First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe Read Online Free PDF

The purpose of the glass is to prevent human bodies from flooding the dome with warm air, which would warp the mirror, throwing the stars out of focus. Warm air would also ripple out through the viewing slit of the dome at night, thereby causing the stars to twinkle. Astronomers hate twinkling stars, because twinkling throws the stars out of focus. Fortunately the glass wall also prevents visitors from hearing profanity, which is a type of noise that can be heard often enough coming from the cage at the butt of the Hale Telescope.
    “Sun’s going down right on schedule,” Schneider remarked.
    Gunn laughed an edgy laugh.
    They finished splicing wires from the kludge into 4-shooter. Pushing his toe around the floor of the cage, Gunn found a roll of transparent packing tape, the kind that is reinforced with threads of nylon. Palomar Glue. Gunn cut a piece of tape with his knife and taped the kludge firmly to the side of his camera. “Palomar Glue,” he said, “is what holds this place together.”

    In the data room next to the telescope, Maarten Schmidt sat hunched over an oak desk, in a pool of light thrown from a lamp. He was the senior astronomer on the experiment. The Principal Investigator. The boss. “You see James in a controlled panic,” he explained to me. “That is not unusual.” Schmidt was a reserved man, gangly and tall. During his lifetime he had spent around five hundred nights on the Big Eye. He described his role in this experiment as much like that of the manager of a baseball team. His star pitcher—Gunn—appeared to be in trouble. All afternoon Gunn had been rushing around, saying, “Don’t worry, Maarten, we’re almost ready.” Maarten had begun to wonder if he might have to cancel the experiment that night and use the Hale Telescope for some other purpose. That might delay the search for quasars by six months, a year, who could tell? Schmidt had become used to delays. He had been searching for quasars for twenty-two years.
    Jim Gunn and Don Schneider walked into the data room. Maarten Schmidt said to them, “I think we had better get to dinner.” He added to Gunn, “Are you coming with us, James?”
    “Yes, in a minute.” Gunn crossed the room and sat down at a computer terminal beside Barbara Zimmerman. She was frantically writing computer code that she hoped would operate Gunn’s kludge.
    Maarten Schmidt and Don Schneider took the elevator to the ground floor and emerged from the dome into afternoon sunlight. They followed a trail among cedar trees and withered ferns dotted with old snow. They avoided mentioning quasars. Maarten said to Don, “You never saw my mark-zero flashlight, did you? It dated from 1950. It was an Eveready. Now it seems I have lost it.” A rooster crowed in the distance.
    They descended into a hollow where the Monastery stands, a building where the astronomers visiting Palomar Mountain take their meals and sleep during the day. The Monastery has stucco walls and a gabled roof, and it resembles a summer resort gone a little to seed. Schmidt and Schneider sat down at the single long table in the dining room. Several other astronomers, who were working on other telescopes at the observatory, had already arrived. There was a pile of steaks on the table. Astronomers generally require a massive dinner, because the cold in the unheated domes can grow so bad at night that the only bulwark between the astronomer and hypothermia might be a couple of rib-eye steaks inside the astronomer’s belly and a bag of Oreos in his hand. The astronomers talked quietly, over a clink of china.
    “We’re trying to get 4-shooter to read out at a controllable rate,” Don Schneider said.
    “At what rate?” asked an astronomer.
    “One hundred and forty million bytes per hour,” Schneider said.
    “That’s incredible,” the astronomer said.
    “We should fill twelve tapes a night with data,” Schneider added.

    At the end of the table sat a woman and a man who listened but did