by Mark Bowen
The PICO drillers managed to weld the broken shaft back together, but the team failed to recover the string for a second time. Finally, they went for the last resort, Bruce Koci, who was preparing to leave the Ice. “It was always like that,” says Gary. “It’s stuck! What are we gonna do? Where the hell’s Bruce?… So somebody goes looking for him,… and [Bruce] didn’t even come out. He asked a couple questions and said, ‘No. Forget it. You’ll never budge it.’”
With this sobering experience fresh in mind, they commenced on the most critical string of the season and perhaps all of AMANDA, the now-legendary “string 18,” the first and only string in the instrument to consist entirely of digital optical modules.
* * *
Dave Nygren, the leader of the DOM project, admits that “for some reason I’m more prone to generate those circumstances where we’re living very dangerously. I may not look like the type, but apparently I do. My wife says, you know, stop doing this; it causes too much chaos, heh, heh, heh.”
The decision to deploy an all-digital string had been made only about a year earlier, at the fall workshop at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, so Dave’s team was given a remarkably short time in which to redesign what was essentially a specialized and oddly shaped computer and build and test about fifty of them. The heart of the system, a large circuit board, circularly shaped so as to fit comfortably with a photomultiplier tube inside a glass Benthosphere, contained over six hundred parts. Once the boards were fabricated, they had to be shipped from Berkeley to the Physical Sciences Laboratory outside Madison, where they were integrated into the DOMs, which were then pumped up to pressure and tested, and the finished product was then shipped to Port Hueneme, California, for its long voyage south. To give some idea of the split-second timing involved, the boards didn’t even reach Wisconsin until November, after the season had begun, and the DOMs didn’t reach Pole until just after Christmas.
To make things more complicated, the Germans had insisted that the DOMs also function as normal AMANDA optical modules, so the collaboration wouldn’t be sacrificing a string, so to speak; it would still give them normal AMANDA data. The idea was adamantly opposed by a couple of the LBL engineers, but Jerry Przybylski and Dave Nygren agreed to put a fiber-optic readout on the digital board as a compromise, figuring it was the only way they could get their new technology into the Ice.
Dave and Jerry share a philosophical belief that any disruptive technology of the sort they were envisioning will tend to have intrinsic aesthetic appeal, and Dave found the fiber-optic compromise unappealing in the extreme. In his view, the DOM “became a hybrid to satisfy the weak of spirit.” He also had a great distrust of fiber-optics, believing they were much too expensive and too fragile to survive the re-freezing process. In the end he was probably right.
Under the argument that they were already building the data acquisition system for the AMANDA strings—the hardware on the surface of the Ice that translated the raw signals from the optical modules into digital information that could be used by AMANDA’s computers—the Germans also insisted on building the data acquisition system for the digital string. This made Jerry Przybylski extremely nervous, but he compromised again with the stipulation that they provide a “back channel,” which would allow him to communicate directly with the DOMs from a desktop computer in the event that the German hardware didn’t work.
The pressure really began to build when four members of the LBL team traveled to Wisconsin in November 1999 to help assemble and test the modules. In the testing stage, a small electrical part on the main circuit board kept burning out, so they had to depressurize the DOMs, take them apart, replace the burned-out parts, reassemble the DOMs, and pump them back up to high pressure several times before finally getting them out the door.
An engineer named Jozsef Ludvig and a management-level physicist from LBL named Bob Stokstad met them on the Ice. Albrecht gave them some space in the AMANDA Jamesway and placed the reel holding what would become string 18 on the snow next to the building, and they began troubleshooting the system one last time—just as Jerry Przybylski had done with the first two DOMs four years earlier. Here, they encountered a problem that required a chip on the main circuit board to be replaced. They arranged for someone traveling south to bring a bag of the chips with him—and then had to unseal, rework, and reseal the DOMs again, at a sprint.
To make matters worse, some sort of sickness was raging through the station, and Ludvig caught it during the final heroic push. As the only engineer on the Ice, he was the one who felt most under the gun. “Before it was over, some sixty module openings and re-sealings took place at Pole,” wrote Stokstad by e-mail. “Forty-two DOMs were ready for deployment, crated and ordered, two days before deployment began.” The drillers would have been more than halfway through the awaiting hole at that point.
Gary Hill, who had also caught the “pole plague,” now had the task of leading the deployment. That went off without a hitch, thankfully, and in the end all but two of the DOMs survived the freeze-in, purring like cats.
Unfortunately, though, it wasn’t over for Ludvig. When they hooked the DOMs up to the data acquisition system that the Germans had built, sure enough, it didn’t work. Now he had to troubleshoot the thing with the highly excitable Ralf Wischnewski, who had designed it, and they simply could not get it to function.
Nevertheless, string 18 was an unqualified success. Thanks to Jerry’s foresight in asking for a back channel, the LBL team actually managed to do some physics with it during its very first year, and when they returned the following year and installed their own data acquisition system, they demonstrated its full potential. The performance of string 18 eventually proved persuasive enough to convince the entire collaboration, in Dave Nygren’s words, to “abandon the AMANDA model and go whole hog into this fully, what I would call modern digital era.”
* * *
Looking back on that season more than a decade later, with IceCube built and more than five thousand of his DOMs still purring away in the Ice, Dave recalled that “the idea of building this really modern stuff, that really gave us the information that you would wish for, was galvanizing. I mean we got string 18 from decision in November of ninety-eight to shipping to the Pole in November ninety-nine and installed in January. Fantastic!
“And, you know, there were a lot of decisions and designs—it was just an amazing era. High adrenalin, high expectations, high performance…”
“And a lot of work by Jozsef Ludvig,” interjected Jerry Przybylski.
“Yeah. It was a little bit too much for Jozsef,” Dave replied. “He began, I think, to show the effects of stress.… He quit on several occasions. He quit while he was at Pole, and then he came back [to the real world] and he quit again, and finally the third time he quit I said, ‘Okay, Jozsef, I believe you.’ …
“It was white-knuckle all the way.… And now the young people [in IceCube] say, ‘Oh this works, you know, I’m gonna use this and do some science.’ … They’re just clueless how it all came to be, and that’s fine.”
* * *
It must have been very stressful indeed, not only for Ludvig, but for everyone else on the Ice that January. They were nearing the end of the season, so the weather was beginning to deteriorate, and they were also entering the traditional end-of-season panic, in which Steve Barwick and Ralf Wischnewski, two of the more volatile members of the collaboration, worked desperately to complete their tasks, calibrating the instrument and implementing the data acquisition system, respectively. (Although the system for the DOMs didn’t work, Ralf still had to hook up the other strings that were deployed that season, as well as the fiber-optic channel from string 18.)
On string 19, the sixth and last of the season, the PICO drillers suffered the supreme defeat: they stuck the drill.
Bruce Koci had left during the drilling of string 18 in order to engage in his other life, drilling ice cores on the tops of high mountains. His climatologist friend Lonnie Thompson had invite
d him on his expedition to Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa.
Bob Morse, who was in some sense Bruce’s boss, since he managed the AMANDA side of the drilling, had pleaded with him to stay at Pole until the end of the season—and he probably could have stayed a bit longer. But in Africa Bruce told me that he’d left in order to send the message that AMANDA was leaning on him far too much for heroics; it was past time for other people to take responsibility for running the drill.
They always had a second drill head with them for just this reason, so the drillers hooked it up and managed to complete the last hole—19a, they called it—overcorrecting a bit. Morse later observed that they could have deployed a Volkswagen in that hole. The string was deployed in record time, and the winter exodus began. Gary Hill and Robert Schwarz left the Ice two days later.
Since it was now the end of January, the season was bound to close in a headlong rush. Barwick and four accomplices didn’t have time to complete the calibration, and several other things went wrong at the last minute, so the instrument wasn’t actually working on the day the last summer Amandroid—Ty DeYoung—caught the last Herc out of town.
“Bloody typical. They can’t even hand over a working experiment,” wrote Darryn Schneider, who was left holding the bag with his fellow winterover, Mike Boyce.
Two days later, he and Mike were out in MAPO, the AMANDA computer building, on the verge of getting the instrument back up and running, when they heard an all-call on the intercom announcing the imminent arrival of the very last flight, come to deliver the last few critical supplies. This took them by surprise. The decision to close the station had come down quickly.
“We go up onto the roof of MAPO to see our last physical connection to the outside world come and go,” wrote Darryn. “I realize it is getting cold, as I freeze a beer can to my bottom lip! The plane lands, unloads cargo as it taxis, and stops just briefly enough to take on a bag of mail. Then it’s off again. We wave like crazy, hoping they realize the significance of their leaving us here. After it has taken off, it banks sharply and does a low run over the station. MAPO is engulfed in the dissipating contrail from the take-off. And that is that. For a moment I almost feel—well, isolated—that the winter has started. Maybe I’m just tired.”
* * *
And so ended the construction of AMANDA. It would never grow beyond nineteen strings.
* * *
In my conversation with Dave Nygren and Jerry Przybylski more than a decade later, I asked Dave if he had seen AMANDA as just a feasibility study or as an instrument that might be able to do some physics.
“I thought it was an infeasibility study, quite frankly.”
I observed that that was a controversial statement.
“I don’t mind being quoted in anything I say, because I’m not here for career development,” he responded equanimously. “This is really how I looked at it: I didn’t like it. I wanted to get rid of it.… Let me make clear, AMANDA was an essential step, but it should not have been carried further than it was.”
* * *
It also ended at the perfect time. From an historical standpoint, it could be argued that the design and construction of AMANDA, which was nothing less than the invention of neutrino astronomy, took place during the one window of time when it would have been possible. It could not have been done before the 1990s, because physics and computer technology weren’t ready for it, and it would have taken much longer and probably been prohibitively expensive after 2000, largely because, just that year, the contract to manage the U.S. presence in Antarctica was awarded to the military contractor Raytheon, which proceeded to impose stifling layers of bureaucracy and control. The company’s motto for the continent became “No More Frontier Attitude.” Everything is regulated now.
But AMANDA required a frontier attitude. The anarchic approach was the quickest, the best, and probably even the only way it could have succeeded.
Furthermore, as we shall see, the ascension of George W. Bush to the U.S. presidency that very year led to a tightening of U.S. science funding. And the Great Recession that came at the end of Bush’s tenure put a stranglehold on discretionary funding of all kinds. On top of that, the political discourse in the United States has become so poisoned and the possibility of compromise so diminished that it has become pretty much impossible to gather support for projects as expensive and far-out as this one.
It was difficult enough as it was.
Part IV
The Real Thing
17. Sometimes You Get What You Ask For
Consider Francis Halzen’s position as AMANDA barreled into the new century. His overriding interest was in helping IceCube to succeed. Two of the senior administrators in his university, John Wiley and Terry Millar, wanted to run the project there, and Francis would have liked to have been closely enough involved to have some hand in ensuring a positive outcome. But this was a shaky proposition, because the university clearly did not have the in-house expertise to manage the project.
From a personal standpoint, it would be a tremendous headache to have any sort of operational responsibility for the construction of IceCube. Furthermore, as a theorist and a professor, he would never really be in charge of construction, even though, as principal investigator, he would be held responsible and his head and no other would be on the chopping block if it failed. Another consideration was that he wouldn’t mind having a little time to do some honest-to-god physics again, which he hadn’t been able to do much of for quite a while, given the distractions of AMANDA.
Everyone at Wisconsin who was involved in bringing the project to Madison remembers Francis as being extremely enthusiastic about it. He is supremely adept politically, however, and he doesn’t show his hand. Jim Yeck, who would join the project three years later to lead the construction of IceCube, points out that Francis is “always playing a game of chess where he’s a couple of moves ahead. He’s thinking of—he’s always in a position where if he made a move he can undo it or change it. So, it’s not chess; it’s a little more complicated than that even.”
The fact is that Francis had seriously conflicting emotions. To this day, he will claim that he would have been perfectly happy if NSF had decided to run the project out of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and named George Smoot as PI.
“Mostly, it was scary!” he says, with a weak laugh. “Scary. It was scary.… You know that at some point you will be spending ten, twenty million dollars a year, flowing through your hands in a very strange way, and you’re responsible for it.… What people don’t realize is that the chances it was a failure were much larger than it was a success. It would have been George Smoot’s failure.” And he laughed again, more heartily this time.
* * *
Keep in mind that the project hadn’t been funded yet and that once it was, the broad strokes of the management structure would be etched in stone. So this was the time of the most strenuous infighting. And Smoot wasn’t the only one bucking for PI. Although it was always a bit unclear whether Steve Barwick would be in or out—he withdrew so often it was hard to keep track—it soon became clear that he, too, harbored the secret and utter fantasy of becoming PI and moving the project to Irvine.
The Europeans were not going to the lengths that George and Steve were, but it did seem that they were delaying things in order to jockey for leverage as the rules for running the new collaboration took shape—memoranda of understanding and the like—among the participating institutions. Strangely enough, the European jockeying often took the form of promoting Steve’s visibility at the expense of anyone’s from Madison or, god forbid, LBL. The AMANDA collaboration always had two spokespeople during those years, one from the United States and one from Europe, and the majority of the Europeans always supported Steve for the U.S. role. He and Christian Spiering were elected in late 1998, and then reelected in mid-2001, by which time Steve’s antics had taken yet another disruptive turn.
Francis wasn’t particularly concerned with the political jockeying—although it
did waste time and energy. For him, the most maddening and painful obstacle was the conflict that surrounded their most important job—which was science, lest we forget. By the time 2000 rolled around, the discovery of the Peacock events was more than a year old, and those first few gold-plated neutrinos had acquired roughly a hundred siblings, yet the PIs still could not agree on how or even whether to publish a paper about it. Some of this infighting was competitive in nature, and some arose from scientific disagreement, but the main undercurrent was political. For the best way to undermine IceCube in the eyes of the many committees that were reviewing it was to torpedo this paper. It is amazing how far some were willing to go to damage or even kill the project rather than lose a chance at gaining control.
The Peacock events had been discovered in the data taken in 1997 by AMANDA-B10, remember, an instrument that was about half the size of the one they had now completed. By the end of 1999, Zeuthen had nearly caught up to Madison in the “arms race” to analyze the 1997 data, and given the comprehensive report that Christopher Wiebusch and his colleagues had produced in the fall, reasonable people would agree that they had also confirmed the validity of the Madison analysis. But Christian Spiering and Ralf Wischnewski still refused to accept it.