First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe by Richard Preston Page A

mangled galaxy appeared. This smear of light had met with an accident. Perhaps a heavy cloud of dark matter had fallen into it, or perhaps it had passed too close to another galaxy. Whatever the cause, a few tens of billions of stars had been sucked out of their normal orbits around the galactic center, thereby curling the galaxy like a bent bicycle wheel. Juan smiled. In all likelihood this galaxy had never been seen by human eyes before and might not be seen again for a long time. He said, “Beautiful, Professor James E. Gunn. You made my night.” He aimed the camera at another galaxy.
Click. Zweee
. “Portrait of an Anonymous Galaxy.”
Zweee
. “Still Life with a Galaxy”; “The Return of the Prodigal Galaxy”; “The Persistence of Galaxies”; “The Starry Night.” A pile of Polaroids accumulated at his control desk. “You can have these,” he said, pushing the pile at me. “I have too many already.”
    The Principal Investigator was less easily satisfied. Maarten Schmidt often went up to the catwalk that encircled the dome. He claimed that he was worried about the weather, but I noticed that the better the weather became, the more often Maarten Schmidt vanished to the catwalk and the longer he stayed there. I asked Jim Gunn what was going on. “Maarten likes to get dark-adapted,” Gunn said, which I understood to be a polite way of saying that Schmidt had a peculiar habit of staring at the stars. When I asked Schmidt about this, his phrased answer was, “I find these trips to the catwalk not a tranquilizer, as it were, but a marvelous contrast to the pressures of the day.” Given the slightestexcuse, he would put on his parka and slip out of the data room. Walking underneath the Hale Telescope, he would cover his flashlight with his fingers, because the dome had to be kept pitch-black or the sensors in 4-shooter would go haywire. He would find a set of stairs, climb them, throw a lever, and open a steel door that led to the catwalk and the night sky. He would switch off his flashlight and stand in the darkness. Then he would walk slowly around the catwalk, traveling “anticlockwise” around the dome, as he described his preferred direction.
    At fifty-five, Maarten Schmidt had reached the age at which prominent scientists can find themselves running their paperwork through a trash compactor in order to fit it in a briefcase. He served on a half dozen advisory boards and flew to conferences all over the world. He liked the catwalk at three in the morning, because, he said, “It is quite pleasant to be able to think about nothing in particular.” He struck many American astronomers as an attractive yet distant and somehow unknowable figure, perhaps like a quasar. He was a familiar figure at conferences, where he seemed to make a passage through a sea of colleagues. He towered above them, distinguished by curly gray hair, a white shirt, and a bow tie—the president of the American Astronomical Society. He was born and educated in the Netherlands. After living for twenty-six years in southern California, he still carried a so-called green card, identifying him as an alien. He retained his Dutch citizenship and voted in Dutch elections. Unlike most astronomers, he dressed up for observing runs. He wore a checked sport coat and a shirt as red as a fire engine, and when he went up to the catwalk, he put on a dapper yellow cashmere scarf. Schmidt had international contacts. “I talk a lot on the telephone—too much,” he said. “These days I find that I am doing all of my office work in the office and all of my science at home. Which is strange.” After he left Caltech in the evening he had a quiet dinner with his wife, Corrie, sitting in their backyard. They saw the dusk settling and watched for the first stars. Strangely enough, the majority of professional astronomers do not know their constellations very well—they find stars by the numbers. But Maarten Schmidt knew his way around the sky. After