Einstein's Shadow by Seth Fletcher

Author:Seth Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

16

MALDEN, MASSACHUSETTS

JULY 2014

Shep usually rose each morning around five, a respectable time for overachievers. These days, though, he was regularly waking up at three, his mind spontaneously seizing upon some element of a nightmarish two-and-a-half-page to-do list.

He’d typed up the list soon after returning from a not-exactly-relaxing family vacation to Israel during the outbreak of war with Hamas. On the day they visited the Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem, sirens blared as they walked out the door. Everyone ran back inside and scrambled into an underground parking garage, from where they listened to the Iron Dome activate. Antirocket interceptors blasted off from mobile missile batteries. Midair explosions rumbled the garage.

Now Shep got to confront the imminent demise of CARMA. He had known that the Event Horizon Telescope was competing with CARMA for a fixed pool of grant money from the National Science Foundation, but there were political reasons that all they could do was cross their fingers and hope that both won. That didn’t happen. Without the grant, CARMA would burn through what money it had left until next April, after which workers would crane the observatory’s twenty-three big white dishes onto flatbed trucks and haul them down the mountain. CARMA’s final expense would be restoring the land it had to a pristine natural state, as the U.S. Forest Service required.

On paper, the EHT could lose one site and still take a picture of a black hole. In practice, however, they usually lost one site per observation anyway because of bad weather. The EHT’s strength—its efficient repurposing of existing telescopes—was only a strength if those telescopes continued to exist.

So they were going for it next year. What choice did they have? Computer simulations showed that for making images of Sagittarius A* and M87, CARMA was, if not essential, close to it. Shep kept hoping that some billionaire might Gulfstream in with $6 million a year and emboss his name on CARMA, but no one thought that was likely. It looked as if they had no choice but to pull the full Event Horizon Telescope array together between now and next March, somehow convince ALMA to participate, and, worst case, hope that new computer simulations would reveal that without CARMA, they were not, in fact, screwed.

So upon return from Israel, Shep typed up a deceptively short list of what had to be done before the spring 2015 observation. Every item on the list contained its own baby universe, each obeying its own laws of nature. The takeaway was that over the next several months, they had to install crates of equipment, some of which had not yet been built, at nearly every telescope they planned to use.

They’d figured out long ago that merely coordinating these telescopes wasn’t enough to achieve their goals. They’d have to continue the long march toward higher bandwidth—faster electronics, bigger data packs. The goal for next year was to reach sixteen gigabits per second. To get there, they’d have to install a full kit of the latest

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