by Mark Bowen
Between Smoot and Barwick, AMANDA was developing a bizarre reputation. Dave Cline remembered the collaboration as having a “bad image in the scientific world,” owing to the “Irvine connection,” meaning Barwick, and all the bickering, which was obvious to outsiders. (Cline distinguished AMANDA from the “brilliant success” of IceCube.)
But Francis wasn’t all that concerned with Smoot and Barwick’s self-promotion. He recalls sitting with Peter Gorham, the principal investigator of ANITA, in a coffee shop in New Zealand during a neutrino conference in 2008 and asking him why they kicked Steve out after he contributed so much to the experiment. When Gorham replied that he tried to steal all the credit, Francis laughed and said, “Oh, if we had thrown him out for that, he would have been so long gone.” They never in fact did throw Steve out. He is still a member, though noncontributing, of IceCube.
* * *
Smoot was a different story. Dave Nygren observes matter-of-factly that when George realized he would not become PI, he “lost interest” and “kind of faded out from the scene.” Aside from speaking ill of the project at every chance he got, he chose to ignore his operational responsibilities. His group was charged with developing some software for running the instrument or analyzing some data, and he had obtained a grant for doing so, but he blithely decided to use the money on some theoretical work instead. This was the last straw. At the meeting in Delaware, which George did not deign to attend, the other PIs voted to expel him. They tried to gain control of the misdirected grant money and failed.
Francis claims to have no hard feelings and to remain friends with both George and Steve. (This is Francis’s shtick. He doesn’t like to be the bad guy.) He tells me he’s got a technique for working with his fellow physicists that helps him understand and not take it personally when they act like children: he assigns them an age, the maximum being twenty-one, signifying full maturity. He only uses the method on physicists, by the way, whom he sees as being less stable than “normal” people, based on what he claims is “a lot of evidence.”
Only one member of the IceCube collaboration is assigned the age of twenty-one: Dave Nygren (“You notice that only Nygren can drink alcohol”). Per Olof Hulth was “in the Nygren category,” and several others follow closely at “maybe nineteen”: Olga Botner from Uppsala; Lutz Koepke from Mainz, Germany, who has taken the lead on supernova detection; and three or four professors from the United States. Francis puts himself at a modest seventeen (“eighteen is already mature”). Steve Barwick comes in at “twelve to fourteen; he certainly doesn’t reach puberty.” And George Smoot comes in at “thirteen, but a nice thirteen.”
It would seem that the ability to play with the other children in the sandbox is not a factor in the decisions of the Nobel physics committee. For, in spite of the fact that George had burned bridges with virtually every collaboration he had ever worked in, he shared the 2006 prize with George Mather of NASA, whose respect he had quite thoroughly lost when they had worked together on COBE, the experiment for which they won the prize. Per Olof remembered being very happy at seeing the smile on Smoot’s face when he greeted him in Stockholm.
And in contrast to Steve, George has found fame. He once won $1 million on the game show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and he’s appeared as himself in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. Just the other day, I was astounded to glance up at the TV in a restaurant in rural Vermont, and there was “George Smoot, Nobel Laureate,” walking onto the scene in a Turbotax commercial.
* * *
Francis jetted about so much during the no-new-starts period that travel began to lose its charm even for him. He believes that since IceCube had been pushed back into the funding queue, NSF wanted to keep them visible—and busy—by reviewing them again and again (although he also entertains the suspicion that the foundation was looking for an excuse to drop the project). IceCube went through something like fourteen major reviews, mostly in the United States, but in Germany, Sweden, and Belgium as well (two Belgian groups had joined the collaboration sometime in 1998 or 1999). They were even reviewed by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which doesn’t usually engage in such micromanagement. Dave Nygren says they “got so tired of it, you know, I would go to Wisconsin for some review, and I’d say, ‘Okay, Francis, what’s the plan?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, keep talking until the time runs out.’ And I’d say, ‘Good plan.’”
At one point Francis realized he had traveled to Europe an average of once a month for several years, “which means that you live off time basically, continuously, and I think these years are going to count double later on, when it’s time to go.”
This unusually young-looking man was beginning to show his age. His personal clock got so mixed up that wherever he was, at home or in some faraway hotel room, he would wake up in the middle of the night and read until he got sleepy again. This is a sensitive time psychologically, of course. One night, he was reading the book Astronomer by Chance by Bernard Lovell, who had worked on radar during World War II and gone on to build the world’s first large radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, England. There were so many delays and cost overruns that at one point Lovell’s employer, the University of Manchester, considered prosecuting him and sending him to jail! Francis was about $5 million in hock to his university on the night he read this. He froze and looked at his hotel ceiling in horror, thinking, “This could happen to me!” and for several weeks went around telling everybody how scared he was. He can laugh about it now, and he often does, but he also says that he still doesn’t think it was funny. Lovell turned things around, incidentally, and made important discoveries that essentially launched the field of radio astronomy. He was eventually knighted.
The truth was that IceCube was in serious risk of failing. NSF kept giving them aggressive deadlines—acting as though they had given them money even though they hadn’t—so when they’d gotten the green light at the end of the Clinton era, the Madisonians had gone into full start-up mode, hiring people and designing the drill. By mid-2001, the design was nearly complete and it was time to think about building the thing, at an expected cost in the neighborhood of $10 million (it would ultimately cost about $12 million). The $4.5 million from WARF would not last long, and it would be very expensive to stop the project, which would mean laying people off and starting again; in fact it might kill it altogether. It was crucial to keep the money flowing.
The political tensions engendered by no-new-starts came to a head over the summer, when Congress got into the act. It was precipitated by neutrinos, interestingly enough, but not IceCube.
What had happened was that the company that owned the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota, where Ray Davis had operated his solar neutrino detector for decades, had decided to close the mine. (Davis’s group then decided to end their experiment, as they had definitely proven their point. Davis would win the Nobel Prize the following year.) The imminent shutdown prompted a group of researchers led by John Bahcall to propose that the National Science Foundation turn the mine into a major underground research laboratory. They envisioned various neutrino experiments, including a competitor to Super-Kamiokande in Japan, as well as efforts in geology and “extreme biology.” The cost was estimated at $281 million. A decision needed to come quickly, because Homestake intended to shutter the mine by the end of the year, at which point it would begin filling with water. This led the two Democratic senators from South Dakota, Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Tim Johnson, who happened to sit on the appropriations panel that oversaw NSF, to take the extraordinary step of trying to earmark $10 million to keep pumping out the mine while the foundation made up its mind.
Normally, this project would have been funded through the same major facilities account that would have been funding IceCube had Bush not issued his no-new-starts diktat. IceCube was probably first in line for this sort of funding, and a couple of other thoroughly reviewed projects had been put on hold as well. Meanwhile, the Homestake en
thusiasts had barely submitted a proposal—NSF hadn’t reviewed it yet—but here they were elbowing their way to the head of the line.
It happened that the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey, not only hailed from Wisconsin, he had gone to law school at Madison and had great affection for his alma mater. He was being briefed on IceCube’s teething problems all along by the university’s congressional liaison, Rhonda Norsetter.
And so, “one fine afternoon” in mid-June, according to Terry Millar, Obey called Chancellor John Wiley, and said, “John, unless I hear from you otherwise by the end of the day, I am going to earmark fifteen million dollars to keep IceCube afloat.”
Wiley’s first thought was to turn the money down. He figured it would not only hurt the university’s reputation in the short run, it would probably hurt financially in the long. The National Science Foundation had been keeping track of federal research expenditures at universities since the early seventies, and in that time the University of Wisconsin had been in the top five every single year, usually higher. The only other university in that class was Johns Hopkins, which was way out in front, actually, because it oversees the Applied Physics Laboratory, which conducts about 50 percent classified research. The University of Wisconsin did not allow classified research on campus. Wisconsin had achieved this record by depending on a level, peer-reviewed playing field, not by relying on earmarks and pork, and Wiley intended to keep it that way.
On the other hand, IceCube was in trouble. Wiley called Millar and Norsetter into his office to help him make up his mind and went off that afternoon to deliver the keynote speech at a gala retirement party elsewhere on campus. Millar and Norsetter spent the day going back and forth with Obey’s staffers, building the argument that since IceCube was one of the most peer-reviewed projects in history and had passed every review with flying colors, sure, the university would take a hit, but it would probably survive. The two drove over to the retirement party in time to catch Wiley’s “little spiel,” and made their pitch to him afterward over hors d’oeuvres. They succeeded in changing his mind.
Congress finally overrode no-new-starts in the spending bill that was hammered out by conference committee in early November 2001. NSF ended up getting more money than the president had asked for, and five major research facilities were funded. IceCube got just the amount Obey had promised.
It seems that Obey’s staffers had it about right. His earmark did generate some controversy, but it never got too heated. According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “One physicist referred to the IceCube project as ‘Kosher pork’—somewhere in-between a peer-reviewed and a pork-barrel project.” The name stuck.
* * *
But it wasn’t over yet. Even as the conference committee was finalizing the 2002 federal budget, the Wisconsin folks learned through back channels that NSF director Rita Colwell had failed to include IceCube in her budget for the next fiscal year, 2003, which would begin in September 2002. This was an extraordinary move, since NSF had already approved it, it had originally been included in the 2002 budget, it was a multi-year project, and it had now received initial funding. It may have been that she objected on principle to pork, kosher or otherwise, but the story in Madison was that Colwell, an environmental microbiologist, was resentful over the fact that Obey had not funded her pet mega-project, NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network. According to Terry Millar, she had lobbied Obey over the summer, he had turned her down, “and the following week he hands her fifteen million for something she doesn’t even want”: IceCube.
Her omission also had immediate consequences, because NSF needed to act in order to release the $15 million in kosher pork for the 2002 fiscal year. This had to be done by the end of January, but all signs indicated it would not.
Now, Terry Millar is an energetic and creative guy—perhaps too energetic and creative for a university administrator, he is willing to admit. Don’t forget that he toured Vietnam as a Marine. He got in touch with Colwell’s predecessor as NSF director, Neal Lane, who briefed him on the political complexity of science policy at this level. In an e-mail to John Wiley summarizing the conversation, Terry mentioned that Lane was “totally sympathetic toward Dr. Colwell for the difficult position she must find herself in” and that Lane had observed that “interactions among NSF, OMB, OSTP, and Congress are fluid, chaotic, and often difficult to anticipate or manage” (referring to the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy). Nevertheless, Lane had suggested the “prudent action” of going over Colwell’s head.
NSF reports to OSTP, which is an office of the White House. Its head is the president’s science adviser, at that point a physicist named John Marburger.
Terry believed that one of his responsibilities as assistant dean was to know everyone who was doing research on campus and figure out ways to synergize their efforts. (“I grow neurons and get them to fire up, and then I try to nurture them along, and those connections create new kinds of possibilities within the university.”) In his energetic way he had somehow found out that Madison had an obscure connection to Marburger’s office: A former Apollo astronaut by the name of Harrison “Jack” Schmitt—the second-to-last person to have walked on the Moon, in fact—occasionally co-taught an engineering course at the university, and Schmitt happened to know the woman who kept John Marburger’s calendar. Terry arranged a dinner with Schmitt at a seafood restaurant outside Madison named Captain Bill’s.
Over dinner, Schmitt told him that Marburger’s main concern at that moment was biosecurity: only a month after the September attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, letters and packages laced with anthrax had been mailed to several media outlets and the office of Senator Tom Daschle.
“And so we said, you know, we have a lot to say about that,” recalls Terry. (Thanks to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Fund, the Wisconsin Idea, and the fact that agriculture is so important to the state’s economy, biology may be Madison’s strongest suit.) “We’d be happy to come in and talk about it. And, by the way, we’d also like to talk about this thing called IceCube.… We got in through the back door.”
Schmitt managed to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Marburger for a delegation consisting of John Wiley, associate dean for the biological sciences Tim Mulcahy, Rhonda Norsetter, Terry, and Francis Halzen. In a letter that Wiley sent to Marburger in advance of the meeting, he came clean about their true intention of discussing IceCube. The meeting took place in mid-February.
“And so we did the Homeland Security bit,” Terry continues, “and then we brought up IceCube. And [Marburger] said, ‘IceCube. What is that?’ So we told him the story, and he said, ‘So why isn’t this?… I don’t get it.’ And so we said, ‘Well, it might have been because of, you know, this little thing that Obey did’ and that ‘we think the NSF director—we’re not sure, of course, but she couldn’t have been real happy because that wasn’t one of her pet projects.’ … And so he thought for a moment, and he said, ‘Well, I can’t get it into the budget this year, but I’ll put it into the president’s budget next year. And I’ll make sure NSF is put in line on this.’
“And so we thanked him profusely, and I said, ‘Ah, so, ah, that would be next year, and we’re at the end of our first year, so what would be your recommendation for the intervening year?’”
Since Marburger couldn’t get them into the 2003 budget, they would be missing a year of funding.
“And so he looked at all of us and he sort of smiled and he said, ‘Well, you seem to have solved the problem for the first year. Ah, the administration will not object if you solve it the same way for the second year.’”
He was inviting them to go for more kosher pork.
It would continue to be a struggle—science funding usually is—but this broke the back of IceCube’s funding problem. However it came about, NSF had gotten “in line” by the middle of the year. The project was awarded $25 million in 2003, enoug
h to complete the drill and get them to the point where they could begin construction.
Rita Colwell eventually made peace with IceCube as well. She later told Francis he was lucky, because she slept with a man who loved the project. Her husband, Jack, was a physical chemist.
19. The Coming of Yeck
There’s the IceCube period, construction basically; there’s the AMANDA period. But there was a period of five years in between, which I—it’s like before Jesus Christ: it’s before Jim Yeck.
—FRANCIS HALZEN
As if the funding obstacles and internal squabbles were not enough, a more fundamental problem was also rearing its head. They were discovering that Beverly Hartline, their hardnosed interrogator on the Hartill panel, had been correct: the University of Wisconsin did not know how to manage a project of this size.
It seemed that the higher-ups in the Space Science and Engineering Center just didn’t get it. This project was by far the largest ever undertaken by the university—it was in the running, in fact, for the largest ever undertaken by any university. It was three times the size of all the other projects in SSEC combined, yet they were treating it as just another project. They were low-balling resources, they were shifting personnel in and out—even Bob Paulos, the project manager—and they were trying to make technical decisions that Francis Halzen and Bob Morse were not willing to let them make. They were insisting that IceCube fit into their internal management structure, when, at three times the size of their entire operation, it clearly needed independent management of its own. The tail was wagging the dog.
This was especially difficult for Paulos, since it caused friction with people he had known and worked with for fifteen years. But he soldiered on nevertheless, and managed to make progress—especially with the drill. In an e-mail to two other senior administrators in early 2001, Terry Millar observed that “at this point, IceCube fails without him.” But even Bob knew all along that they would eventually need to hire someone above him who had managed multi-hundred-million-dollar projects before. And as the transition from planning and designing to actually building their Great Pyramid under the Ice approached, and as the budget grew from $15 million a year to more like $40 or $50 million, their overseers at the National Science Foundation began insisting that that person be found.