Note to my readers: This is also cross-posted on The SkepticBlog, the blog of The Skeptologists.
I want to indulge myself for a moment and follow up on what Ryan wrote about our shoot at Mt. Wilson.
When we shot The Skeptologists, I had never been to Mt. Wilson before. I’ve been to a few observatories, including some small ones affiliated with Universities, Mt. Stromlo in Australia, and the IAC facilities on La Palma in the Canary Islands.
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These are all fantastic places to visit, but they’re relatively new. Mt. Wilson has been around for a long, long time, and even better, we filmed in the dome of the Hooker 100″ telescope. When I found that out, I was ecstatic! This was the very telescope used by Edwin Hubble when he was investigating the nature of what they used to call simply "nebulae", what we now call galaxies.
When we got there, I was not disappointed. The ‘scope is magnificent! I love the brute force steelworks of it, the criss-crossing braces, the sky-blue paint. The control board was very retro (duh), and had an almost steampunk feel to it.
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But the best part was when we went down into the pit, the bottom of the dome where we could stand under the magnificent ‘scope. I was peering around, and when I was underneath it I happened to look up. My eyes caught a flash of green, and I realized I was seeing the 100″ mirror itself. It was supported by a maze of steel, but gaps in the bracing and random bits of machinery and metal left a clear view of the glass.
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I had an odd moment, thinking of the photons that hit that glass a century ago. They had traveled millions of light years through space before being reflected by that mirror. The galaxies observed by Hubble had emitted countless fleets of them, more photons than there are stars in the sky. The vast majority flew off into open space, and still ply their way between galaxies. But a tiny fraction of those made it to Earth. Some were absorbed by our atmosphere, and some few of those were aimed right down the telescope’s gullet. A fraction of those were absorbed by the mirror itself as well as the other mirrors used by the telescope to focus the light.
Out of the countless octillions of photons that started their journey, only a few made it into Hubble’s detectors. And from those scant particles of light, he and his fellow astronomer (Slipher, Hale, and others) discovered the Universe itself is expanding.
I stood there thinking of all that, and I couldn’t help it. I reached up and touched the back of the mirror. I laughed at myself a little; a skeptic connecting with a chunk of glass. I didn’t feel any vibrations, no sense of Hubble’s energy, no rapport with the history.
And yet… we’re still apes, we humans. We can see something, hear it, taste it; but it’s our fingers that relay so much of the sense of what’s around us. Nothing New Agey or superstitious, just a simian need to fulfill the part of the brain that desires the tactile sensation of connection.
But still. Touching that glass put me there. That part of my brain firing up gave me the extra dimension of sense, the understanding, the knowing, and (yes) the feeling the history of the place. And there is history at Mt. Wilson; our grand explorations of the cosmos took a major leap there. When I reached out my hand, that’s what I was experiencing, if only vicariously.
I remember it better now than I would have otherwise. I can still picture it all, can remember how it felt, and my sense of awe remains unabated.
It was, simply, cool.
And even a skeptic responds to that.
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:36 am
Given that you once lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m surprised that you hadn’t made the trek up to the
grave marker of James LickJames Lick Observatory on the top of Mount Hamilton. You’d have had a chance to see an even older telescope up there.December 3rd, 2008 at 8:40 am
Your write-up reminded me of the pre-human ape touching the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey!
About 12 years ago I went to the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, and I just had to touch the limo in which JFK was assassinated (totally against museum rules of course). Talk about touching history!
Nice post. I wish I could see a telescope like that someday.
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:45 am
Boston Globe’s Big Picture Blog is running a Hubble Advent Calendar.
It’s great so far!
You haven’t mentioned it, so I thought I would share it here.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:00 am
Hax Or – yes he did: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/12/01/hubbles-advent-on-the-big-picture/
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:02 am
Minor correction – ESO has no facilities on La Palma. It operates Chilean facilities. European countries have telescopes on La Palma of course, but they’re not part of ESO.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:03 am
I hope you saw the story on Hale that was on the Discovery(?) channel a few weeks ago. He made it all possible.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:07 am
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: It’s a boyhood fantasy… I must have seen this ship hundreds of times in the Smithsonian but I was never able to touch it.
Lieutenant Commander Data: Sir, does tactile contact alter your perception of the Phoenix?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Oh, yes! For humans, touch can connect you to an object in a very personal way, make it seem more real.
[Data also puts his hand on The Phoenix]
Lieutenant Commander Data: I am detecting imperfections in the titanium casing… temperature variations in the fuel manifold… it is no more “real” to me now than it was a moment ago.
Cmdr. Deanna Troi: [observing from a catwalk] Would you three like to be alone?
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:08 am
A book recommendation for you and BABloggers: “No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory 1915-1935″, apparently still available here: http://museumjt.stores.yahoo.net/noonemayevha.html
AS the blurb states, it’s “a collection of extraordinary letters written to the observers at Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935 by people from all walks of life and the world over expressing their idiosyncratic understandings of the universe.” Idiosyncratic is putting it mildly! The book is an absolute delight.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:13 am
Those old observatories are pretty cool. I hope we can preserve them for future generations. I’ve been to the Yerkes in Lake Geneva. It has the world’s largest refracting telescope. Was a leader in its observations back in the day.
Now it looks like it might be preserved, but they were close to shutting it down and converting it into- of course, condos.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:21 am
This is also cross-posted on The SkepticBlog, the blog of The Skeptologists.
Beautiful description Dr. Plait. That feeling you are talking about I feel all the time when really contemplating science and how far these rather hairless simians have come. I just wish that we could project that sense physically to those who seek to fill their lives with woo and whatnot. I’ll make sure to point folks to this entry.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:24 am
Hax Or, Actually he did!
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:27 am
Blake: ROTFLMAO
That was great.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:35 am
Oops! I fixed it; the ESO has been changed to the IAC.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:38 am
Way to go phil you probably knocked that thing right out of alignment! hehe.
I totally agree with the amazement at wich I find in the contrast between where we were and where we are now. I am just humbled and amazed at where we are now, compared to our hirsuite simian cousins. They looked up at the same sky that we do but boy are our brains thinking different things…
I wish I could travel to hundreds of years in the future when we have efficent and regular space travel! I feel i’ve been born too early!!
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:41 am
[...] Hubble
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:43 am
Chris, in regards to your last two sentences (“I wish I could travel to hundreds of years in the future when we have efficent and regular space travel! I feel i’ve been born too early!!”) I’ve always felt the same way. However, I realize I wouldn’t be content in any era I grew up in. If I was born three hundred years from now, when we will (hopefully) routinely be traveling and colonizing Mars and moons of Saturn or whatever, I’d be disappointed that I was born too early to witness interstellar travel.
Feeling you were born in the wrong era is a natural thing but there are a lot of people who lived in the past that wished they could live in the era you and I do today!
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:53 am
as for TOUCHING. I know how you feel. When the Shackleton exhibit came to New York city… well I had to go see it. It was a pretty quite day at the tail end of the tour. I couldn’t resist. I HAD to reach over and touch the boat he sailed from Elephant Island to South Georgia island. Broke every rule, but I still remember the feel of it. For some reaon, I had to touch it. I’m still glad I did (and no one caught me).
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:54 am
I would say my first time at Yerkes was similar…seeing the over 100 year old 40 inch refractor…and getting to look through it! Standing there wtih goose bumps looking at the Hercules Cluster (the first object I got to observe with it) is a strong memory.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:15 am
Phil – I noticed you mentioned the green glass, but not why it is green. I toured Mt Wilson back in the early 90s while at JPL for a Chautauqua on Cassini. The blank was apparently made up of recycled wine bottles – thus the green color!
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:28 am
Living in central Arizona, I can take a three-hour drive south to visit Kitt Peak, or a three-hour drive north to visit Lowell Observatory.
Even though it’s far older, Lowell is much the cooler trip, for a couple of historical reasons:
First, it was founded by Percival Lowell, the main proponent (and maybe original proponent, although I don’t remember for sure) of the ‘canals on Mars’ hypothesis.
Second, Lowell Observatory was the site where Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet formerly known as Pluto. Sadly, that scope is not open for tours, but you can walk around the outside of the dome, where there’s a plaque commemorating the discovery of Pluto.
And BA, I visited the observatory last summer and got a photo of Bad Astronomy next to that plaque, but all I had was my cell phone camera and it didn’t turn out well. At all. Next time I go, I’ll bring my real camera and see if I can do any better.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:32 am
Your post immediately made me think of the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where the proto-human is first touching the “pillar” that has appeared outside its den. It is the transmittance of “enlightenment”, I suppose.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:42 am
where Clyde Tombaugh discovered
the planet formerly known as Pluto.…the Pluto formerly known as planet.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:47 am
billsmithaz,
There’s a third: Lowell is also where VM Slipher made his first spectrograms of nebulae, which indicated immediately that they, as a class of objects, had a tendency to be receding from us. This was a major discovery all by itself; Hubble’s big step was to discover Cepheids in M31, allowing for a standard distance/redshift to be established.
Once when I was doing research at Lowell, I was allowed to hold some of VM’s glass spectrograms and contemplate their role in history. You’re right: Lowell is, in its historical way, cooler than Kitt Peak.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 am
…As for touching. At one time I worked for a satellite manufacturer. The first time I ever stood in front of a satellite under construction I was overcome with a desire to touch it because it was something that would go up into space. (Carefully looking around..then just reaching out with a finger and touching its side. I found out later it was OK). Later on I found I wasn’t the only one. Nearly everyone I knew had the same reaction the first time they encountered something that would go into space.
I also have similar feelings when visiting any significant historical monument or place.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:11 am
I love old, solid pieces of technology. That control panel is beautiful. It reminds me of the TARDIS console in Sarah Jane’s last season. But man, Hubble must have had a big head, ’cause those eyepieces must be more than a foot apart!
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I had visited Mt Wilson on a Friday and all I could do is a self-guided tour and could only see the 100″ from behind the glass (pictures were bad) and I couldn’t see any of the other telescopes. I was VERY disappointed. We were going to then go to Palomar but I didn’t want to be disappointed again so we just decided to go to Meteor Crater instead. Which was cool.
I would like to go on a weekend but if the tour is the same as what I saw then I will pass.
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Phil,
I get the same feeling when my Dad lets me hold one of his NASA artifacts — especially the flighted souvenirs he was given through his years there. Mystical, no, powerful, yes.
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:13 pm
I haven’t been to Mt Wilson, but I have had the opportunity to tour inside the Palomar scope. You can’t see the mirror, but can you get an up close view of the controls and steel framework. We “rode” the upper level all the way around as it rotated – smooth as glass after 50 years. It was a lucky coincidence that we ran into the right person at the right time.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:13 pm
“Touching that glass put me there. That part of my brain firing up gave me the extra dimension of sense, the understanding, the knowing, and (yes) the feeling the history of the place.”
In your place, I’d have touched the glass too (as would the other posters here it seems). In 2000 I visited the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. There I had a chance to see dinosaur fossils still embedded in the strata. I was unable to resist reaching out and touching the leg bone of some long gone giant, and in doing that my mind was transported to a different time and world. I stood there with my eyes closed for over a minute imagining…and it gave me goosebumps. Powerful experience indeed.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Oh yay, you’ve also been to La Palma!
I was there at the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) a couple of years ago (professors at my institute often encourage students to join them for observing time) for two nights of miserable seeing but great fun. It was cool to see how a practical astronomer actually works!
December 3rd, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Phil:
Is that pretty blue the original color of the scope? I ask because they’re trying to find out the original color of the Clark 26″ refractor at UVa, and are planning to repaint it that color to restore it to its 1880′s appearance. It’s a bit of a detective story! I’ll miss the nice royal blue it has now for sure, but I wonder what color these old scopes were painted when they were new.
Rich
December 3rd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Heck, I got goosebumps just *reading* the part where you touched the mirror. I’ve been to Mt Wilson a couple of times. I like to sometimes look at this webcam and think about all the cool stuff that was discovered at that place…
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/towercam.htm
December 3rd, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Lowell was amazing – it was pretty much the entire reason I went up to Flagstaff last February. The expanding universe was discovered there! Actually being able to touch the Clark telescope was just… cool.
(Plus, as we came out of the Dome, it started snowing. My first snowfall!)
December 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm
“But still. Touching that glass put me there. That part of my brain firing up gave me the extra dimension of sense, the understanding, the knowing”
As Diana Troy once said in a similar situation: “Would you three like to be alone?”
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:37 pm
A hasty rhyme-
I touched a meteorite once, in a museum
I thought, Wow, this is big and weird, gee, um
To the touch it was cold
And it felt very old
Learning they fly makes want to so see em
Because there are so many touch receptors in our fingertips it makes sense that by touching something we might expect to be more closely connected to it. Even to the extent of leaving something behind or taking something away. Silly idea. But comforting and connecting. Silly idea though.
I just looked over at a photo of my two grandsons and winked at them, causing me to wonder if there is a connection between the touch and the wink.
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Hey, I grew up living 200 feet from the 24″ refractor that Percival Lowell used to, uh, well, to map the veins in his eyes. But it’s still a cool telescope. I’d love to see one of the big old ones.
Oh, and touching? Yeah, I know what you mean. It was all I could do to not touch Endeavour when I got a tour. But somehow I thought it best not to mess with it. And I hope the link doesn’t get me all moderated and stuff.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Johnny,
I guy I used to work with was once called to NASA on an engineering issue. While at the VAB he was invited up into the service scaffolds of the space shuttle Challenger. His host encouraged him to go ahead and touch the tiles with his bare hands, which he did with some enthusiasm. The Challenger was at that time being prepped for its last flight. He touched the shuttle, and it blew up. Coincidence? YOU DECIDE.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Naomi:
You should come east to Charlottesville, Va sometime and touch that 26″ Clark at UVa that I referred to above. One of my favorite things to do is point it by hand at Jupiter or Saturn and set it up. The tactile experience is priceless. It just doesn’t compare to today’s go-to scopes. Very satisfying. If you’re an astronomer you can contact us at CAS and maybe we can even arrange a personal tour.
The telescope is open to the public on the 1st & 3rd Fridays of each month for “Public Night” observing. On the 2nd & 4th Fridays we at CAS operate the scope for “Group Night” where Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, school groups and such can observe through the scope.
We do a PowerPoint presentation in the attached classroom and the kids can touch a fragment of the Barringer Meteor Crater meteorite. If it’s clear the dome is opened up and we observer what targets of opportunity present themselves. If it’s cloudy the scope itself is rather extremely cool.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Oh yeah, by the way, at tonight’s CAS meeting at McCormick Observatory one of the door prizes that I handed out was a copy of “Death From The Skies”. I gave one away last month too.
Our speaker was Dr. Mark Whittle (Phil, he sends his fond regards!) who explained that the WMAP image of the CMB (which is is basically a microscopic (you read that right: MICROscopic) view of the universe’s quantum state graininess (at the beginning of the inflationary period) when it was the size of a bacterium! So the 27 Billion Light Year wide CMB (13.5 billion LY to the left & 13.5 billion LY to the right = 27 billion LY diameter) is an imprint of a bacterium sized universe!
And all us BA Blogees where right there, melted into pure energy and stuff…
Dr. Whittle got a long ovation at the end of his talk.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:57 pm
I think I over parenthesized that comment…
Oh well…
December 4th, 2008 at 6:39 am
Fantastic account, Phil — thank you. I’m also an astronomer and while at a DPS conference in Pasadena a few years ago, I just had to sneak away and make a pilgrimage up to Mt. Wilson. I’ve been working on HST for 18 years, so it was a profoundly satisfying experience for me to walk around the spot where Edwin Hubble, our namesake, changed the world.
I have also visited the even-older Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and I’ve been involved in their educational outreach efforts. It is another inspiring place to visit, and I encourage you to make that trek if you haven’t already.
I think you would be as mortified as me (and many other astronomers) if any of these cultural icons were ever bulldozed or otherwise made inaccessible. I wonder if Yerkes, Lick, Mt. Wilson, and other historic observatories could form an educational outreach consortium that would help ensure each others future (rather than each of them fending off developers, etc, for themselves)?
December 4th, 2008 at 7:32 am
One problem that observatories have encountered, Max, is with the National Register of Historic Places. You’d think that getting on the Register would do the trick, but they prevent modifications of the telescope, like, say, putting a spectrometer on the scope, or upgrading the tailpiece. Clearly not in the observatory’s best interests.
If such an EPO Consortium could be founded (I hereby nominate you & Phil to the advisory board) perhaps such an august (september?) organization could inveigh on the Register’s sensibilities to allow observatories to be on the list without being hamstrung…
December 4th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
On my first ever trip to the US I had the best part of a day to kill to try and avoid jet lag… so what to do – drive up Mt Wilson. That winding road was an interesting experience for one not used to driving on the wrong side of the road, especially after just getting off a long flight. Worth it though, the sense of coolness was much as you describe – thanks for the words.