'I Heard The Learned Astronomer...'

A STRONOMERS ARE A retiring, night-owl sort of species by nature, but their monastic image is imposed on by outsiders and the everyday world as much as it is created by the astronomers themselves. The scientific community, too, keeps its distance, regarding astronomy as a rather old-fashioned and superstitious discipline. Professionals these days call the field "astrophysics"--a label which may bring them closer to other scientists, but alienates them still more from the average person. The problems astrophysicians deal with often seem, to the common eye, ascetically dry, scholastically obscure, and maybe irreverent.

To the uninitiated, "the Observatory" means the tennis courts which lie below the buildings. Those who work at the place know it as the "Center for Astrophysics." This label, officially created in 1973 includes the programs of the Harvard College Observatory, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Astronomy department, all of which use the complex.

The buildings of the Observatory, a hodgepodge of different eras and styles, might be a metaphor for the research they house.

Impressive and expensive, the Center is wealthy. Money flows in from devotees, the state, and the University; private donations to the cause of specific researchers, federal appropriations to the Smithsonian, NASA contracts, and a Peter's Pence from Harvard tuitions. These riches are an embarrassment. The subject of money puts people on the defensive at the Observatory; each feels called to account for the sums spent on his research. Motivated by this same sense of responsibility verging on guilt, the Smithsonian, HCO and the Department of Astronomy try to explain the returns the public and the University get on their investment. As part of "Smithsonian Year", the institution's annual justification to Congress, the Smithsonian publishes a scoresheet, the "Report of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory." The Public Affairs Office of the Center puts out a series of educational pamphlets: "Comets", "Meteorites", and so forth. The Observatory holds open nights and colloquia, to which anyone interested is invited. And the tennis courts are free to Harvard students.

THESE TOKEN ATTEMPTS at interaction with the world outside the scientific enclave serendipitously serve to bind the members of the Observatory together. The colloquia and tennis are among the few common rituals in this intensely pluralistic society. The Observatory buildings mark the intersection of an almost infinite number of lines of research. But there is little communication between them; each fraternity keeps to itself. Research projects are conceived and funded separately, and teams work as closed units. A group will have more contact with people doing similar work in Arizona, or the USSR, than it will with a group doing a different project down the hall. A piecemeal progress is being made here, with technological inevitability.

But the Observatory housed another astronomy, not so long ago. An astronomy humanistically understood, an observation of a sky full of myth and poetry. Astrophysics is a specialized science, the exclusive province of a professional elite.

Listening to people at the Observatory, the fragments of this transition come together.

Art Goldberg is a junior majoring in Astronomy, one of the 22 undergraduates in the field. With a student/teacher ratio of about ten to one, Astronomy is a close-knit department. "Most of my professors are friends of mine too," Art says.

Art moves comfortably around the part of the Observatory he knows, exhibiting objects, people, and what each does with the enthusiasm of a novice. In his descriptions, the Observatory is glamorous. As he strides through the buildings, he explains things, and theories from the bottom up ("this is really pretty neat"). His excitement is contagious. And he knows all the eccentricities of the place: "There're lots of funny license plates around here. Fred Whipple's--he's the guy that did all that work on comets--says COMETS, and David Layzer's say HAAVAD and ENDURO."

Though he seems thoroughly at ease, Art doesn't quite know his way around the labyrinth of Perkin yet; he keeps looking through offices as he passes them, trying to orient himself with a glimpse of the outside world through the plate glass windows. Momentarily startled from their contemplation or industry, the inhabitants of the cells look up and smile.

In the Wolbach Library, Art pulls out the sky charts. He flips quickly through a brightly-colored one put out by the Czech Academy of Sciences--"This is mainly just a teaching tool"--pointing out the galactic equator, describing the meaning of different colors. The constellations are carefully boxed off, charting a sky far from anthropomorphic. Art lingers a bit more over a photographic atlas. "These are good pictures," he says, nodding approval. He describes problems people have mapping the sky. "Our galaxy is like a record--really thin and flat--so when you look through the record, you get what's known as the 'zone of obscuration'.

Observational astronomers--the field essentially divides into observation and theory--are visual-minded. Maps and photographs are not just tools, but art objects. "The plate stacks," Art says, "they're one of the most impressive things around here." The Plate Stacks are two floors of green metal cabinets full of stars captured in glass. This treasury, containing about half a million pictures which go back to the 1880s, forms the cornerstone of Building C. Martha Liller, guardian of the plates, explains that the expensive collection is one of the long-range investments of the Observatory; only in recent years has it begun to pay off in fashionable fields such as quasars and X-ray sources. She demonstrates the blink comparator, which is used to note changes in the light intensity of a star over time. "You put one plate on this side," she says, "and one over here. Then you look through this eyepiece. The machine flashes the two pictures in front of your eye alternately, fast. Anything whose light intensity is changing will show as blinking. They find optical correspondents for X-ray sources that way, for example."

On top of one cabinet of plates a more conventional photograph is propped. A chain of ladies in turn-of-the-century dress hold hands in front of an Observatory that no longer exists. At the end of the chain stands Edward C. Pickering, appointed Director of the Observatory in 1877. Pickering concentrated on photometry, using the Great Refractor to take thousands of pictures, which the ladies he leads in the picture classified.

IT TOOK THOUSANDS of man-hours," David Layzer says of the classification. "Or rather woman-hours. Those women who produced the Draper system (the plate-stacks classification system) came here maybe at 20 and stayed--some of them 30, 40 years. They weren't paid much of anything. Some had an independent income, but for those who didn't ..." Layzer frowns and shakes his head. A professor of Astronomy, Layzer has been around the Observatory a long time, teaching Nat Sci 90, a large undergraduate course, and doing theoretical work. "That was the old way of doing things here," he goes on. "The Observatory was run like an anthill. They had a slave labor system, in essence. All those non-productive females. Today astronomy is different. Now all the thinking is done by research teams, not one master. And all the rest is done by computer. I guess you could consider a computer programmer a non-reproductive female..."

Layzer's view is wide, inclusive; he pulls the pieces of the Observatory together as he talks. "I teach a Gen Ed course," he smiles. "Astronomy is a science where you can see the past feeding into the present in one generation," he continues. "Sergei Gaposchkin--he's quite a character--was studying binary stars 40 years ago. Now they think binary stars might be connected to x-ray sources. And that's part of a whole computer project."

The computer room is just down the hall from the plate stacks, in fact. The instruments' hum, not completely muffled by the heavy metal-cased door, grows louder as you approach. Inside, the maze of complex machinery makes the room vibrate. Arny Epstein, one of the researchers working on the HEAO-A3 satellite experiment, tries to make the names charts and computers comprehensible. He runs through the basics of his work in a matter-of-fact tone. Then he grins: "Now I'll show you something." He sits down in front of a TV screen hooked up to a typewriter keyboard and a piece of equipment that holds trays of minute interconnected objects. "Me and some other people put this together on a sort of alarm clock principle. This part"--he indicates the stack of trays--"is a Nova 1200 computer. But this part"--he waves at the TV-typewriter hookup--we did" Arny elaborates on the advantages of the screen system, which is labelled "Cosmic Investigations, Inc."

"This is the coup de grace," he continues, pushing more buttons. "Have you ever played Tanks at the 24 Rest? Well, this is better. It's called Space War. You have a satellite, and I have a satellite. Now you're in orbit". he says, pointing at the screen, on which two objects are rotating about a dot. "You can change your orbit by firing your engines, like this." Blips emerge from the back of one satellite and it starts to describe an ellipse. "Then you have torpedoes." He turns his spaceship, fires an arrow-shaped blip and the other ship disappears. Space War has an infinity of variations. "There is always the final escape--you can send yourself into Hyperspace." Arny's ship disappears in a flash of light. "But you don't know if you'll come back", he adds. "And if you do, it'll be in a totally random spot." Space War's cosmic overtones of that other world are only less intriguing than the mechanics of the game itself.

SEVERAL DECADES BACK IN TIME, at the other end of the binary-star research chain, Sergei Gaposchkin preserves the older world of Astronomy in his 6' by 8' cubicle under the Great Refractor a 15-inch telescope installed in 1847.

The room is hung with photographs of himself doing handstands. Each is labelled. "Sergei at 73" "Sergei at 67" etc. Gaposhkin describes his life's ideals in classical Greek terms. "I aimed to perfect my mind and my body." Tiny but muscular, the 77 year-old Gaposhkin is irrepressible. In the midst of conversation he stretches his arms up to the ceiling and implores God, "Why did You give me this incredible desire?" He is a bit of a dandy too; his yellow and brown patent leather shoes dictate the tone of his dress.

Gaposhkin has been around the Observatory since 1933. As he says in his opus, SERGEI, or the Divine Scramble, "Harvard College Observatory greeted very sweetly the stranger SERGEI, coming from the superior Regions of Divine power in Mind, Heart, Frame, as if knowing that he will contribute to Harvard a glory second to none; will discover 13 most remarkable stars and catch more star-stellar denizens than all astronomers observers at Harvard since its foundation in 1843..." Unpublished in two volumes (so far ...he is working on a third), SERGEI combines the hour-by-hour detail of Gorky's Autobiography with the expansiveness of War and Peace. Gaposhkin claims "everything is in there." He generously distributes the work to his friends, with a note: "Dear Friend, I hope in view of the present shortage of construction your shelves will endure the Weight and Size of this humble work."

Gaposhkin will talk on any subject, the bigger the better. He expands on universal peace and love, on a letter he wrote to President Nixon: "I said we should take all the biggest bombs, and drop them in the biggest ocean." Before technological progress gave birth to Space War, stargazing seems to have had a pacific influence.

PERHAPS JOHN WOLBACH '48, is right when he says, "The problem with astronomy today as I see it, is that the science has divorced itself away from philosophy and religion." Wolbach, an amateur observer, doesn't fit into the hierarchy very well; he is not a professional astronomer, nor a student, nor an employed research worker. "Many people," David Layzer says, "don't understand Mr. Wolbach."

Wolbach speaks jerkily, emphasizing most of the words in his sentences. This habit; combined with his propensity for Elizabethan phrases, makes his speech hard to understand. But having been at the Observatory for 25 years, he knows a lot about the backwaters of the place. In one continuous phrase, he sums up the history of the Observatory, commenting in passing on everything from Astro 1 (" ... the Harvard freshman course, which at one time, ahem, was a gut or football course") to the nature of astronomy (...there is a great deal of continuity in this science, unlike many others...") to the influence of the space race on astronomy. "The Apollo program, plus bad publicity, killed off public interest; it was extremely ill-advised to sell such things on TV, which, after all, goes for the lowest common denominator of mentality, because as a result, space programs became a bore; they were not astronomically illuminating to the few, and the many were never really excited." He straddles the chair and adjusts his tie--red, with green football players on it.

Wolbach is disenchanted. He has given up trying to get astronomers interested in the world outside. "I can't seem to describe to them what the public would like," he says. "So I have found it useless."

It is still possible for a man like Wolbach to retire from the world to the Observatory. But he will be the last untonsured astronomer there. The logarithmically increasing expansion and division of the field is widening the gap between those within the Observatory and those without.

The three telescopes at the Observatory are survivors of that same past era of the amateur. All are now obsolete, or rapidly becoming so. The smog and city lights make serious observing impossible in Cambridge. The gap between Cambridge and the stars widens both ways, unintentionally but inevitably.

A TOP THE SEARS TOWER, the Great Refractor, around which the HCO developed, is the focus of Open Nights, when interested outsiders are shown around the precincts. The Observatory ignores it.

John Wolbach is one of the few persons who has a key to its dome. He has been in charge of the Great Refractor during the last 15 years, during which the Tower, the dome and the telescope itself have decayed rapidly. Wolbach, distressed, would like to restore the Tower from the bottom up. "This room, the rotunda at the base here, has potential," he says, walking around the granite pier that supports the Refractor. Brilliant murals signed "Sergei Gaposhkin, 1957" line the walls. Wolbach frowns at them. "A Russian individual by the name of Sergei Gaposhkin--Dr. Gaposhkin--was given liberties, here. He, ahem, found the ultraviolet paint, as you see, and then he--painted." Wolbach comes down with emphasis on the last word, and stops in front of a vivid pink, flaming "SUN".

The mahogany and brass telescope points upward in the center of this decaying elegance. It smells of ships; between it and the white, wooden dome the room seems a reassembling of some old dismantled Pequod. Wolbach stumps to the door leading out to the roof, then turns looking back, up at the white curve. "They say this was built by a shipwright, a man who built whaling boats," he says. "But it leaks."

On the Science Center a metal dome glints brightly, catching the last light of the spring sun. The "Michael" telescope has just been mounted on the roof there; Art, a former professor of his, and some other students set it up. Nat Sci 90 will use it, instead of the "9" telescope on the Observatory roof, for the simple projects that can still be done there, where the city obscures the stars. The occasional amateur can come up on Friday nights to peek at the lavender and cornerless box of Cambridge sky. If the moon rattles, the Observatory will doubtless hear about it from a computer, or a satellite.