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

is a professor at Princeton University. That evening, he wore a brown cable-knit sweater drilled with one or two moth holes, and greasy blue trousers of the style worn by gas station attendants. The pockets of these trousers had been used to carry objects never meant to be put into pockets, and thus were either ripping out or rotting out along the leg seams. On the floor sat his toolbox. Lettering on it read J. GUNN . It was a Sears Craftsman toolbox. It was crammed with tape, wire, electronic chips, screws, nuts, gimcracks, and many different types of pliers. On the workbench sat a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses, which were padded around the nosepiece with a wad of electrical tape. He said the tape helped his glasses sit more comfortably on his nose.
    The Hale Telescope, and the three other working telescopes at the Palomar Observatory, are owned by the California Institute of Technology—a place better known as Caltech. Caltech is a small private university located in Pasadena, California. Around the basements and laboratories of Caltech, Jim Gunn and his ilk are sometimes referred to as plumbers. They are also known as the Palomar gadgeteers. They are, in fact, professional astronomers who happen to build their own instruments. Gunn was the plumber for a team of astronomers that had been trying to map the edge of the universe. Such an effort required teamwork, and certainly a plumber. The two other members of the team were Maarten Schmidt, who was the team leader, and Donald Schneider, who was Schmidt’s assistant. The team also had the help of various engineers and programmers, including Barbara Zimmerman.
    Gunn was beginning to get frustrated with this job. For three years now the team had been looking for quasars of a certain raretype. They had not yet found any quasars of this type. Quasars were points of light that glittered in the depths of the universe; cosmic lighthouses. The team wanted to find and map the locations of a few of the most distant quasars. They believed that in doing so they could trace the contour of an otherwise hidden shore: the outer limit of the optically explorable universe. For this particular attempt the team had been awarded four nights on the Hale Telescope in March, when the moon would be down and the Milky Way would be lying flat on the horizon, affording a view of deep sky.
    The team had decided to try to doctor the camera on the telescope so that it would scan across the sky, which would speed up the search for quasars. That would be like panning a video camera across a landscape, except that they would pan a telescope across the universe. The Hale Telescope’s camera was an electronic system meant for taking snapshots, not motion pictures. The camera, being full of robotic devices, was controlled by a computer that sat on a floor below the telescope, which needed to be rebuilt for the experiment. The quasar team had hired an engineer named Richard Lucinio to tear down this computer and rewire it. Then, just before the moon waned, Richard Lucinio went to the hospital. In Lucinio’s words, “I had something funky in my stomach, and to this day I don’t know what it was.” Neither did two gastroenterologists, musing over Lucinio’s gut and wondering whether to operate. Meanwhile the computer at the Hale Telescope remained inoperable. The quasar team had been given a chance to use the Hale and they did not want to throw that chance away merely because their computer engineer might be dying. Gunn had no choice but to try to save the experiment with a soldering iron.
    Gunn lives in Princeton, New Jersey. He took a taxi to the Newark airport before sunrise. He flew to Los Angeles. He rented a car and drove to Caltech, where he picked up the J. GUNN toolbox, and then he headed east and south on Interstate 210. When he arrived at the dome of the Hale Telescope, he went inside the dome and lived there for the next three days, until he had built the kludge.
    Gunn turned the kludge over in