Bunch of Amateurs (32 page)

There was the moon’s surface up close. The craters were scattered atop a smooth, dusty plateau, creating a landscape that, at this level of intimacy, seemed familiar—reminiscent of a time-lapse photo of the aftermath of a drop splashing in a bowl of milk. I could imagine myself walking on that moon dust, the notoriously powdery regolith that makes the surface feel like a treeless prairie after a dust storm.

I could hear Dobson and Garth almost laughing at my cries of joy, the pleasure of good “seeing.” I was reminded that at the Sistine Chapel, there are guards whose job entails quieting the crowds’ groans because often in the inevitable crescendo, this ambient sound becomes increasingly obscene. But the sounds in Rome are people observing man-made beauty and art, experiencing awe.

We don’t really have a good vocabulary for what was happening when I peered closely at those craters, which is the precise opposite of the Sistine sensation, the inverse of wonder. What’s happening inside the tiny space of that eyepiece is understanding, a kind of knowing, a bite of the apple. The mysterious object in the night sky becomes instantly intimate. You can familiarize yourself with the place. Walk around it a bit. Get to know it. Imagine yourself running the dusty plains or leaping into a milk-drop crater. These are not so much groans of wonder as yips of orientation.

Ah, I see where I am now.

When I pulled back, Dobson spun the telescope toward Saturn. We talked a bit about the Cassini Division, the black line that’s sometimes visible there. Dobson focused the telescope, as he has tens of thousands of times.

“Here,” he said, in one of his rare koan-free moments, “I want you to see this.” It didn’t take much time at all, and it was the precise effect Dobson has been arranging on street corners for decades. In a few seconds, I was leaping across the Cassini line, a line as wide as the continental United States. It was an incredible sensation: Saturn was no longer a planet, but a place.

If you had one million pictures of one million galaxies and you wanted to organize them in folders by type, how would you go about it? If you spent fifteen minutes on each image—trying to decide what kind of galaxy it was, spiral or elliptical, and whether it contained any notable irregularities and novelties—then, given an eight-hour workday with no vacation time, it would take an average lifetime and then some—eighty-six years. So you think, maybe, I’ll hire a staff. But even with a crew of ten, nine years seems a long time for such grueling, mind-numbing work.

What would really work a lot better? A staff of 230,000.

In the late ’00s, when scientists set up a website called Galaxy Zoo and invited amateur astronomers from all over the world to sign in and classify images, that is what happened.

Communities formed around some of these efforts. One of them created a fellowship around a couple of peculiar galaxies that were pretty small and oddly colored, like little emeralds in the distant sky. They became known playfully as the Green Peas. The amateurs who spotted them in the images called themselves the Peas Corps and their
online thread where they discussed their observations was slugged, “Give peas a chance.”

In time, they realized that they had found something new. In the grade-school textbooks, for the longest time, galaxies came in two classical types, spiral and elliptical. But the old sober idiom is giving way to new terms as discoveries increasingly familiarize us with a universe that now has newer and more names: irregular, ring, ventricular, starburst, and now, the Peas Corps has contributed its own goofball name, as so often happens in a profession distinguished by amateurism. “Green Pea galaxy” is now the term of art used to describe an intense kelly green star factory that has one-one-thousandth the mass of our Milky Way but is pumping out ten stars for our every one.

The dark sky has always been every culture’s final frontier and its first palimpsest. Professional astronomers may consider themselves the primary authors of it, but every culture writes and rewrites all over it, thinking, theorizing, seeing, dreaming. The metaphors have changed radically. The universe is such a different place now from the languid Kubrickian void of the previous generation. That serene expanse of totally cool collegiate space that might be a speck under the fingernail of a giant is, today, a much more knowable, mapable, named, and landmarked cosmic jungle. We now live in a wild and violent place where normal stars are occasionally consumed by stellar zombies; where a cosmic drive-by can cause “resident stripping,” furiously yanking the guts from a dwarf galaxy, resulting in a billion-mile slough of stellar litter; where a patch of darkness might suddenly reveal the wreckage of a “vampire star”; where entire galaxies of four hundred billion stars can collide with another of comparable size in a “galactic smashup” or where dozens of them can pile up because a monstrous “cannibal galaxy” appears driven to consume its neighbors; where our own Milky Way is now known to be on a 300,000-miles-per-hour collision course with our
neighbor galaxy Andromeda, which will result in a new galaxy already nicknamed—Milkomeda—that will unavoidably come into existence in about four billion years.

All of this violence happens in a universe of incomparable extremes—one that is, when resting, just under 3°K and, at its most violent, churns temperatures of 100,000,000°K. The current general theory of the universe literally holds that 96 percent of all material stuff—dark matter and dark energy—cannot refract light, so it’s invisible. Dark matter is there but we cannot see it. Of all the matter in the universe, the remaining 4 percent is called baryonic matter because the baryon is the heavy bit in an atomic nucleus and is considered (this week) basic to the construction of all visible matter. These intermittent flecks of visible stuff bunch up—a process known ponderously as “baryonic acoustic oscillation.” Whatever forms those clumpings eventually take—stars, planets, rocky asteroids and comets, gassy nebulae, our bodies—the sum total of it all is still, essentially, only 4 percent of the matter in the universe, the only visible stuff out there, and all of it is composed of space lint.

The universe, then, as we see it, is but a few shards of exploding flotsam and collapsing jetsam bobbing along in a vast and expanding ocean of ghostly motes. Occasionally amid the violent jets of plasma and colliding galaxies and rogue black holes, a spurt of stellar dust will gather in the tug of a medium star and for hundreds of millions of years begin to clump together into little dust bunnies until these smack together into “planetary embryos” and then condense into planets, which cool as tiny greenhouses nursing elements other than the universe’s tedious streams of hydrogen.

We think of the earth or our gas giants such as Jupiter as the only models for what a planet might look like, for obvious reasons, but recent discoveries suggest that exoplanets might be dominated by different elements, so that on distant planets we might find plateaus marked by lakes of methane, or oceans of ammonia, or rainstorms that extrude droplets of molten rock.

But perhaps as rarely, a planet might form around the dominance of carbon, and there, in an isolated tiny fold at the edge of a spur off a spiral arm of a galaxy, the necessary insulation of improbable distances and statistically arcane geographies might cool the entire system to a temperature somewhat on the more habitable side of 100,000,000°K. In that wan blemish of the time-space continuum, earthlike conditions form and then, equally unlikely, give rise to life and then, perhaps extremely less likely, conscious life. Some have examined these stunning odds and concluded that the purpose of the universe is not merely to rarely burp up a fleck of life, but that intelligent life is destined to dominate the universe. This theory is known as the Anthropic Principle—this idea that the purpose of the universe is to birth life like us and permit us to be fruitful and multiply. This theory has its dissidents, among them Martin Gardner, who before his death argued that the universe is not plagued by intentions and purpose. Gardner gave his idea a scientific name, the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle, the acronym for which the audience would figure out on their way out the door.

Every day, it seems, the universe is revealed to be a new place, with novel fields of study, such as “celestial mechanics,” and new forms of hypothetical energy: “quintessence.” Recently astronomers collected dust grains pelting our upper atmosphere probably from a star called “Beta Pictoris” some sixty light-years away and which may be the source of the origin of life here—jibing with the old but still surreal theory of panspermia. This dust is not to be confused with an even more exquisite dust called “Ultra Primitive Material”—a trail of which we happened to pass through in 2003, alleged to be the original dust that became our solar system and was preserved, bound up in cometary ice. And this is not to be confused with pre-solar grains—even older, dustier dust. When the clergyman says that “of dust we are made and to dust we shall return,” he has little idea just how cosmically true it is. His language is metaphorical, grand, even sentimental, but the world that is
rapidly coming into focus is not. Dust to dust, only the blip in between is the universe.

The heroic story we all hear in high school about Galileo is that he was the guy who proved the Copernican notion that the earth was not the fixed center of the universe. The other part of the lore is the cautionary tale. The Inquisition put him on trial because he discussed these proofs in a book entitled
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
. Four cacophonous centuries later, those two world-views are still bickering.

In the end, Galileo was ordered to back off his view that the earth was not motionless and the fixed center of the universe. Which he did; wearing the white robes of a penitent, he asserted that the earth did not move. When the members of the Inquisition left his chambers for the last time, it is said Galileo hissed, “
Eppur si muove
” (“And yet it moves”).

Despite the confession, Galileo confirmed the Copernican Revolution, shifting us out of a geocentric universe and into a heliocentric one. With his proof, he legitimized one more mechanical explanation of the world. Once again, the conventional thinking provided by mystical authority (the Church) or traditional wisdom (Ptolemy and Aristotle) was grudgingly set aside, and Galileo became one of the iconic names of those who inaugurated the Renaissance. Not bad, for a monk.

But there is also the gritty vernacular version of the story that might not be as heroic, but reveals the long history of improvisational
astronomy. Galileo mastered the telescope not so much to jump-start the Enlightenment but to make some fast money. He was a monk, and, like any respectable celibate of that time, he also had three illegitimate children and was desperate to provide for them.

He jumped on the idea of telescope-building when he first heard of the devices coming out of the Netherlands. Those items had a magnification power of 3X. (The plastic spyglasses that are now included free with any Halloween pirate costume are more powerful.) The concept was quite simple. In a long tube that we would still recognize as a telescope, the far end would hold a convex piece of glass. The idea had grown out of the fiddling lots of people had been doing with lenses.

In the late 1200s, a new killer app from Italy had entered the popular culture—reading glasses. They had replaced the “reading stone,” a magnifier placed directly onto a manuscript. The new idea was to put the magnifier directly onto one’s face—at first a radical, awkward, and unlikely notion. Soon, a new class of entrepreneur—spectacle-mongers (an actual phrase, once upon a time)—mastered the technique of shaping glass into smaller, manageable, and vaguely familiar shapes. (The word “lens” comes from the word “lentils.”) The new invention had widespread repercussions. By restoring the precise vision of adults around the presbyopian age of forty, eyeglasses are responsible for adding another span of productivity and creativity to the natural human career. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that eyeglasses were responsible for the Renaissance and gin up one of those books like
The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World
; or
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
; or
Tulipmania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused
. Call it:
Eyeglasses: How Spectacles Saw a New World and Brought Forth the Enlightenment
.