From Eros to Gaia by Freeman Dyson

Author:Freeman Dyson [Dyson, Freeman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307831026
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Hale now had Yerkes hooked but not yet landed. Hale needed not just a forty-inch lens but a telescope mount and a dome and a stellar spectrograph and an observatory building three hundred feet long. Over the next three years, Charles Yerkes was persuaded to provide all these things, slowly and painfully, one at a time. Five years passed before the observatory was finished and Yerkes earned his reward of presiding over the dedication ceremonies. Meanwhile, George Hale had founded the Astrophysical Journal, the leading professional astronomical journal in the world, and had secured the mirror-blank for a sixty-inch reflecting telescope to put into his next observatory.

The next observatory happened to be at Mount Wilson in California, to which Hale moved in 1904. He installed his 60-inch reflector there in 1908. This time the telescope and the buildings were paid for by Andrew Carnegie, who was subjected to the same treatment as Charles Yerkes and succumbed even more quickly. The citizens of Pasadena were as proud of their big new telescope as the citizens of Chicago had been of theirs. Andrew Carnegie made the mistake of coming in person to visit Mount Wilson two years after the 60-inch reflector was installed. He spent a rainy night on the mountain with Hale and saw no stars. As a result, he found himself paying for a large share of the 100-inch telescope that went into operation alongside the 60-inch seven years later.

Hale afterward explained why he felt himself compelled to make such immodest demands on Mr. Carnegie’s generosity: “I was thus bound to undertake the heavy task of raising funds or to forego the possibilities I seemed to see ahead. These were nothing less than an effective union of astronomy and physics, directed primarily toward the solution of the problem of stellar evolution, but with equal consideration of the advantages to be gained by fundamental physics from such a joint study.” A fair and balanced verdict on Hale’s career was pronounced long after his death by Hunter Dupree: “Hale was one of the first prototypes of the high-pressure, heavy-hardware, big-spending, team-organized scientific entrepreneurs. Would that all who followed him on this path had his technical competence, his clarity of scientific objective, and his breadth of view.”

Hale’s final adventure, the planning and building of the two-hundred-inch telescope on Mount Palomar, belongs to a more modern era. Instead of raising the funds from Mr. John D. Rockefeller personally, as he would have done in the old days, Hale had to deal with the administrative apparatus of the International Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. But the result was the same. Six million dollars flowed out of the Rockefeller coffers, and the telescope that bears Hale’s name dominated observational astronomy for a quarter of a century.

George Hale was preeminent as organizer of the private support of astronomy. Yet astronomy today is supported by governments, not by millionaires. The era of private endowment of major scientific enterprises is generally believed to be past. How then can

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