by Mark Bowen
Things seemed to be at an impasse.
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The subtext to this little drama was that it was just one front in the ferocious political maneuvering that had commenced when it began to look as though IceCube might become a reality. This brought up even stronger emotions than the prospect of a discovery. Most of the Europeans wanted to delay the transition, realizing that since the lion’s share of the funding would come from the National Science Foundation, a U.S. institution was bound to lead it. They feared that they might be marginalized.
The only two institutions that stood a realistic chance of taking the lead were Berkeley and Madison, and on the face of things Berkeley had the upper hand. For large physics projects aren’t usually managed by universities, they’re managed by national laboratories, and the Berkeley campus ran its own laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley, in its own backyard.
A year or two earlier, when NSF had solicited proposals for a second round of Science and Technology Centers, a program manager in the physics division named Gene Loh had encouraged Buford Price to fashion a center around AMANDA and IceCube. (Loh, an alumnus of Kenneth Greisen’s Fly’s Eye experiment in Utah, had more or less founded NSF’s particle astrophysics program.) The idea was right up Buford’s alley, since he loves big interdisciplinary ideas, and he remembers this as one of the more exciting and stimulating periods of his life. By early 1998, he had come up with a vision named DeepIce, which would combine research in astrophysics, through AMANDA and IceCube; paleoclimatology and geology, through ice cores and glacial seismology; and even microbiology: there was great interest at the time in looking for unusual life forms in the subglacial lakes under the Antarctic ice sheets, and the drilling of ice cores could provide access to them. The center would be administered by Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) would play a large role, and IceCube would be the largest program in it. This was not necessarily a power grab by Buford—there was even talk of Francis moving to Berkeley and becoming principal investigator—but it was in the interest of his university and LBL, and he received much, shall we say, encouragement, especially from his LBL colleagues.
At about the same time, separate from DeepIce, LBL officially joined AMANDA. This brought in two heavyweights in addition to Dave Nygren, who was already contributing with his digital optical module: William “Willi” Chinowsky, an experienced particle physicist who had worked as an NSF administrator for a time, and George Smoot, who was reasonably well-known to the public—and notorious among physicists—for his participation in the Cosmic Background Explorer experiment (COBE), a satellite-based instrument that had made the most important advance in the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation since Penzias and Wilson had accidentally discovered it in 1965.
In the early nineties, COBE (as in Kobe Bryant), had demonstrated that the microwave background was not uniform across the sky, it rippled. And since it is believed to be a remnant of the Big Bang, the ripples were interpreted as being primordial fluctuations in the structure of the newborn universe, which had evolved, as the universe expanded and cooled, into stars, solar systems, galaxies, galactic clusters, super clusters, and so on. This was a huge idea, and Smoot made world headlines by breaking the rules of his collaboration and stepping into the limelight to claim the discovery as his own. At one point he told a gaggle of reporters that looking at COBE’s map of the ripples was like “looking at God.” The outrageous politicking he did in order to claim his place in the sun earned him enormous resentment within his collaboration. There was even talk of lawsuits.
The LBL group joined AMANDA with their eyes directed at IceCube and in the firm belief that Nygren’s digital optical module was the only viable technology for the larger instrument. Smoot managed to obtain a $300,000 grant to develop the DOM, and in October 1998, a month before Albrecht, Ty, and Gary presented AMANDA’s first gold-plated events in Madison, the Lab held a workshop that resulted in a decision to deploy one entirely digital string in AMANDA during the 1999–2000 season.
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Meanwhile, the potentates at NSF were becoming increasingly serious about IceCube. We can be sure that Francis was keeping them primed with every new discovery in the AMANDA-B10 data, but they also had larger considerations in mind.
Near the beginning of 1997, the foundation had convened an external panel chaired by Norman Augustine, a former Undersecretary of the Army who was now chairman and chief executive officer of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, to evaluate the entire U.S. Antarctic Program. In the report they produced in April of that year, the panel had stressed the geopolitical importance of the “U.S. presence in Antarctica, particularly at the South Pole” and suggested that “this consideration, in itself, justifies a year-round presence at several locations, including a moderate-sized facility at the Pole.…
“National prestige is involved in participation in activity in Antarctica, particularly at the South Pole, much as there is in involvement in the space program.…
“Antarctica today is a continent generally characterized by peaceful, environmentally friendly, human activity. High among the reasons for this situation is the role played by the U.S. over many years in helping create a system of treaties and international agreements governing the nature of human conduct on the continent. The presence of the U.S. in Antarctica is a key element of the continued stability of the region.”
The Antarctic Treaty had been created during the International Geophysical Year, a grand international research effort that took place at the height of the Cold War, in 1957 and 1958. It focused on the exploration of Antarctica, the upper atmosphere, and outer space. Sputnik was launched under its auspices. When the treaty came into force in 1961, it became the first arms control agreement of the Cold War.
Originally signed by the twelve countries that had a significant presence on the continent (there are now fifty-three treaty-states), the treaty turned Antarctica into an international peace, research, and conservation park. It prohibits any nation from establishing a military presence there, and it neither recognizes nor disputes the territorial claims, some of which overlap, that have been made by seven different nations. (Argentina once sent a woman who was seven months pregnant to its Antarctic base, hoping to buttress its territorial claim with the argument that an Argentine had been born there. Their archrival, Chile, then went one better by arranging for a Chilean child to be both conceived and born in Antarctica.) The stations on the continent are to be used for peaceful purposes, mainly scientific, and while they tend to be run by individual nations, all treaty-states have free access to every station.
The territorial claims, which are postponed as long as the treaty remains in effect, divide the continent into pie slices, with the center of the pie at the South Pole. The U.S. Amundsen-Scott Research Station is thus located at a strategic point.
At the AMANDA collaboration meeting at UC Irvine that I was barred from attending, a grad student from Stockholm named Patrik Ekström told me something interesting about the airstrip at the station: at one end, it ran in a circle around the marker for the geographic South Pole. Every time a U.S. plane landed or took off, he told me, it taxied around the circle, thereby treading on every territorial claim except Norway’s. To Patrik, who was not a U.S. citizen, the planes seemed to be saying, “This place may not be ours, but it’s not yours either.”
The Augustine Panel’s principal conclusion about the entire U.S. presence in Antarctica was that South Pole Station needed to be replaced “for economic, safety, and operational reasons.” The following winter, Congress and the Clinton administration approved funding to the tune of $128 million, and construction began during the 1998–99 summer season. The new station would be completed ten years later, at a final cost of $174 million.
Although science was seen as a secondary objective of the U.S. Antarctic Program, the fact was that most of the people who worked on the continent saw it as their mission either to do science or support it, and considering its middle name, it was diff
icult for the National Science Foundation to justify an expenditure of more than $100 million simply for “presence.” Thus the foundation needed a big project at Pole, and an international project would fit U.S. objectives particularly well. Under the “International Cooperation” subheading of their terse list of recommendations, the Augustine Panel singled out AMANDA specifically, noting that it was not only the largest science project at Pole, it was also the most international. Since IceCube stood to be much larger and more international, it fit the bill even better.
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These considerations were undoubtedly in the minds of the NSF managers in the spring of 1999, when, on short notice, they invited the principal investigators of AMANDA to a meeting at a hotel near the foundation’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to take place on Monday, May 10, and made clear that its purpose was to discuss IceCube in practical terms.
About a week before the meeting, George Smoot did an end run around the rest of the PIs and secretly sent a white paper directly to Gene Loh. If it was anything like the proposals he later showed to the collaboration in the open, it would have made himself principal investigator and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory the lead institution, and paid scant heed to European participation. Loh must have shared it with Francis or Buford, for on the Friday before the meeting, all of the original PIs got together and disinvited Smoot and Chinowsky.
Nevertheless, the meeting was a turning point. John Bahcall traveled down from Princeton to give an overview of the scientific possibilities: “I rarely give up time from talking about solar neutrinos, so the fact that I’m talking about high-energy neutrinos shows how excited I am about them.” Francis presented the latest results, sweetened with his unquenchable optimism. Several institutions besides LBL that had either joined or petitioned to join IceCube sent representatives to demonstrate their support. (According to Francis, they’d been waiting in the wings to see if it would work. “You just watch,” he told me. “Now, they’ll be beating down the doors.”) Christian Spiering reviewed the water-based efforts in Europe, and he and Per Olof must have been somewhat mollified to see how much the Americans planned to include them. Buford and Francis were wise enough to realize that this had to be an international effort, because in point of fact, good science always is. There had been some question as to whether Steve Barwick would show, as he had a double teaching load that semester, but he did in the end, and he was given the job of talking about logistics and budgets.
At that point Francis was still holding out hope that Steve would be able to assume the enormous responsibility of becoming project manager of IceCube, the technical and managerial lead responsible for getting the instrument built. Steve certainly had the technical chops. Unfortunately, however, he demonstrated once again that day his limitations in other areas. As was frequently the case, he froze the night before the meeting, and it was unclear until the last minute whether he would actually give his talk. Bob Morse had to hunker down with him in his hotel room to work on it, and the two walked into the meeting room several minutes late. Steve gave a stiff but competent presentation.
Despite the shenanigans in the background, the managers were impressed. They had seen internecine warfare before. The following afternoon, they held what was ostensibly a closed meeting with Buford, Bob, and Francis—into which Willi Chinowsky, George Smoot, and Doug Lowder marched unannounced. (Willi must have pulled some strings with his former colleagues at the foundation.)
And so, as they looked into the eyes of a fractured collaboration, the NSF managers officially embraced IceCube: they solicited a proposal due the following November first.
At that point no one knew exactly how much a kilometer-scale instrument might cost, but it was clear that it would be in the hundreds of millions, and this was far too much to be financed in the usual way. The managers explained that they wanted to fund the project through a special NSF-wide account dedicated to large infrastructure projects, known as the Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction account, or MREFC. This mechanism appealed to the managers in specific subject areas, such as Dennis Peacock in Polar Programs and Gene Loh in Physics, as it would remove a large number from their individual budgets. It had the disadvantage, on the other hand, of making the project highly visible. It would actually appear as a line item in the budget that the foundation would present to Congress every year, so it could become a political football—as indeed it would.
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Take it all around, of course, this was an excellent development, although it also added to the workload. At that point in that hectic year, the principal investigators were beginning to sag under the load. As he sat in the hotel bar on Monday evening, after they had made their presentations, even the indefatigable Christian complained of being overworked. And I have never seen Francis so agitated. He said that if the meeting hadn’t been imminent Smoot might very well have been kicked out of the collaboration.
They were bouncing like pinballs all over Europe and the United States. They’d held a collaboration meeting in Berkeley the previous month; they’d hold another in Uppsala the next. After much hand-wringing, Christian was nearly ready to submit the journal article presenting the up-going events they had discovered with AMANDA-B4. (He sent it to Astroparticle Physics a week later, and in the relieved e-mail he sent out in order to share this signal moment with the rest of the collaboration, this unreligious man included a cross fashioned from x’s.) They were planning to deliver a dozen or so papers at the International Cosmic Ray Conference in Salt Lake City in August. They were readying the many tons of hardware and mobilizing the manpower for the upcoming season at Pole, which looked to be their most challenging yet. And now they had a major proposal to write.
On Tuesday afternoon, as the meeting in Arlington came to a close, Gene Loh gave them a “non-negotiable” deadline of June 1, three weeks hence, for the first step in the proposal process: a letter of intent. Francis sent out an e-mail before he left town, suggesting who should be responsible for the different sections. As an example of his ability to let bygones be bygones, not only did he include George Smoot, he even suggested they use the rogue white paper that George had submitted the previous week for ideas.
Steve Barwick responded instantly and angrily with the circular argument that he didn’t have time to work on the document and that if it was submitted without his input, he would withdraw his name. His closing words sounded dangerously close to his annual threat to undermine the approaching Pole season: “I have a hardware program to run and we must spend $800k during the next few weeks or you can kiss [AMANDA] goodbye for this year.”
The other Californians and the Europeans had their reservations as well, so, in view of the deadline, Francis gave up and went it alone. He wrote the letter of intent himself and was the only person to sign it, and he finessed the politics by focusing only on the essence of the idea, not project management. He named no institutions, even Wisconsin, figuring this was the least damaging way to go, since it would signify that “nobody was really responsible” and that he would be seen simply as “a theorist who [was] out of control.”
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In late July, Buford learned that DeepIce would not be funded, for the main reason that IceCube, which was by far the largest project in it, stood a good chance of being funded on its own. He let the rest of the PIs know in an exceptionally gracious e-mail.
Now, the realpolitik at this early stage was that formal European support was not strictly required. The proposal was basically an agreement between the lead institution and NSF, so all it really needed in order to signify international interest was a list of potential partners. This meant that the Europeans didn’t need to be involved in the writing of the proposal, which made the process that much less fraught.
Somehow, the principals from Madison and Berkeley agreed to write a proposal together, and the way they got that ball rolling was to sequester themselves in a hotel room that August during the International Cosmic Ray Conference in Salt L
ake City, and hammer out a first draft over the course of about a week. They would go over to the meeting in the morning to rub shoulders and have breakfast with their friends, they’d hole up in the hotel room during the day, and they’d return to the meeting in the evening to meet friends again and go out to dinner. Francis asked one of the grad students from Berkeley to give his talk about the status of IceCube for him, and the student pointed out in his talk that one aspect of that status was that Francis was in a different hotel working on the proposal as he was speaking. (Somewhat more significantly, Albrecht Karle reported on the seventeen neutrino candidates they had uncovered six months earlier and mentioned that they now had a grand total of fifty. This made AMANDA the clear front-runner in what was now no longer a race.)
Madison was represented in the hotel room by Albrecht, Bob Morse, Gary Hill, and Francis; Berkeley by Buford; and LBL by Willi, George, and Dave Nygren. Their competing ambitions notwithstanding, this was a strong group, and what Willi and George brought to the table was long experience with large and expensive projects. COBE, the Cosmic Background Explorer, had run to more than half a billion dollars. George and Willi knew about things like management structures, and they weren’t cowed by large numbers. They also worked at a national laboratory, and as Francis points out, the default assumption was that a project of this size would be run out of a lab. The labs are run by the Department of Energy, however, while this project was being funded by the National Science Foundation, and as Francis also points out, “in Washington everybody hates everybody else.” So NSF was leaning strongly toward taking a risk on the University of Wisconsin rather than “god forbid having a DOE lab do an NSF project.”