, and the dome site at the top, with the trees and shrubs cleared, created a barren plateau. But under the night sky, far from city lights, it was hard not to feel the closeness to the cosmos.

In 1937 Byron Hill went on a camping vacation, and Mark Serrurier was asked to temporarily take over the supervisor’s task at the top of the mountain. While he was there he asked a woman he had been dating, Naomi, to visit him for a weekend. Serrurier waited until a dark night, when the carpet of stars was spread overhead, to ask Naomi to marry him. She felt so overwhelmed by the sky, the stars, and the power of the place that she deferred an answer until the next day. It wasn’t until she was halfway down the mountain that Naomi felt far enough away from the magic of the peak to say yes.