The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017

by Hope Jahren

  Almost immediately after these conversations began, Gossan said, she felt emotionally distraught by them, often working on her supernova research at home rather than at the office, and switching her chat settings to “invisible.”

  “It’s not good if a person in power is out of their fucking mind,” Ott wrote to her in December 2014, referring to an issue with another student.

  “Well we are all out of our minds,” Gossan replied.

  “Yeah, but your insanity does not affect other people’s lifes,” he said.

  By Gossan’s third year Ott’s demands on her intensified, she said. “When I said I couldn’t work 80 hours a week, he said I would never make it in academia,” Gossan recalled. “I came to Caltech to do science. He slowly but surely made me feel worthless.”

  In April last year, she said, she realized that her deteriorating relationship with Ott was harming her work and emotional well-being. After a dispute in which Ott said she had “not published anything substantial” enough to speak at a conference commemorating Einstein, Gossan reached her breaking point. Two days later she switched advisers, and about a month after that she filed a complaint with Caltech’s Title IX office, which handles issues of gender equity.

  By that time Kleiser had gotten a new adviser too. But she was still upset about her unexplained firing—she felt like an outcast, she said, uncertain of her place at Caltech or as a scientist. “I went into a several-month-long state of depression where I couldn’t even sit down at my computer and work,” she said. “It made me feel sick.”

  Kleiser said she didn’t find out about Ott’s feelings for her until June 4, when Caltech’s Title IX coordinator called her into her office and presented her with a stack of 86 poems Ott had posted about her on his Tumblr page. (The poems, which BuzzFeed News has reviewed, are no longer online.) The coordinator told Kleiser she could join Gossan’s official complaint.

  The two graduate students knew each other, and that night they met for a drink. Kleiser emailed the Title IX office from the bar. “Add my name. Talked to sarah. I am so mad,” she wrote. “I will do whatever it takes.”

  In a letter sent to Kleiser in September, the university acknowledged that her firing “was prompted by [Ott’s] romantic or sexual feelings for you” and that his behavior “significantly and adversely affected your educational opportunities at Caltech.” A letter sent to Gossan concluded that Ott’s interactions with her “placed an inappropriate and undue burden on you that adversely affected your emotional and physical well-being.”

  In addition to Kleiser and Gossan, seven other students have left Ott’s research group since 2012. All of them spoke with BuzzFeed News. Four said they were fired abruptly. Many said that Ott’s erratic behavior created a hostile and demanding work environment where bullying was the norm.

  Casey Handmer was a grad student in Ott’s group until June 2013, when he was fired partly because Ott didn’t want him to keep his bicycle locked up inside. “Either you accept my rules or you go look for another advisor,” Ott wrote him by email. “Your call!”

  “As his student, did I have an obligation to manage his moods and pussyfoot my way around the extent to which a grown man is unable to control himself?” Handmer told BuzzFeed News. “I hadn’t come to Caltech to join some weird cult where you have to do whatever the leader says.”

  Five other students, including Gossan, quit his group on their own for a variety of reasons, some of which were unrelated to his behavior. Since Ott joined Caltech’s faculty in 2009, just two of his graduate students have completed their degrees.

  “At this point it’s not isolated incidents, it’s a statistic,” a former student who testified in the Ott case told BuzzFeed News. Though she never felt personally harassed, she said she left the research group in part because she found the atmosphere toxic, with Ott often berating and belittling his students.

  “It’s normal to have an ebb and flow, for students to quietly migrate somewhere else, but having nine students [leave] and two graduate is very strange,” Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysics postdoc at Caltech who works in a different research group and testified in the investigation, told BuzzFeed News. “If this was a normal company, there would be no question about his dismissal.”

  The case underscores a common problem in academia: professors, promoted for their research, may be unequipped to advise students.

  “We don’t talk enough about how to talk about, and live within, honorable professional boundaries in the role of professor,” C. K. Gunsalus, director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics, told BuzzFeed News. (Gunsalus was not involved with Ott’s case.) “There isn’t always as much formal preparation for the teaching and advising role as is needed for people.”

  Harrison, the division chair, told BuzzFeed News that Caltech considers the success rate for graduating students when a professor is up for tenure, though she would not speak to how it was weighed in Ott’s case.

  Caltech is planning to offer more mentorship training for junior faculty, Harrison added, and is considering how to get confidential feedback from students about how professors advise them. “We are drawing every lesson we can from what happened.”

  In the first week of January, Kleiser moved to Berkeley to continue her graduate work on supernovae. Caltech did not tell her or Gossan that it would be sending out a university-wide statement about their former adviser and the complaint they played such a big role in.

  “I did not know it would go out, but I am dealing with it fine,” Kleiser wrote in an email. “I just moved out of my apartment an hour ago and am driving up to Berkeley tomorrow, so I am thinking about other stuff. :)”

  Gossan, however, is not feeling as settled. She will stay at Caltech to finish her degree, which she expects to get next year. Ott will be allowed back on campus July 1.

  CHRIS JONES

  The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  Like many astrophysicists, Sara Seager sometimes has a problem with her perception of scale. Knowing that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies and that each might contain hundreds of billions of stars can make the lives of astrophysicists and even those closest to them seem insignificant. Their work can also, paradoxically, bolster their sense of themselves. Believing that you alone might answer the question “Are we alone?” requires considerable ego. Astrophysicists are forever toggling between feelings of bigness and smallness, of hubris and humility, depending on whether they’re looking out or within.

  One perfect blue-sky fall day, Seager boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, on her way to her office at MIT and realized she didn’t have her phone. She couldn’t seem to decide whether this was or wasn’t a big deal. Not having her phone would make the day tricky in some ways, because her sons, 13-year-old Max and 11-year-old Alex, had a soccer game after school, and she would need to coordinate a ride to watch them. She also wanted to be able to find and sit with her best friend, Melissa, who sometimes takes the same train to work. “She’s my best friend, but I know she has other best friends,” Seager said, wanting to make the nature of their relationship clear. She is an admirer of clarity. She also likes absolutes, wide-open spaces, and time to think, but not too much time to think. She took out her laptop to see if she could email Melissa. The train’s Wi-Fi was down. She would have to occupy herself on the commute alone.

  Seager’s office is on the 17th floor of MIT’s Green Building, the tallest building in Cambridge, its roof dotted with meteorological and radar equipment. She is a tenured professor of physics and of planetary science, certified a “genius” by the MacArthur Foundation in 2013. Her area of expertise is the relatively new field of exoplanets: planets that orbit stars other than our sun. More particularly, she wants to find an Earthlike exoplanet—a rocky planet of reasonable mass that orbits its star within a temperate “Goldilocks zone” that is not too hot or too cold, which would allow water to remain liquid—and determine that the
re is life on it. That is as simple as her math gets.

  Her office is spare. There is a set of bookshelves—Optics and Asteroids III and How to Build a Habitable Planet—topped with a row of certificates and honors leaning against a chalkboard covered with equations. In addition to the MacArthur award, which doesn’t come with a certificate but with $625,000, she is proudest of her election to the National Academy of Sciences. Although the line between lunacy and scientific fact is constantly shifting, the search for aliens still occupies the shadows of cranks, and Seager hears from them almost daily, or at least her assistant does. By the standards of her universe, Seager is famous. She is careful about the company she keeps and the words she chooses. She isn’t searching for aliens. She’s searching for exoplanets that show signs of life. She’s searching for a familiar blue dot in the sky.

  That means Seager, who is 45, has given herself a very difficult problem to solve, the problem that has always plagued astronomy, which, at its essence, is the study of light: Light wages war with itself. Light pollutes. Light blinds.

  Seager has a commanding view of downtown Boston from her office window. She can sweep her eyes, hazel and intense, all the way from the gold Capitol dome to Fenway Park. When Seager works at night and the Red Sox are in town, she sometimes has to close her curtains because the ballpark’s white lights are so glaring. And on this morning, after the sun completed its rise, her enviable vista became unbearable. It was searing, and she had to draw her curtains. That’s how light can be the object of her passion and also her enemy. Little lights—exoplanets—are washed out by bigger lights—their stars—the way stars are washed out by our biggest light, the sun. Seager’s challenge is that she has dedicated her life to the search for the smallest lights.

  The vastness of space almost defies conventional measures of distance. Driving the speed limit to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star grouping to the sun, would take 50 million years or so; our fastest current spacecraft would make the trip in a relatively brisk 73,000 years. The next nearest star is six light-years away. To rocket across our galaxy would take about 23,000 times as long as a trip to Alpha Centauri, or 1.7 billion years, and the Milky Way is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. The Hubble Space Telescope once searched a tiny fragment of the night sky, the size of a penny held at arm’s length, that was long thought by astronomers to be dark. It contained 3,000 previously unseen points of light. Not 3,000 new stars—3,000 new galaxies. And in all those galaxies, orbiting around some large percentage of each of their virtually countless stars: planets. Planets like Neptune, planets like Mercury, planets like Earth.

  As late as the 1990s, exoplanets remained a largely theoretical construct. Logic dictated that they must be out there, but proof of their existence remained as out of reach as they were. Some scientists dismissed efforts to find exoplanets as “stamp collecting,” a derogatory term within the community for hunting new, unreachable lights just to name them. (Even among astronomers there can be too much stargazing.) It wasn’t until 1995 that the colossal 51 Pegasi b, the first widely recognized exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star, was found by a pair of Swiss astronomers using a light-analyzing spectrograph. The Swiss didn’t see 51 Pegasi b; no one has. By using a complex mathematical method called radial velocity, they witnessed the planet’s gravitational effect on its star and deduced that it must be there.

  There has been an explosion of knowledge in the relatively short time since, in part because of Seager’s pioneering theoretical work in using light to study the composition of alien atmospheres. When starlight passes through a planet’s atmosphere, certain potentially life-betraying gases, like oxygen, will block particular wavelengths of light. It’s a way of seeing something by looking for what’s not there.

  Light or its absence is also the root of something called the transit technique, a newer, more efficient way than radial velocity of finding exoplanets by looking at their stars. It treats light almost like music, something that can be sensed more accurately than it can be seen. The Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009 and now trailing 75 million miles behind Earth, detects exoplanets when they orbit between their stars and the telescope’s mirrors, making tiny but measurable partial eclipses. A planet the size of Jupiter passing in front of its sun might result in a 1 percent dip in the amount of starlight Kepler receives, a drop that in time reveals itself to be as regular as rhythm, as an orbit. The transit technique has led to a bonanza of finds. In May, NASA announced the validation of 1,284 exoplanets, by far the largest single collection of new worlds yet. There are now 3,414 confirmed exoplanets and an additional 4,696 suspected ones, the count forever increasing.

  Before Kepler, the nature of the transit technique meant that most of those exoplanets were “Hot Jupiters,” giant balls of hydrogen and helium with short orbits, making them scalding, lifeless behemoths. But in April 2014, Kepler found its first Earth-size exoplanet in its star’s habitable zone: Kepler-186f. It’s about 10 percent larger than Earth and orbits on the outer reaches of where the temperature could allow life. No one knows the mass, composition, or density of Kepler-186f, but its discovery remains a revelation. Kepler was searching, somewhat blindly, an impossibly small sliver of space, and it found a potentially habitable world more quickly than anyone might have guessed.

  In August astronomers at the European Southern Observatory announced that they had detected a somewhat similar planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the single star closest to us after the sun. They named it Proxima Centauri b. Studying the data, Seager supported the discovery and agreed that it might boast a life-sustaining—or at least non-life-threatening—surface temperature. There are now nearly 300 confirmed exoplanets or candidates orbiting within the habitable zones of their stars. Extrapolating the math, NASA scientists now believe that there are tens of billions of potentially life-sustaining planets in the Milky Way alone. The odds practically guarantee that a habitable planet is somewhere out there and that someone or something else is too.

  In some ways the search for life is now where the search for exoplanets was 20 years ago: common sense suggests a presence that we can’t confirm. Seager understands that we won’t know they’re out there until we more truly lay eyes on their home and see something that reminds us of ours. Maybe it’s the color blue; maybe it’s clouds; maybe, however many generations from now, it’s the orange electrical grids of alien cities, the black rectangles of their lightless Central Parks. But how could we ever begin to look that far? “Everything brave has to start somewhere,” Seager says.

  The beginning of her next potential breakthrough hangs on the wall opposite the window in her office. It is a two-thirds scale model of a single petal of something called the starshade. She has been a leading proponent of the starshade project, and outside her teaching, it is one of her principal professional concerns.

  Imagine that far-off aliens with our present technology were trying to find us. At best, they would see Jupiter. We would be lost in the sun’s glare. The same is true for our trying to see them. The starshade is a way to block the light from our theoretical twin’s sun, an idea floated in 1962 by Lyman Spitzer, who also laid the groundwork for space telescopes like Hubble. The starshade is a huge shield, about 100 feet across. For practical reasons that have to do with the bending of light but also lend it a certain cosmic beauty, the starshade is shaped exactly like a sunflower. By Seager’s hopeful reckoning, one day the starshade will be rocketed into space and unfurled, working in tandem with a new space telescope like the WFIRST, scheduled to launch in the mid-2020s. When the telescope is aimed at a particular planetary system, lasers will help align the starshade, floating more than 18,000 miles away, between the telescope and the distant star, closing the curtains on it. With the big light extinguished, the little lights, including a potential Earthlike planet and everything it might represent, will become clear. We will see them.

  The trouble is that sometimes the simplest ideas are the most complicated to execute. About once a decade since
Spitzer’s proposal—he could work out the math but not the mechanics—someone else has taken up the cause, advancing the starshade slightly closer to reality before technological or political inertia sets in. Three years ago Seager joined a new, NASA-sponsored study to try to overcome the final practical hurdles; NASA then chose her from among her fellow committee members to lead the effort.

  After those decades of false starts, Seager and her team have already succeeded in making the starshade seem like a real possibility. NASA recognized it as a “technology project,” which is astral-bureaucracy-speak for “this might actually happen.” Today the starshade is a piece of buildable, functional hardware. Seager packs that single petal into a battered black case and wheels it, along with a miniature model of the starshade, into classrooms and conferences and the halls of Congress, trying to find the momentum and hundreds of millions of dollars that allow impossible things to exist.

  “If I want the starshade to succeed, I have to help mastermind it,” Seager says. “The world sees me as the one who will find another Earth.” She has her intelligence, and her credentials, and her audience. She has her focus. But maybe more than anything else, Seager understands in ways few of us do that sometimes you need darkness to see.

  Seager grew up in Toronto, wired in a way all her own. “Ever since I was a child, there was just something about me that wasn’t quite like the others,” she says. “Kids know how to sort through who’s the same and who’s different.” After her parents divorced, her father, Dr. David Seager, achieved a certain fame by becoming one of the world’s leaders in hair transplants. The Seager Hair Transplant Centre still operates and bears his name a decade after his death. David Seager was besotted with his bright daughter and wanted her to become a physician.

  Seager did her best to fit in. Sometimes she did; mostly she didn’t. Eventually she gave up trying. She still talks breathlessly—“without enough modulation,” she has learned by listening to other people talk. She has never had the patience to invest in something like watching TV. “Things just move too slowly,” she says. “It feels like a drag.” She sleeps a lot, but that’s just a concession to her biology; she recognizes that she’s a more efficient machine when she’s rested. But if Seager’s apartness didn’t make her insecure, it also made her feel as though the expectations of others didn’t apply to her. “I loved the stars,” she says. When she was 16, she bought a telescope.