BOOK REVIEW
Astropolitics
Eric Chaisson
Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of
Technology. W. Patrick McCray. viii + 367 pp. Harvard
University Press, 2004. $45.
As an arriving student at Harvard more than 30 years ago, I sought
out some famous astronomers at a reception to welcome newcomers. As
I approached them, planning to introduce myself, I couldn't help
overhearing the end of a conversation that shocked me: A visiting
astronomer was telling the observatory director heatedly, "Your
observatory is getting too damn big!" He glanced at me with
disdain and walked away. Welcome, indeed, to the big leagues of astronomy.
The visitor that day was Jesse Greenstein of Caltech, a powerful
champion of small, elite academic programs designed to serve only a
few astronomers, giving them private access to the biggest
telescopes. And the recipient of his ire was Leo Goldberg, whose
Harvard College Observatory took a team approach to astronomy and
space science; Goldberg often supported drives to build national
telescopes for use by all astronomers.
Greenstein's jab at Goldberg that day typifies a cultural battle
that still rages. The controversy is especially heated among optical
astronomers, who are more contentious than any other group of
scientists I know. They regularly bicker over whether astronomy
should be practiced by small groups using private telescopes or by
large teams at open-
access national facilities. It's a classic
confrontation of "haves" and "have-nots," but a
complex one, because when it comes to owning powerful telescopes,
rich East Coast institutions like Harvard are among the have-nots.
In Giant Telescopes, science historian W. Patrick McCray
addresses this cultural divide, especially the professional rivalry
between private and national observatories. In the first few
chapters, he uses the careers of Greenstein and Goldberg to
illustrate it, describing the many clashes that took place between
the two men in the 1960s and 1970s as it became increasingly hard
for solitary astronomers to practice traditional modes of
investigation as individuals. The general reader is likely to find
McCray's account of the "astropolitics" of this era
amusing, although the narrative suffers somewhat from a lack of
intimate detail because he didn't know these colorful characters personally.
The middle chapters of the book highlight a debate that occurred in
the 1980s about the design of big telescopes (ones larger than the
archetypal 5-meter Palomar device in California). Should the new
mirrors be single, monolithic pieces of polished glass? Or should
they be clusters of smaller, less expensive mirrors working
together? McCray relates well the sad story of the inability of the
National Optical Astronomy Observatory to bring together the
astronomy community as the consortium struggled for survival. It
scaled back its plans first for the 25-meter Next Generation
Telescope and then for the 15-meter National New Technology
Telescope, finally settling on twin 8-meter Gemini telescopes, one
in each hemisphere. This part of the book will be slow going for the
general reader—there are few diagrams or illustrations to help
the uninitiated, and McCray's close probing of the record does not
make for a very exciting read.
The final chapters chronicle the ordeal of building the Gemini
national telescopes in the 1990s, each smaller than the private Keck
telescopes in Hawaii and a good deal less powerful than Europe's
Very Large Telescope in Chile. The Gemini observatories, although
originally conceived as an American undertaking, became an
international endeavor, and the telescopes are now
available to any astronomer from any of the countries that
collaborated on their construction (the United States, the United
Kingdom, Canada, Chile, Australia, Argentina and Brazil). In his
account of the policy, politics and engineering leading up to the
actual building of the observatories, and throughout the book,
McCray relies on archived correspondence, technical documents and
interviews with some of the principals involved. This saga will
likely interest most those who lived though the troubled project; I
was mostly on the sidelines and thus had a tough time staying with
this section of the text.
The most insightful and readable part of the book is the short
concluding chapter. Here, McCray weighs the question of whether the
astronomy community today is becoming more like the high-energy
physics community, with its big budgets, huge teams and pipeline
data collection. He also wonders whether European optical
astronomers, who are more unified than their fragmented American
counterparts, are about to achieve the same sort of dominance as
European high-energy physicists.
My impression is that in books of this type,
historians often write, without knowing it, a kind of revisionist
history. McCray was not a player in, or even a witness to, any of the
decisive events he describes. That may make it easier for him to be
objective as he assesses the record, but it also means that he lacks an
insider's view, however subjective. Specifically, the interviews he
conducted years after the key events unfolded have in some cases yielded
little more than self-serving statements. Accordingly, the book does not
capture particularly well the daily pressures, regular infighting,
peculiar culture, methods and triumphs of today's optical astronomers
doing big science in a golden age of astrophysics.—Eric J.
Chaisson, Astrophysics, Tufts University