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

dinner he would work on his quasars far into the night, and then he would watch television; later he would sometimesdream of the Big Eye, although he could never remember what happened in these dreams.
    When he and Corrie had first been married, they had lived a casual existence, staying up until three in the morning and getting up late. Then they had had three daughters. Their daughters, Maarten explained, “didn’t allow us to continue that way.” Now that their daughters had grown up, Maarten and Corrie liked to take off for a little resort in the Anza-Borrego Desert, where they could sit outdoors in lounge chairs under a palm tree and look at the stars. They would pass a pair of binoculars back and forth, in order to discuss the excellence of a particular constellation. They had found a kind of peace watching things happen at night in the desert—jackrabbits running past, bats flipping after moths, meteors razoring the sky. They talked a bit or were quiet. Maarten particularly enjoyed the desolate yips of coyotes, a sound he had never known growing up in Holland. They noted the comings and goings of planets, and the galaxy wheeling overhead, until dawn caught them by surprise.
    Maarten Schmidt grew up during the Second World War in the city of Groningen, in the north of Holland, where his father was a civil servant in the city government. He did not do well at sports (except at the high jump); he was the sort of kid who would rather look at stars. Groningen was blacked out during most of the war, and Maarten was thirteen years old when he first began to notice unnaturally brilliant stars hanging over his lightless city. They attracted him. His grandfather give him a thick magnifying lens and an eyepiece. Maarten taped the lens to a cardboard toilet-paper tube and put the eyepiece into the other end of the tube. He took the invention to the third floor of his house and looked out the window. He found a double star in Lyra. He explored the sky. Then the sirens would start up. Waves of Allied bombers passed over Groningen almost every night on their way to Hamburg and Bremen, and a tremendous roar of their engines shook the city. Sometimes the German antiaircraft batteries that ringed the city started shooting like mad, trying to hit the bombers, searchlights stabbing everywhere. Allied fighters would strafe the German batteries, or the bombers would loose their bombs into Groningen. One night a bomb fell in the street near their house. They huddledunder the stairs until two in the morning, when the “all-clear” sirens sounded, and then they tried to get a little sleep.
    Maarten’s discovery in 1963, that quasars are brilliant and remote, had pushed him into fame, something he had not looked for and at times had resisted. Schmidt’s quasars burned like beacons across unimaginable reaches of night. People would ask him if he had invented the Schmidt telescope. (“No—that was old Bernhard Schmidt. No relation. He was drunk most of the time, so he must have been brilliant in between.”) His face appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine in 1967, when, after several years of photographing quasars alone in the prime focus cage of the Hale Telescope, he had smashed open the universe, had driven the limits of the Hale Telescope into territory beyond anything its builders had imagined, identifying quasars at greater and greater leaps, plunging into lookback time.
    He lingered on the catwalk. So much about quasars remained unfathomable. In twenty-two years he had not found more than partial answers to his questions about their birth and death. In an interview with an historian of science named Spencer Weart, he once said that in his mind’s eye he imagined science as a cloth being knotted together by many hands, in the manner of the anonymous Flemish weavers of old, who had worked side by side on benches. Corrie was a weaver. She had hung the inside of their house with large tubes and wheels of knotted cloth in muted