First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

by Richard Preston

  While I held the flashlight, he slid the tweezers into the camera. “Here’s the nut,” he said, holding it up. He plucked the two washers out of the camera. Then he spotted the third and last washer deep inside the circuitry. “What we need,” he said, “is a sticky probe.” He ran down the ladder and returned with a roll of Scotch tape and a length of stiff wire. He wadded a ball of Scotch tape around the end of the wire. That was the sticky probe. Then he pushed the wire down into the camera, trying to snag the washer on the sticky tape ball. “Dammit,” he said. The tape ball had fallen off the wire. Now he had a CCD camera with a washer and a ball of Scotch tape lost inside it. “The sticky probe wasn’t going to work anyway,” he said. “Unfortunately I am going to have to take this board out of here. If you could turn the flashlight this way …” Working deftly with the pliers, he pulled out a circuit board and retrieved the last washer and the ball of Scotch tape. Then: “Damn. I broke the video wire. That was inevitable.”

  Now he had to solder a new video wire. He went downstairs to the electronics shop, where he lit a propane gas heater to warm up the shop, and put on a different pair of Woolworth’s reading spectacles, in order to see the video wire. He held the video wire close to his face and dabbed at the wire with a soldering iron. “You want an instrument so badly,” he remarked, “that finally you have to go and build it yourself.” He turned the wire in his fingers and poked it into a droplet of molten solder.

  Gunn’s hands displayed cuneiform marks left by molten solder that continually rained on them. “Fortunately solder burns aren’t permanent,” he said. His left index finger was slightly crooked and stiff, prone to mild arthritis. His knuckles were large and knobby, but the tendons that controlled everything were as taut as piano wires. His left thumb bore a scar—“the result of an accident, which I do not like to think about, with a wire brush on a power grinder.” The wire brush had shredded the inside part of his thumb down to the bone.

  “I cannot bear to see something not working,” Gunn once said. During cloudy nights on Palomar he had taken apart and fixed cars and trucks. He had torn down and rebuilt a gearbox that drove the dome on the Oscar Mayer Telescope. He had repaired the old Otis elevator in the Hale dome. The department of astronomy at Princeton owned a powerful computer that crashed one day, and not even the manufacturer’s service representatives could figure out what was wrong with it. Gunn started poking around. He pulled out a circuit board packed with chips and soldered in its place a single resistor that had cost around fifty cents. The computer came back to life, apparently no worse for its chipectomy.

  Gunn had built himself a stereo—an awesome kludge. He had begun it as a hi-fi in 1964, and after decades of mutations Gunn’s stereo had almost completely renewed its material substance, just as the human body is said to replace itself every seven years, although Gunn’s stereo still contained a few 1964 amplifier tubes, just as the human body contains teeth. The stereo had fattened into several cubic feet of components, until it didn’t fit well in Gunn’s living room. Gunn had finally had to bury it in a crawl space under the living room floor in order to get it out of the way. During the times when he was off traveling and Jill Knapp, his wife, wanted to hear music, she had to spend ten minutes toggling data switches and plugging and unplugging coaxial cables that led under the floorboards, trying to get sound out of Jim’s stereo, because its wiring diagram mysteriously seemed to change every time he played music on it.

  The fact that he had to build his own scientific instruments frustrated Jim Gunn, because he was a theoretical cosmologist as well as a tinker. He had never been able to settle on a career. He did not know whether he preferred to ponder the nature of the dark matter (quark nuggets? fast-moving cosmic strings? rotted Wimps?) or to fiddle with sticky probes. So he did both. He had written 200 papers, mostly with coauthors, on subjects ranging from the evolution of galaxies to the design of new machines. “Most of the science I’m doing now is highly collaborative,” he said. “Inevitably I play the role of engineer, because inevitably it is my instrument we use, which inevitably needs care and feeding.”

  The world of astronomy held three types of people: observers comfortable with telescopes; theorists comfortable with pencil and paper; and instrument builders comfortable with wires. Mother Nature valued her secrets too highly to let any astronomer run wild in all three fields, but Mother Nature had somehow overlooked Jim Gunn. A writer named Jim Merritt once called Gunn “a kind of triple threat ranging across all three fields,” a line that reverberated among Gunn’s friends, who nicknamed him the Triple Threat.

  Some years ago the following sign appeared on a bulletin board at Caltech:

  GUNN FOR A DAY CONTEST!

  In 500 words or less, write an essay describing why YOU

  want to be Jim Gunn for a day.

  GRAND PRIZE

  For one day, you can be Jim Gunn!!!

  You will be magically enabled to:

  1) Write one paper that is a major theoretical breakthrough.

  2) Design one instrument.

  3) Successfully avoid your graduate students all day.

  Being Jim Gunn for a lifetime brought much excitement but very little peace. “I don’t end up with much time to think about what it all means,” he said.

  The boss of the Wide Field/Planetary Camera project, Jim Westphal, who has worked with Gunn for a decade, once said of Gunn, “Not only does this man do wondrous great science, he helps others do wondrous great science. He is such a kind man that he bails everybody out of their problems. As long as he’s bailing me out, I think that’s wonderful.” Gunn had memorized the cabala of exotic parts. Jill Knapp, his wife, once spent a day designing a unit for a radio telescope, and then showed her design to Jim. “You can buy that for sixty-nine cents,” he said, and gave her an address.

  He had a tendency to drop out of sight once in a while, drawn, perhaps, by the aroma of burning solder drifting from a basement laboratory somewhere. Jill could not always track Jim once he had gone to ground. “I have lost Jim for twenty-four hours at a time,” she said. He spent so much of his life on airplanes that one of his graduate students said of him, “Jim Gunn could be defined as a probability function that peaks over the middle of the United States.” There were widespread doubts that Gunn ever slept. “Yeah, he sleeps,” Jim Westphal said, “but he doesn’t sleep very often.” Concerning his own situation, Gunn once remarked, “I feel incredibly privileged to be able to do something in life that is this much fun.” One of Gunn’s fellow Princeton astronomers, Edwin L. Turner, thought, “In some imaginary sense, astronomy might be better off if Jim Gunn were three people.” So might Jim Gunn, but since the laws of physics limited him to one point in space and time, he had to travel endlessly around North America, somewhat dismayed by the fact that in the ages since the Big Bang, the average spiral galaxy had rotated on its axis at least forty times—had existed for at least forty galactic years—evolving, as it turned around and around, into a hypnotic, heart-pounding wonder, whereas he, as a temporary collection of proteins, would remain intact for what amounted to only ten seconds out of a galactic year—not exactly enough time to figure out what it all means.

  James Edward Gunn, Senior, and his wife, Rhea, had their only child in 1938, in Livingstone, Texas. They named him James Edward Gunn, Junior, and one of the things he had in common with his father was the eyes: brown and mobile. When the boy grew older, those eyes could be by turns piercing or shy. James Gunn, Senior, had a square jaw, a bold forehead with heavy eyebrows, and brown hair (what was left of it). Jim Senior looked a lot like his son does today, except that he was clean-shaven and wore a suit and a felt hat. Jim Senior was very nearsighted and wore rimless spectacles. He loved science, and if it hadn’t been for the Depression, he might have become a college professor; but instead he became a wandering oil prospector. He worked for Gulf Oil Corporation, looking for pools of crude oil with gravity meters. Every year or so, Jim Senior moved with his crew to a new site, taking Rhea
and Jimmy with him.

  Jim Gunn once narrated his childhood to me, in these words: “First half of first grade, Chipley, Florida. Last half, Meridian, Mississippi. The whole of second grade, Bossier City, Louisiana. Third grade and half of fourth, Plainview, Texas. Hum. What. Oh, Christ, I thought I could reel these towns off. The other half of fourth grade seems to have vanished—I don’t know where we were living then. Anyway, when I was in fifth grade, we moved to Camden, Arkansas. Life was a little strange. One of the bad things was that we never stayed anywhere long enough for me to make close friends. I’m rather grateful in a way—most children are affected by cliques and I was not.”

  When they moved, Jim Senior packed his tools into a clamshell trailer and towed it behind the family Ford. “During World War II and just after, running an oil exploration crew was difficult,” Gunn recalled to me. “You had trucks and machines, but you couldn’t get parts. So my dad manufactured his own parts.” Jim Senior had made the trailer too. He shaped it from aircraft aluminum into an ellipsoid with flat sides. The trailer opened along hidden lines—its front and stern cracked apart and lifted up like wings. Shelves dropped down and secret doors unvalved, revealing a drill press, workbench, power hacksaw, band saw, grinder, plane, vise, lathe, electric welder, acetylene torch, and racks of hand tools—a Texas oilman’s Fabergé egg.

  “I got most of my early education from my dad,” Gunn explained, and it was not what was taught in the public schools. “I got my hands dirty with lathes.” Jim Senior rolled up his sleeves when he worked in the aluminum egg alongside his boy, and he taught his son a love of building things with his hands. “My dad,” Gunn said, “was really my buddy.”

  Jim Senior liked to say, “My main excuse for having a boy child is so I can have an electric train.” The two of them created a piece of Virginia, sculpting Appalachian ridges from papier mâché, shot through with tunnels. They built a town and a switchyard, and assembled HO gauge railroad cars from zinc parts. The boy named it the Shenandoah Valley Lines. When Jim Senior moved the family, he and his boy pulled up the towns and piled the mountains into boxes. Like the aluminum egg, the Shenandoah Valley folded for travel.

  When Jim was seven years old, his father gave him a book on astronomy, The Stars for Sam. He read it so fast that Jim Senior gave him another book on astronomy, and he read that one, too, from cover to cover, when he was seven years old. It was a college textbook. After that, with the help of the aluminum egg, Jim Senior helped his son build a small refracting telescope. They made a body from a mailing tube. They took a piece of glass from a pair of spectacles and ground it to fit the tube. The lens was one and a half inches across, the same size as the lens on Galileo’s telescope. The view from Bossier City, Louisiana, wasn’t bad. They saw craters and seas on the moon. When they pointed the mailing tube at Jupiter, they saw a salmon egg in the sky, attended by tiny moons. They pointed it at the mists of the Milky Way, and they saw the Milky Way jump into finely divided stars. Jim Senior consulted his star chart with a flashlight: Okay, you see that bright star. Move a little to the left and down. They saw Orion’s Sword, where stars are catching fire. They searched for the Ring Nebula. The boy believed that he could almost see it—a bubble of gas where, he would learn later, the outer layer of a star had lifted off into space, resulting, perhaps, in the incineration of the star’s solar system.

  Miniature worlds and models fascinated Jimmy Gunn. The Shenandoah Valley was a closed, symmetric universe governed by laws. He also began experimenting with flight. “I started making model airplanes practically at age zero,” he recalled. He worked with kits at first. With exquisite patience he would glue an airframe out of ribs of balsa wood, stretch paper over it, and dope the paper with chemicals to shrink it over the airframe. Then he would bolt an alcohol engine to the plane’s nose. To get the plane aloft, Jimmy and Jim Senior would take it to an open field and wire it to a car battery. Jim Senior would flip the propeller until it caught with a sound like an elf’s chain saw, and let the plane go. The boy held a control line, turning around and around while the plane circled and Jim Senior cheered. He could make it climb or dive by working the line. Sometimes the plane would hit the ground and break up into fragments—weeks of work gone in a burst of splinters.

  Jim Senior was a private man who did not share all of his life with Rhea or his son. He would put his hat on his head and drive off for a few days without telling them where he was going or why. Rhea got hints that he was visiting east Texas, maybe Houston. Jim Senior never talked about it. In the summer of 1949, Jim Senior moved the family to Camden, Arkansas, where he prospected for oil and gas with his gravity meters. Jim started fifth grade in Camden. At Christmas that year, Jim Senior loaded his boy with presents. He gave Jim an Olson 23, one of the best airplane engines that money could buy. He also gave Jim a kit for a reflecting telescope with a four-inch mirror, a beauty. They made plans to build the telescope together. One day in February, Jim came home from school to find an ambulance parked in the driveway beside the aluminum egg. The house was full of people. “An aunt of mine from Shreveport was there, and she whisked me away and told me as gently as she could.” His father had died of a sudden heart attack. Jim Senior may have known or suspected he was dying, which might explain all the magnificent presents he had given his boy that Christmas. And those unexplained trips to east Texas had been to see a heart specialist. His heart had been failing on him, but he hadn’t wanted to tell his wife and son. The ambulance pulled out, bearing the body of Jim Senior.

  As Gunn recalls, “It hit slowly, over the next two years. My dad was a key part of my world, and that world became empty for a while after he was gone. He was not there anymore, and I missed him terribly. I still miss him. In truth I don’t like to think about all this very much, because it is still a very painful thing for me.”

  Rhea moved Jim and herself to Beeville, Texas, a small community in the south coastal flatlands behind Corpus Christi, where her sister lived—a country full of towns with names like Pettus, Refugio, Mineral, Goliad, and Poth. Row crops did poorly in the hard soil, except for some cotton. Cattle and the military did better; Beeville had a naval air station. The town had two main streets and four or five blocks of clapboard houses, which sat on feet made of cinder blocks. Jim and his mother moved into a little white duplex, and she found a job as a clerk in a drugstore. For two years they lived in Beeville, the longest time Jim had stayed anywhere. They were not destitute, since Jim Senior had had some insurance. Rhea told Jim that he could have a room of his own built onto the back of the house. Jim laid out the specifications: many shelves for books and tools, and a workbench. But they had to sell his father’s clamshell trailer workshop, the aluminum egg. “It had deteriorated somewhat,” he remembered, “and I was too young to keep it up. That was one of the great sadnesses.” For the rest of his life Jim Gunn would feel a sense of loss whenever he recalled his father’s aluminum egg. He did not know what had happened to it; probably junked. He figured that if he only had it now, he would park it next to the Hale Telescope. He said, “I could use it right now.”

  There were other ways to fill an empty planet. He designed and built twenty or thirty experimental airplanes in his room at the back of the house. Some lofted into the blue, went out of control, and dived at seventy miles an hour into the ground. Rhea married an Army man, Bill Taylor, and Bill took Rhea and Jimmy to New Boston, Texas, near the Army’s Red River Arsenal in Arkansas, where Bill was stationed.

  At the Red River Arsenal the Army provided a woodworking shop inside a Quonset hut, “to try to keep the soldiers off the bottle,” Gunn now thinks. He asked his stepfather if the two of them might go down to the Quonset hut on weekends and build a telescope. Bill Taylor agreed, because he wanted to be a good father to this boy. Jim then sent away in the mail for a cheap lens the size of a salad plate. He and Bill Taylor built a six-foot tube for the lens, in the Quonset hut, and the soldiers marveled at the two of them, constructing what was apparently the biggest t
elescope in Arkansas. When Jim and Bill let first light into it, they found out that it was also the worst telescope in Arkansas—the mail-order lens was no good. Then the four-inch mirror that his father had given him, that last Christmas, came into Jim’s mind, but the kit did not include a tube. Jim found a rainspout and cut it to the right length and built a second telescope in the Quonset hut. He took it out at night, and he could see colored bands on Jupiter. Then he built a third telescope, a refracting telescope with a three-inch lens, and with it he could see the Ring nebula in Lyra.

  The Army transferred Bill Taylor to Okinawa. Jim and Rhea moved back to the house in Beeville for the time that Bill was stationed overseas, during Jim’s high-school years. Jim sold the Shenandoah Valley railroad model when they moved; it had become troublesome to pack. Today Gunn wanted those trains. He admitted that their disappearance was another of the sadnesses. Back in his room in Beeville, he built furniture. He discovered classical music simultaneously with vacuum tubes and built himself a hi-fi. He also acquired a friend by the name of Bill Davis, and the two of them hit upon a new way to reach for the stars. They sent away in the mail for zinc, sulfur, and potassium perchlorate. They mixed the chemicals and packed them into finned steel tubes, followed by a plug of gunpowder for an igniter. The launch zone was a cow pasture outside Beeville. Most of the rockets flashed and fizzled on the pad, which unnerved the cows, to be sure, but not as much as when a rocket rose a hundred feet into the air and burst in a hail of shrapnel, which terrified the cows.