by Mark Bowen
It seemed that Willi and George were happy to play along with this idea, in the confidence that all involved would see the good sense of locating the project at their laboratory in the end. Everyone knew it would be a stretch for Wisconsin—or any university—to carry off a project of this size and that NSF didn’t have much experience with big projects either. Indeed, the foundation was very anxious just then about another megaproject in their pipeline, the project Serap Tilav had moved to, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. LIGO had been initiated by three professors at two assuredly capable technical institutions, Caltech and MIT, but the professors had proven incapable of managing the project, even with significant support from their institutions. After a decade of false starts, the foundation had hired a new project manager, and the LIGO collaboration had finally demonstrated feasibility with a relatively small instrument, analogous to AMANDA, at around the time AMANDA detected the Peacock events. By 1999, the proposal for “Advanced LIGO,” which would end up costing more than $1 billion, was only slightly ahead of IceCube’s.
Francis was perfectly willing to admit that he couldn’t manage the project. In fact, he had no desire to: he wanted to keep himself free to do physics. He was also wise enough to realize that the project was far too big to be run in the context of Madison’s physics department or even the College of Letters and Sciences, which housed it. Shortly after the May meeting with NSF, he had broached this radical thinking to Terry Millar, the associate dean of physical sciences in the Graduate School, who was also an out-of-the-box thinker. (Terry, an energetic ex-Marine Vietnam veteran with a doctorate in mathematical logic, had been working with Francis and John Wiley, dean of the Graduate School, to keep AMANDA afloat since the early nineties.) Millar had responded by suggesting the Space Science and Engineering Center, a unique institution on the Madison campus that had considerable experience carrying out $10 or $12 million satellite projects for NASA and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Francis and Terry had then recruited an SSEC mechanical engineer-cum-project manager named Bob Paulos, with a view to making him project manager for IceCube.
Paulos took on the main responsibility for pulling the proposal together. He remembers George Smoot and Willi Chinowsky as being willing to go only so far in helping him out, however: it wasn’t in their self-interest, necessarily, to make Madison look good. They also displayed a certain arrogance. “There was always this attitude like, ‘You’re out in hay country out in Wisconsin, you know, let the big kids handle this,’” says Bob. “One time, one of them … said something to me like, ‘Why don’t you guys just build the drill and let us do everything else.’ They should take care of the tough stuff. Us farm boys, we could probably build a hot water drill.” Evidently, the Berkeleyites didn’t realize that the drill was probably the greatest technical challenge in the project.
The proposal was submitted on time in November 1999. It designated Madison as the lead institution, Francis as principal investigator, and Bob Paulos as project manager. The project was expected to cost about $140 million to build and operate over the next five years, and the plan called for the first IceCube strings to be dropped into the Ice over the 2002–03 Antarctic season. Shortly after the proposal was received, Dennis Peacock at NSF told Francis it had passed with flying colors.
That’s when the chess match really got interesting.
16. Y2K at Pole
AMANDA was never seen as more than a feasibility study. It had fulfilled its essential purpose by detecting the Peacock events. But it was also a testbed for technology, and the collaborators always held out the hope that they might make a real discovery with it. They had a working instrument in their hands, after all. They had opened a window on the neutrino universe, however small, so there was at least some chance that they’d be able to see something through it. This possibility was in nature’s hands.
Understand that the holy grail in neutrino astronomy is a “point source” or “neutrino star,” any single object that emits neutrinos—either steadily, like the usual star; periodically, like a pulsar; or just once, in a single blast, like a supernova or gamma ray burster. Bob Morse puts it best: “I think of myself as a cave man, stepping out of my cave, pointing at the sky, and saying, ‘Look at those stars!’ All I want is to see one point source of neutrinos up there. Then there are the folks who want to measure things. They’re saying, ‘That one’s blue, and that one’s red.…’ It’s like existence and essence.”
The collaboration is always gripped by “point source fever.” Whenever they produce a new tranche of data or enhance their instrument in some way, they search hopefully for point sources of any kind. Since their data is statistical in nature, this leads to many emotional ups and downs, because chance fluctuations nearly always produce random hot spots in the neutrino sky.
In 1999, for example, the Madison group thought it had found a point source among the Peacock events and their siblings in the data from AMANDA-B10. The even days in the dataset were kept blind, remember; they were working with only the odd days. At an October collaboration meeting in Philadelphia, about a month before the IceCube proposal was submitted, Ty DeYoung presented a sky-map (the neutrino version of a map of the visible stars in the night sky) with sixty up-going events and showed that six of them—10 percent!—were clustered at a particular spot in the sky. This was so exciting that more than fifteen years later Ty still remembers the exact coordinates of the spot. He petitioned the collaboration for permission to “un-blind” the even days in order to find out if the hot spot was real. “Steve [Barwick] in particular gave me a hard time at the presentation,” he writes, “but no one found anything really problematic in the analysis, so we opened the box on the other half of the data, and found … nothing. Not a single event!” Improved statistics had washed the hot spot away. Some variation on this scenario has recurred several times a year ever since.
But even without a point source or some other surprise of Galilean magnitude, they could still do science with AMANDA, mostly in the way of setting new limits.
* * *
The millennial season at Pole, 1999–2000, was a banner season. Most everyone who was there remembers it fondly. The camaraderie of working together in the field put all their family squabbles in the background. They intended to add six more strings, which would open their window that much wider, and, more importantly, to make one of those strings entirely digital, in order to test Dave Nygren’s potentially game-changing digital optical module.
Not only had they carved out a large chunk of work for themselves, the station as a whole was also running on all cylinders, as this was the first year of serious construction on the new station. There were twice as many people in and around the old dome as it was designed to support, and Y2K only added to the fun. Various “DVs,” distinguished visitors, passed through, and numerous adventurers—skiers, “snow bug” riders, and even a group of skydivers and balloonists—got it into their heads to do something special at that special place as the new millennium was born. It was even more of a circus than usual.
I arrived about a week before Thanksgiving. As I adjusted to the altitude and the surreal surroundings, I was most struck by the humanity of the place. Amidst all the whirring and buzzing of three shifts a day, six days a week, I sensed that this unusually positive group of people were more than just co-workers, they, like the Amandroids, were a kind of family. A day or two before the holiday, as I walked across the snowy floor of the dome on my way toward the tunnel that led up to the Ice and the long walk to the dark sector, I came across the head cook, Sally Ayotte, shuffling from foot to foot in her Extreme Cold Weather gear, deep-frying one turkey and smoking another in different rigs fashioned from fifty-gallon oil drums (see photograph 13). She told me that Bruce Koci had procured the hickory for smoking the birds by arranging to have the wooden crates for the hot water boilers he needed to ship to the station that year made of that kind of wood.
Sally went to great
effort to provide a welcoming atmosphere, or, as she put it, “show respect” for all the workers and visitors at Pole. Her galley was the heart and soul of the place. Over the years, she’d also learned some tricks about how to cook in those high, dry conditions. Thanksgiving dinner, which the two hundred of us enjoyed in three shifts, serving and cleaning up for each other, was a cozy, warm-hearted affair, and surprisingly elegant: the wine steward wore tails and a top hat above his blue jeans.
* * *
The season had gotten off to a good start. PICO had fielded a strong drilling team (see photograph 16). But it was early in the season, so Bruce was still engaged in the slow process of waking the sleeping dragon. (“It’s the whole history of Antarctic drilling rolled up into one drill,” he told me.) He got his thirty-two boilers fired up about a week after I arrived, and the next order of business was to melt enough snow to fill a few tanks with hot water and get it running through the hoses. (Once a hose was filled, the water had to be kept hot and flowing; otherwise it would freeze and the hose would become one of the most unwieldy pieces of detritus you can imagine.) We had to unwind and rewind the hose segments in order to check for leaks, and this gave me the chance to experience what was said to be the essence of the drilling experience: dragging more than a mile’s worth of two-inch hose around on the Ice. It was a riot. About five of us would line up about twenty feet apart and drape the hose across our shoulders in the manner of Jesus draping his arms on the cross, then drag it across the Ice as its large winch-driven reel payed it out. If we weren’t going in a straight line and one of us dropped the hose for whatever reason, there would be a slingshot effect and the people on either side would be dragged twenty or thirty feet perpendicular to the direction they thought they were going, bouncing on one leg as if doing the can-can. All this at minus forty degrees on an ocean of white, under perfectly still, bluebird skies.
* * *
As the weeks wore on, the reality of the place set in, although I can’t say that it ever seemed less than surreal. I learned to be wary of the thrill and exhilaration—the sunlight relentlessly pouring into your eyes, the constant activity all around—you could run yourself ragged. You’d get out of bed, don your many layers, grab the backpack you needed to carry on your wanderings that day, and stumble across the Ice to the galley to find yourself at the end of a drunken and ebullient tablemate’s day. Or on the night—or day; it was hard to tell the difference—that you really needed to sleep, a bucket loader would be rumbling back and forth outside your Jamesway, carrying snow to the showers to melt for water. That might be the same night that the woman on the other side of the paper-thin wall in the next cubicle invited a guy to sleep over. Or at five a.m. there would be an “all-call” over the intercom about a pair of skiers who had just been sighted on the horizon, halfway through their attempt to traverse the whole continent, and you’d rush out to the geographic pole marker to meet them. (The two I met were man-hauling surprisingly lightly laden sleds in an “unassisted” attempt. They refused even a cup of hot tea as they stood by the marker having their pictures snapped. After half an hour or so, they glided off and disappeared over the opposite horizon. They’d been out for forty-seven days and were on pace to set a speed record, but unfortunately, they had to abandon their attempt two days later, when they discovered that the fuel for their stove had leaked into their food.) The phrase “inhospitable environment” took on palpable meaning for me. I got a gut feel for how herculean a task it really was to build a world-class particle physics detector at a remote field station on a two-mile-thick ocean of ice.
Bob Morse was AMANDA’s “on-ice lead,” cheerfully coordinating and assigning tasks; dealing with every little emergency that came up with scheduling, transportation, or health; negotiating with NSF about “population”: how many beds they could find for the incoming Amandroids, or for space on the next Herc for an essential piece of equipment. As an old hand, he knew how to pace himself. “This place is like a junkyard dog,” he advised. “It keeps coming at you.”
Drilling commenced during the second week of December, and we pulled the drill out of the first hole of the season at three in the afternoon on the eighteenth. I was then transferred to Albrecht’s deployment team. Things got off to an inauspicious start when one of the “GAs,” or general assistants, the all-purpose gofers at Pole, dropped a $6,000 pressure sensor, made by a company named Paro, down the hole as she was preparing to attach it to the bottom of the string. Kurt Woschnagg, who was monitoring progress from the control shack, called out to ask if it was connected, and Albrecht told him it was gone.
“What do you mean ‘gone’?” Kurt asked.
“It’s gone. The Paro’s gone,” Albrecht responded.
Kurt walked angrily to the hole to make sure he’d heard Albrecht correctly, but when he noticed how attractive the young woman was, his attitude changed. None of us—all male, admittedly—wanted to hurt her feelings by telling her how expensive that little gadget was. Things went smoothly after that.
I couldn’t quite believe that I was threading connectors together with my bare hands in minus-thirty-degree weather, but I cannot claim to have experienced the barbaric essence of the deployment experience, because this was the first year that there was any sort of shelter around the hole. Bruce had designed a windbreak shaped like a dome with a large pie slice taken out of it, about a quarter of the circle, and it worked well in spite of the gap, because the wind at Pole almost always blows from the same direction. We could even fit a couple of space heaters in there (although that led to several melted holes in people’s wind pants). Bruce made note of what seemed to be “a direct correlation between the amount of shelter that you have and the kind of weather that you have. If you don’t believe that, we bought all kinds of shelters this year that we’ve never had before and look at the weather.” It was sometimes overcast, but there weren’t many storms.
We completed the deployment of the first string of the year, AMANDA’s fourteenth overall, at eight a.m. the next morning. When Albrecht e-mailed the news to the north, he was congratulated by Per Olof and Francis, who was “religiously following” the progress from CERN in Geneva. It was the earliest first deployment in AMANDA’s history. I left the next day.
Thus I missed the traditional Christmas morning “Race Around the World,” in which the contestants, on foot, bicycle, or skis, complete two laps around a two-kilometer loop encircling the South Pole marker—and the general mayhem that accompanied the millennium. But I kept track of what my new friends were up to once I got home.
The Amandroids celebrated the big moment alone out on the Ice. The deployment team was about halfway through its job on the third string of the season. Earlier in the day, the ubiquitous Robert Schwarz had mentioned to Carlos de Los Heros, a Spanish scientist based in Uppsala, how much he liked the Spanish tradition of eating twelve fresh grapes at New Year’s, one at each strike of the town clock, and they had decided to go ahead with it. Robert procured some grapes from the galley and handed them out, and since they had no clock, Carlos stood by the metal “90 South” interstate highway sign that was posted on the drill tower and hit it twelve times with a hammer. They drank champagne, posed for a photo (see photograph 17), scrawled commemorations on the first optical module to be deployed this millennium, and got back to work. The string was deployed about four hours later, just in time for those who had any energy left to wander over to the geographic pole and join in the ceremonial placement of the new South Pole marker.
The drillers had finished their work early enough to join in the station-wide celebration, which featured a parade led by bagpiper John Wright and was filmed by WGBH, the PBS affiliate in Boston, as part of its worldwide millennium coverage. My fellow driller, James “Tater” Bret, a good-natured and comfortably round individual, told me by e-mail a couple of days later that he’d been “filmed for quite a long time.”
“I went as Baby New Year and seemed to draw a lot of attention in my diaper, sash and HUGE to
p hat. So much for fame. As you might have surmised, New Years Eve was a blow out filled with champagne; tight, skimpy dresses; naked people; tuxedos; and a lot of good energy. The band was stellar, and should play again as soon as possible.”
* * *
The DVs must have been waiting for the much-anticipated—and in the event anticlimactic—Y2K computer bug to pass, as they began streaming through only after New Year’s. The first wave consisted of a group of congresspeople and NSF mucky-mucks, including the foundation’s director, Rita Colwell, and Dennis Peacock of Peacock event fame. It fell to Katherine Rawlins, a grad student studying under Albrecht, who was now an assistant professor in Madison, to show them around AMANDA.
“Their visit went very very well,” she e-mailed a couple of minutes after they left. “I showed an event animation, talked about neutrinos and the thrill of discovery, etc., and we briefly visited the string 17 hole.… I tried to pitch IceCube at appropriate moments, and they seemed very responsive and enthusiastic. Rich thought we kicked ass.
“We now return to our regularly scheduled panic and chaos…”
* * *
Prophetic words. The next day string 17 got stuck in the ice, about five hundred meters before it reached the bottom of the hole. It turned out that the drillers had let the drill head hang in place for about four hours at one point and the hole had necked down at around that depth.
The deployment team had attached the last optical module to the string and were dropping it to its final resting place when Kurt Woschnagg and Gary Hill in the control shack noticed that the pressure sensors, which measured how fast the string was descending, weren’t registering any changes. They looked out at Robert Schwarz, who was controlling the winch, and saw that he was lowering the string as fast as he could. As in the similar experience three years earlier, the string appeared to be streaming happily into the hole. The difference was that when they reversed the winch and tried to pull it out, it wouldn’t budge. The guess was that the weight at the bottom of the string had somehow punched through the narrow part of the hole and become wedged below it. As they tried to pull it up, enough tension built in the cable to break the shaft that drove the winch, which started freewheeling—and the string began dropping again. Mike Boyce, one of the coming year’s winterovers, was standing near the hole. He told them all later that he had resisted his natural impulse to grab the string—which was good, since if he had he would have disappeared into the hole with it. Gary raced out and hit the emergency brake, dropping the winch to the snow, and it ground to a halt.