Last Pictures by Paglen Trevor

Author:Paglen, Trevor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

26. Tower of Babel (detail), Pieter Bruegel the Elder

27. Demonstration of eating, licking, and drinking

When George Helou (pictured on the right) arrived to study astronomy at Cornell University in 1975, the twenty-three-year-old Lebanese graduate student found what he described as an “American experience.” Although Helou had fallen in love with the night sky in his home country, he never imagined studying astronomy could become a career. When Carl Sagan and other Cornell faculty began developing the Voyager space probes’ Golden Records, Helou volunteered to help. The idea that he could choose whether or not to work on his professors’ projects was as alien to him as the idea that there would not be an exam. “The whole thing, including the notion that we should send pictures to extraterrestrials, all seemed very ‘American,’ ” he recalled Nonetheless, he enjoyed the “exercise in self-assessment more than anything else . . . How do you describe humanity? And without any cultural references?”

Helou joined Carl Sagan’s assistant Wendy Gradison and Argentine radio-astronomer Val Boriakoff to create an image intended to be a “demonstration of eating, licking, and drinking.” The first two activities proved easy enough: Gradison was given an ice cream cone and Boriakoff a toasted tuna sandwich (although he hated tuna). But showing the act of drinking proved to be a challenge. Their first attempts “didn’t show much,” said Helou. “I suggested we use a jug with a special spout. Because if you really want to capture drinking, you have to show water flowing into the mouth. And from a scientific perspective, that was our first concern—to show the flow.” The budding scientist also wanted to indicate that water has a surface and is subject to gravity, and that gravity has a particular strength. “We took numerous takes over a twenty-minute period before we got it right. And I think we did.”

Helou went on to join the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where he has spent the past twenty-nine years. Boriakoff discovered PSR 1953+29, the first binary millisecond pulsar, in 1983. He passed away in 1999. We were unable to locate Wendy Gradison for this book.

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