Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  For now we can’t photograph these exoplanets (at least not well; some very fuzzy dots have been produced by NASA). The way astronomers find them is to set a telescope to monitor a star’s light and plot the data of the light’s intensity on a graph. It looks mostly like a flat line running from left to right. But when the big planet moves in front of the sun, that line (moving from left to right) dips down, plateaus at the bottom of a trough, runs flat for a while (as the planet continues to pass in front of the sun), and then rises back up to its original intensity when the exoplanet moves on with the rest of its orbit. It forms a shape like a cup on a graph with a very flat bottom. For amateur astronomers, confirming the existence of an exoplanet with their own telescopes spitting out a flat-cup graph is a big thrill. Discovering it in the first place and adding an exoplanet to the great list of them is the dream.

  Edwards’s assumption is that if intelligent life elsewhere is roughly as intelligent as us, then they will see that moment of transit, that dip in the graph as an unusual place (the jutting spit of land, the sheer seaside cliff wall) on which to build an interstellar cairn and hoist a flag. So let’s assume there’s a star that’s one hundred light-years away and has intelligent life on an orbiting planet. If those aliens can see our sun, they can figure out when their gas giant transits in front of their sun from our perspective. That’s a brief moment—it differs for each exoplanet—but let’s say it’s five hours long and it happens, oh, once every two years. Edwards argues a life as intelligent as ourselves might pulse a laser flash in an artificial pattern during the transit as a kind of beacon. And he explains how our most intelligent astronomers and theirs would most likely use an H-alpha filter, like “super dark welder’s goggles,” to screen out competing light and reveal the intelligently designed optical signal.

  Those aliens would only fire off their flare when their massive Jupiter-like planet was dimming their star from our perspective. Similarly, if we were trying to signal our location here, we would fire off our laser when our Jupiter was dimming our sun in relation to that one star system. Instead of looking for signals from all stars at all times, we could dramatically limit the search to just these few hours per star.

  “So we have this sweet spot where both parties know not only where to look but when to look,” Edwards said. “I think that’s cool.” If a host of amateurs built Russ Genet–like light buckets, then amateurs could crowd-source the search for beacons the way the Peas Corps scoured millions of galaxies and plucked out certain peculiar examples.

  Professionals “can’t do things that take a long time or risk taking a chance not getting a good payback on their time with the scope,” Edwards said. Often they must be employed on tasks with a high likelihood of success—the kind of projects that win grant proposals. “Amateur astronomers do these kinds of experiments all the time,” Edwards said. “This is their stock in trade: They get to do all the things that the professionals don’t get to do.”

  So far, the SETI program has come up with nothing. The truth is, our increasingly familiar thirteen-billion-light-century-wide backyard is still a very large place. And yet, the SETI folks are said to keep a bottle of champagne in constant refrigeration. Anticipation has already led to the formation of a rather presumptuously titled committee—the “SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup.”

  Their mission? To “prepare, reflect on, manage, advise, and consult in preparation for and upon the discovery of a putative signal of extraterrestrial intelligent (ETI) origin.” They have already written the Declaration of Principles Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

  The general thinking is that such a finding would radically reorient human civilization. Sure. And there is something silly in the SETI protocols, but reading them, one gets the sense that the tone is practically a placeholder for the kind of world-changing effect such a discovery would have. The atheist/theist squabble of today would shift dramatically. The discovery of other life would not end organized religion. Probably nothing could. But the weight of authority would shift dramatically closer to the scientists. Their work, however seemingly fatuous now (Google the “Drake equation”), would be seen as far more predictive than the millennia of clergy who flattered us with claims that we are God’s unique creation.

  That is why the amateurs have gathered, tellingly, at the edges of astronomy. From the massive arguments about atheism, to the technical debates about how to craft a hula hoop–sized mirror, to Edwards’s late-night thoughts on transgalactic communication—the amateurs have come. From our earliest stirrings, we have always thought that maybe some of those blinking stars were distant beings trying to send us a signal, and now it turns out that that piece of scriptural conjecture might have been instinctively correct.

  When Jim Edwards contemplates the night sky, he sees in his mind a bowl of stars whose transit hours are blinking on and off continuously throughout the night—a heaven filled with Gatsby lights, beckoning us for a closer look. Physical contact with others—what are called third-kind encounters—might be only the stuff of movies for now. And even second-kind encounters—back and forth communications—are still far off. But for now Edwards is longing only for an encounter of the first kind, the simple beacon. “Basically, each star is a blinking light and the only thing that you are communicating is that you are there,” he said. “All you are saying is, I am here.”

  7

  THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

  I. Girl, Interrupted

  laude-Anne Kirshen, who would grow up to become one of America’s more innovative scholars, was a beautiful, smart seventeen-year-old in Brussels in 1940. She’d taken the vocational test that would set her on a path to becoming a high school teacher. She had a yellow Citroen car, a handsome boyfriend named René, and a new job just a few doors down from the house of Jacques Brel, the internationally famous songwriter.

  “So that was my outlook at the moment,” she told me one night over dinner. “Final exams were to be in June as always, and I was sure that I had already won the teaching competition and I was sure I would get this job.” Then, a slight hitch.

  “Hitler invaded in May,” she noted. Suddenly young Kirshen felt that every solid thing she knew to be true had become unmoored. “The Nazis took the country in ten minutes.”

  From her balcony, she watched the bombs drop. And then a few metaphorical ones fell. She had taken a long walk with her brother and told him of a Spanish novel she had read. “I said that the Jews, they seemed awful, and he took a breath and said, ‘You know that our grandfather was Jewish.…’ ” Then she learned that both her mother’s parents were Jewish and that the reason her father could not practice law in Romania in those days was because he was Jewish. Overnight, she was a Jew. “It hit me like a bomb, I had to start rethinking everything,” she said. “Who was Jewish? Who was not? One girl, Irene Rosenfeld—she is still alive and living in this country—she said to me, ‘We should be friends, we should stick together,’ and I said, ‘Why?’—She knew.” Claude-Anne’s parents had decided long ago to suppress their religious background and now, as she was about to turn eighteen, she discovered she was precisely the enemy Adolf Hitler intended to pursue and destroy.

  “I was a total innocent and an idiot,” she said. Her boyfriend, she discovered, was “very anti-Semitic.” When she told him that she was Jewish, she was stunned to learn that he knew too. And, “it was the usual story: ‘I hate the Jews, but not in your case.’ ”

  Her brother sent news that he had moved the family’s funds to America and suggested that they flee to France. Claude-Anne’s mother was not merely a Jewish woman somewhat in denial, but insisted upon keeping up with her bridge games in Brussels in the hopes that the life of leisure she once led would return. But pretty quickly the unavoidable became obvious. They loaded up their clothes, an Irish nanny, and their dog, and headed for France. The decision was to go to Bordeaux. A family friend got them as far as the French border, after which a series of cabs got them from one town to the ne
xt. Claude-Anne’s new life as a Jew really began the day she and her mother pulled into a small hotel in France.

  “So we were in France and we went to a hotel,” she said. “The woman saw our luggage, our nanny, my mother and me, and the dog. She asked if we wanted accommodations out back or a choice of rooms and just as we were about to go up, a whole family entered the hotel and the woman’s face changed. The hotel keeper immediately said, ‘We are booked up.’ They pleaded and said they had children and they could stay anywhere, they would stay in the lobby. She said, ‘We are all full.’ They asked if she could call another hotel that might have space. ‘No,’ she said, ‘all the hotels I know are booked up.’ After they left, she turned to us and she said, ‘It’s a good thing that God gave them a nose to be recognized by.’ And that was my first brush with French anti-Semitism and it was really a blow.”

  They were in France for a year, often on the move. In the town of Argenton-sur-Creuse, she took the dog out for a walk one day. She had met an American there, who accompanied her down by the river. “His name was Roode, a Dutch name. And he begins by telling me the schools he went to. I understood that’s how Americans introduced themselves—what schools did you go to? His school was something that sounded like a brothel to me: Groton.

  “So we walked and we got along with his dismal French and my English and, at a certain point, there was a river and a little peasant’s house and a man opens the door and says that there is going to be an attack, a bombing. ‘Come into the house and take shelter,’ and the American said, ‘Those French are hysterical.’ And I thought, ‘How can hysterical apply to a man?’ We took three more steps and the bomb exploded in front of me. The first one had fallen in the water. I had heard a big noise, a big splash. I was about to explain to Roode that you don’t use the word hysterical for a man and then a second bomb exploded. I felt the leash go, a burning in my hand, and the dog ran away. I saw blood on the dog and I slowly sank to the ground. I was bleeding and the American was beside me. It was shrapnel. It had entered my leg under the knee and went out the side. Went right through me. It didn’t fracture any bone. And to this day, I have these two scars on my legs and the exit scar is the worst, like a hole. I used to charge ten cents to see the scars on my knee.”

  The people in the house took her in, but she was bleeding profusely. “Then the door opens and there enters a soldier of the Foreign Legion—tall, blond, and strong. I remember there was a song by Edith Piaf and it went, ‘Il était jeune, il était beau, Mon legionnaire!’ ” She remembered how odd it was that so many of the soldiers in the French Foreign Legion were young Germans. He scooped her up in his arms. When he stopped a motorist to get her to the hospital, the French driver declined, saying he didn’t want any blood in his car. “Then freeing one of his hands, he pulls out his revolver and said in perfect French, ‘Je te fais sauter la cervelle’—I will blow your brains out. They put us in the car—that did it.”

  She wound up lost in a hospital hallway until her mother—accompanied by the dog, who had walked home—got her out of there. They fled to America, where she got a job in New York as a translator, working for the war effort. She eventually met an academic, an Italian professor of the Middle Ages, whose Spanish surname derived from a long-ago suppression of the Jews: Roberto Sabatini Lopez. Soon enough, he got an appointment at Yale University. By the end of the war, they moved to New Haven, where the local professors’ wives explained to her the rest of her life—maintain a nice home and advance her husband’s career. It was that much-earlier time. Feminism was a generation away.

  “I was desperately frustrated. There was nothing to do but be a housewife. And Roberto was paid $3,700 year. It was 1946.

  “Apartments were hard to find because veterans were coming back and they got priority. The guy took us around and said, ‘If you don’t take this one, you are on your own.’ We opened the door, and wallpaper detached and flew onto my face—909 Howard Avenue—and I said, ‘How come this wallpaper is free?’ He said that the owner was in jail because he killed his wife. The man said, ‘Don’t take it if you don’t want, but it is the only apartment.’ ” Soon, she’d bought some paint and struggled to fix up the place.

  “I got a visit from the Yale welcoming committee one day. We didn’t have a telephone and so, all of a sudden, two or three well-dressed women walked up, and the place smelled of cabbage and these elegant ladies said, ‘How are you?’ and we hadn’t even unpacked. I was miserable. I had never painted a wall. I was barefooted when they arrived and the paint had dripped all on me. I was a sight.”

  So, Claude-Anne Lopez, once on track to be a schoolteacher in Brussels, was now an all-American housewife. Her future in 1946 was a kind of prison—one of petits fours, cocktails, and a lot of small talk, in a dump on Howard Avenue, a depressing little street near the New Haven train yards.

  II. The Sound of T. Rex Clapping

  Fraudulence always seems to lie at the heart of amateur pursuits. Maybe you don’t have the right credentials, or background, or something else—other people’s presumptions—keeps you from doing what you want, so you just pretend. It’s a kind of prison break. The culture around you won’t let you out of where you are or into where you want to go. So, you pretend to be someone else, and make your move.

  I first realized how liberating it was to pretend to be something you’re not when I infiltrated a secret weekend convocation of geniuses. Every so often the MacArthur Foundation flies all the previous fellowship winners to an undisclosed location for an unpublicized meeting of talks and socializing. A friend who was a winner from a while back told me about it, and so I figured the best way to go (on a magazine assignment) was to pretend to be one of them.

  As I moved among this crowd at receptions and late-night parties at the Hotel Nikko in Chicago, I was surprised and gratified at how easy it was to pass myself off as a genius. I never did get caught, unless you count getting spotted in the bar one night by an acquaintance, Stanley Crouch (genius, ’93):

  CROUCH: Wait a minute. I don’t think you are a genius.

  ME: Argue with my momma, smarty pants.

  During this long and boozy weekend, I discovered that the group broke into two natural constituencies: those who were highly credentialed and believed they clearly deserved this honor and those self-invented types who felt like they’d had an incredible stroke of luck. For three days, I watched the collision of the institutionally credentialed and the improvisational outsider. It turns out they don’t get along that well, and their differences are conspicuous. The pros had a drink and went to bed; the amateurs stayed up all night and got drunk. Amateurs prefer wonder to certainty, invention to knowledge, freedom to security, beer to wine. The credentialed pros at the MacArthur conclave solemnly accepted their new celebrity as Fellows. The amateurs wore the title “genius” like a funny hat at a New Year’s Eve party.

  The thrill I felt being undercover in the Nikko, I discovered, is a common sensation among amateurs. They feel like frauds, like fakes, like someone might discover that they are not who they pretend to be. Now they were being honored, but once, a while back, they simply assumed a role for which they were never credentialed.

  The paleontologist Jack Horner is one of those. A college dropout, he taught himself an entire discipline, in this case paleontology, and just became one of the country’s greatest dinosaur theorists. He looks like an American rebel. He’s a long drink of water in jeans and a work shirt—a handsome hippie with a Ben Franklin mane. When he talks, he walks—bobbing back and forth in front of the room like a slacker looking for his bong. It’s an ironic tic, since his work is anything but laid back. At the genius convention, he gave a talk one morning about his most radical idea. Horner is the guy who overthrew the single most accepted dinosaur fact in history: that Tyrannosaurus rex was a vicious predator.

  Watching Horner in action, you realize you are seeing something deeply American. He’s part evangelical, part stand-up comic. Horner’s talk was packed with his grou
ndbreaking ideas but carried the dopey title “Would Tyrannosaurus Rex Really Eat a Lawyer?” The room was crowded with other geniuses and their kids. Horner started off by asking if anyone could remember where they saw T. rex eat a lawyer. Of course, all the kids knew.

  “Jurassic Park!” they screamed.

  “How many people think T. rex would eat a lawyer?” he asked. The room became a forest of upraised hands. “I wish you were right,” he said, to uncomfortable laughter. Horner began loping back and forth. He casually shook loose some old assumptions. He brought up Henry Fairfield Osborn, the most famous paleontologist of the early twentieth century. Osborn made it onto the cover of Time magazine. The Museum of Natural History in New York is dedicated to him. He was a man of great repute whose hint at archness was summed up in his rakish fedora, a symbol so potent it survived into our time … on Indiana Jones’s head. Osborn is the quintessential American expert.

  “Now, here was a man who liked himself more than dinosaurs,” Horner said. He was “one of those guys who believed that if he said something, everyone should believe it.” Having softened up his audience’s faith in authority and conventional wisdom, Horner plowed into arguments that were like set pieces of T. rex schtick—ideas with punch lines.

  “What about those cute little hands?” Horner asked. They were useless, and could never do any work for a predator stalking dinner.

  “T. rex couldn’t even clap,” Horner said. An easy laughter took hold of the crowd. Horner explained that T. rex, with his muscular legs, couldn’t sprint—a fatal flaw for a hunter. His body posture, the bones now revealed, was not so much an upright Godzilla on the attack as a horizontal turkey on the lam. Horner duck-walked in front of his lectern, to the delight of the kids. He told us that T. rex’s eyes were beady and weak, also a poor adaptation for a hunter. And yet, said Horner, almost conjuring a lightbulb over each of our heads, T. rex’s massive olfactory cavities in his brain suggested the most exquisite sense of smell in the history of nasal evolution. He would have been able to smell dead flesh some twenty-five miles away.