Five Billion Years of Solitude (17 page)

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I
n early January of 1848, a fifty-two-year-old master carpenter named James Lick arrived in the small village of San Francisco. He had been born in Pennsylvania but had made his fortune building and selling fine pianos in South America. He hoped to expand that fortune through purchasing cheap land in the new California territories, which he thought would soon be annexed by the United States. Along with his tools and workbench, Lick had brought along an ironclad chest filled with $30,000 in gold. He immediately began buying up vacant lots around town. Seventeen days after Lick’s arrival, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill, the California Gold Rush was set in
motion, and Lick found himself the biggest player in a buyer’s market for San Francisco’s abundant real estate. Soon he was swamped with sales offers, as residents abandoned their coastal harbor homes in droves to seek gold in the inland hills. He bought up all the land he could at cut-rate prices, then netted huge profits as San Francisco’s population exponentially boomed from wave after wave of arriving prospectors. Within a decade he had become one of the new state’s most successful land barons, with vast holdings in San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Jose.

By the time Lick suffered a debilitating stroke late one 1874 evening in the kitchen of his Santa Clara home, he was the richest man in California. He spent his remaining years in convalescence, planning the fate of his fortune for whenever he died. Lick’s first thought was to build giant statues of himself and his parents, so gargantuan they could be viewed from far out at sea. He was dissuaded when he realized their visibility would make the statues prime targets for any future naval bombardment of the coast. For a time he wished to build a pyramid larger than any in Egypt on a large tract of land he owned in San Francisco. Lick changed his mind again, thanks to the persuasiveness of his friend George Davidson, an astronomer and president of the California Academy of Sciences, who convinced Lick that he should instead build the world’s most powerful telescope. Lick ultimately drew up a deed of trust that bequeathed $3 million to various public works throughout the state that had made him so wealthy. Seven hundred thousand dollars went to the University of California to be spent building an astronomical observatory to house “a telescope superior to and more powerful than any telescope yet made.”

A few months before his death in 1876, Lick signed off on his trustees’ choice of Mount Hamilton as the site of the observatory, and told them he wanted to eventually be buried beneath his great telescope. Construction began in 1880, and the 57-foot-long, 36-inch “Great Lick Refractor” achieved first light in 1888. It was enclosed within “the first hot-rivet project west of the Mississippi,” a beautiful neoclassical dome
of green-patinated metal. Lick’s refractor was the world’s most powerful telescope for nearly a decade, and to this day remains the second-largest refracting telescope on Earth. After the 36-inch’s completion, in accordance with his wishes Lick’s remains were disinterred and entombed below the observing floor of his telescope. There, beneath curving beams that resemble a fine piano’s wood-carved hammers, a spotlight shines down through the gloom onto fresh flowers and a brass plaque that reads “Here Lies the Body of James Lick.”

Before the Great Lick Refractor’s completion, Lick’s trustees had inaugurated the observatory by building a small, dome-sheltered 12-inch telescope. On December 6, 1882, the 12-inch was used to observe the transit of Venus, along with another telescope custom-built for the occasion. The astronomer David Peck Todd traveled from Massachusetts solely to use Lick’s equipment to observe the transit, and was fortunate to arrive beneath clear skies. Over the course of four hours, he captured Venus crossing the Sun on 147 chemically treated glass plates, creating the most complete photographic record of a transit prior to the twenty-first century. It would be another 122 years before Venus once again cast its shadow down upon Mount Hamilton.

The sky was gray and ominous above Lick Observatory when I arrived with Laughlin on the afternoon of the appointed day—June 5, 2012. In the intervening years, Mount Hamilton had sprouted about ten more major telescopes, all in white domes sprinkled across the summit. Marcy and Butler’s Automated Planet Finder sat atop a nearby crag, soon to be unleashed upon the sky. Behind it loomed the enormous dome of the 120-inch Shane reflecting telescope, the largest on the mountain and the primary eye on the sky through which Marcy and Butler had discovered most of the first hundred worlds in the early years of the exoplanet boom. The Hamilton spectrometer they had used for their first RV surveys was still in the Shane’s basement, though upon decommissioning it would be moved to the Smithsonian Institution for display and safekeeping as a national treasure. As with all observatories near large urban areas, Lick’s utility had suffered in recent
decades from electric light pollution. Its astronomers lived for nights when Pacific fog rolled in to blanket Silicon Valley below. The coastal city lights would vanish and the stars would shine down like diamonds from a sky as dark as it had ever been in all the eons before. Perched on its peak above the fog, the aging observatory still had life left in it, somewhere between a few years and forever. Another transit of Venus would not occur until December 11, 2117.

Laughlin and I entered the small dome that once held Lick’s first telescope, the 12-inch. The dome now contained the squat, stubby, rust-colored Nickel Telescope, built in 1972. Its 40-inch mirror was larger and more powerful than the lens of the Great Lick Refractor of yore, but still so vastly inadequate compared to the best telescopes of 2012 that it was rarely used for cutting-edge observations. That afternoon, however, it was poised to capture the Venusian transit in a literal new light. Sloane Wiktorowicz, a trim and athletic thirty-year-old UC Berkeley postdoc, had mounted his custom-built instrument, POLISH, on the Nickel for the occasion. He was folded into a chair in the small adjacent control room, monitoring his instrument using three large flat-screen displays. Not every element of the endeavor was high-tech: POLISH was shrouded from ambient light by a black nylon sheet held in place by duct tape and cardboard from a disassembled box of Famous Amos Chocolate Chip cookies. The Nickel’s mirror would have melted beneath the Sun’s concentrated rays, and was mostly shielded by a block of wood. A small hole drilled in the wood and covered with a silver filter let sunlight safely trickle in. Lashed with more duct tape to the telescope’s frame was a sawed-off section of black-painted stovepipe. It extended above the mirror like the barrel of a gun to further minimize any light from within the dome reaching POLISH’s delicate sensors.

POLISH measured polarization, the way that the waves in a beam of light oscillated at perpendicular angles to the light’s direction of travel. Light ordinarily is unpolarized—meaning each photon’s polarization oscillates in a random direction—but when it reflects or scatters
off a surface, or an atmosphere, the light can become polarized, with each photon’s oscillation aligning in the same direction, like iron filings in a magnetic field. The principle is used in polarized sunglasses, which reduce glare by filtering out polarized light reflected off clouds in the sky or the surface of a lake. In astronomy, Wiktorowicz told me, the same effect could be used to enhance the signal of polarized light bouncing off or shining through an exoplanet’s atmosphere. Measure that light’s polarization very carefully and you could get data about clouds, hazes, and atmospheric composition for a planet, even one that was many light-years away. Forty years earlier, Wiktorowicz said, polarization measurements of Venus had provided the first evidence that droplets in its atmosphere weren’t made of water but of sulfuric acid. His task on this day was to observe Venus just as it started its transit, during ingress, when it blocked part of the Sun’s edge and exhibited the strongest polarization signal. Out of the transit’s six-hour duration, Wiktorowicz had a fifteen-minute window at the beginning in which he could make his measurements.

“The idea is to calibrate what we can expect from exoplanet transits,” Wiktorowicz explained. “We’re seeing Venus from up close at a distance of only about a third of an AU, which means its angular size is about three times larger than if we were seeing it from outside the solar system, like you’d see an exoplanet. The interplay between those two scales means that when we look at this transit from Earth, it’s as if we are witnessing one of these hot Neptunes we see in the Kepler data transiting the Sun, in terms of the total amount of starlight that gets blocked and the size of the atmospheric ring. I don’t know if anyone else will be looking at the transit in polarized light. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Twenty minutes before the transit’s beginning, pools of blue were breaking through the cloud banks above Lick, but the weather was still uncertain. Wiktorowicz had bigger problems. The computer in charge of guiding the 40-inch telescope had suddenly gone berserk, sending the telescope, POLISH, and duct-taped improvisations slewing wildly,
perilously close to colliding with the concrete floor, the metal dome, or anyone foolish enough to stand in the way. He couldn’t even point the telescope, let alone take polarization measurements. Pavl Zachary, a scruffy technician wearing Army-standard olive drab, stormed into the small control room, out of breath, a squawking walkie-talkie hanging from his belt. “I was just settling in for the transit with a bag of celery and some cheese puffs,” he said between gasps. “Then I get a call on the radio that Sloane is trying to do science. The nerve of some people! Sloane, are we parked?”

“Supposedly the telescope is parked,” Wiktorowicz replied, looking at the Nickel, which had begun slewing toward the floor, as if to gain a view of Earth’s core, or of Madagascar on the opposite side of the world. The transit of Venus would begin in ten minutes.

Zachary began to do battle with the telescope’s computer, resetting its various components one by one, occasionally clambering up into the dome to watch for results.

“This is bad luck, but it could be worse,” Laughlin joked, trying to lift Wiktorowicz’s flagging spirits. “At least you’re not Le Gentil! You don’t have dysentery, you still have all your possessions. You haven’t been declared legally dead.”

“There is that,” Wiktorowicz said with a mordant chuckle. “I don’t have dysentery and I’m not dead yet. I’m guessing I will be by 2117.”

“It’s bypassed the software limits—that’s kind of scary,” Zachary eventually said. “I’ve never seen anything remotely like this before. Our robotic telescope can’t even find the Sun. We might have to search through the incident reports. It’s times like this I’m glad we do not work at a nuclear power plant.” He scratched his head. “Sloane, are you ready for the really bad news?”

“Sure.”

“The associate director is on the mountain for the transit.”

“Oh. Oh, no.” Wiktorowicz glanced over at me, then explained: “Things tend to go wrong when he’s around. He’s a really nice guy but seems to have bad karma at observatories.”

“Terrible karma,” Zachary chimed in from the dome, his voice muffled by the Nickel’s whirring hydraulics.

Wiktorowicz nervously drummed his fingers on his desk in time with beeps from the Nickel’s motion alarm. He looked at his open netbook nearby, tuned to a NASA video feed from the Keck telescopes in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The picture switched from three commentators bundled against the mountain chill to a telescopic view of the entire Sun, reddened by a filter. A small black arc appeared and slowly grew at the Sun’s edge, like a worm’s bite out of an apple. Ingress had begun. Minutes passed. Muscles worked and writhed along Wiktorowicz’s jaw, and a bead of sweat slid down his temple in the cool air of the control room. Blue sky could be seen through the dome’s open slit, above the aimlessly drifting telescope. The clouds had cleared. He sighed, cursed, produced a turkey sandwich from his bag, and ate it with resignation.

“This seems excessive, even for the associate director,” Wiktorowicz said between bites. “It’s like the telescope just lost its mind. Maybe the ghost of that French guy with dysentery is trying to stick it to us.”

“I think it just drifted into a rough mood and needed to cool off with a random walk,” Zachary said. “Cheer up, Sloane. We’re gonna help it find itself.”

Laughlin and I excused ourselves to go watch the transit from the parking lot beneath the suddenly clear sky. As we left I glanced again at the netbook’s video feed from Mauna Kea. Wiktorowicz was staring dejectedly at the screen, slowly chewing another turkey sandwich. The worm-bite arc had become a perfectly circular bullet hole in the Sun—Venus had slid well within the disk, and its ingress had passed.

We walked out into bright sunlight, seemingly undiminished by Venus’s shadow. I risked a quick, dazzled glance up at the glaring Sun, but it looked as it always does. Cumulus clouds still dotted the sky, and when one every now and then drifted over the Sun, a soft wail would rise up from the gathered crowd, followed later by cheers when an unobstructed view returned. It would be another few hours before the Earth’s rotation carried the Sun and the transit’s conclusion over the
horizon and beyond sight. Wiktorowicz eventually admitted defeat and left the confines of the Nickel dome to join us. Through one of the small telescopes nearby, we took turns gazing at Venus’s imperceptibly creeping black circle and clusters of nearby sunspots. Few words were said. The silence deepened with the acceptance that each gaze brought the experience closer to an end, and that in all our lives we would never see such a sight again. When the Sun had sunk low in the sky and chill winds were rising at the edge of twilight, Laughlin said his goodbyes, and we began the drive back to Santa Cruz.

Weaving down the long, winding road, Laughlin remarked that the transit had surprised him. He had thought it would be more like a total solar eclipse he had witnessed years earlier.

“I was in a boat off Baja, Mexico. It was July, but about ten minutes prior to totality the air started to get noticeably colder, seemingly every second, as the Moon blocked off more and more sunlight. The Sun visibly became a crescent, and the optical effects were overwhelming. Everything seemed to be swimming, the shadows were all distorting into little crescents, and the light was becoming very sharp and angular. I looked up and saw shadow bands flowing overhead as the light shined through convection cells in the upper atmosphere. I looked down and saw the eclipse’s shadow sweeping across the ocean toward me at breathtaking speed. Then the Moon slid into place, and sunlight shining through its mountains and valleys drew a diamond ring in the sky. The Sun’s corona popped out, white and glowing and wavering. I could see the planets all stretched out along the ecliptic—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter. The whole solar system was right in front of my eyes. Orion was directly overhead. Everyone was hooting and hollering and yelling. It was pure primal joy, like that feeling right after a big football touchdown. The eclipse itself lasted something like seven minutes, but it went by in a flash. There was no time for contemplation or anything deep. It was a roller-coaster ride.