The Man Who Painted the Universe by Ron Legro

Author:Ron Legro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Published: 2015-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

8

ALL FALL DOWN

Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.

—John Quincy Adams, Oration at Plymouth

Throughout the latter half of 1996, Frank spent most of his spare time and many sleepless nights conceiving a design for the rotating globe. He did the planning almost entirely inside his head, although eventually he drafted a sheaf of pencil sketches, beginning around January 1997, a few months before he began actual construction.

The sketches crystallized his thinking, detailing how the globe would be angled at 45 degrees, with an opening portal at the bottom, and showing the gear that would rotate it. His almost meteoric flash of inspiration came after he remembered the glowing-paint mural he’d created in his bedroom in Chicago. He realized he could expand that youthful exercise by painting the entire visible universe onto the inner surface of the globe. Instead of reflecting light, as in a projector planetarium, his stars would glow and radiate of their own accord, just like their real counterparts.

“It just came to me,” he said later, recalling the moment so vividly that he switched from past to present tense. “I am thinking of doing it, believe or not, in a rotating globe where I can show all the seasons. My vision is a big sky map where you can get people inside it, which is a planetarium. But if it doesn’t turn, it is not any good.”

A projector can move the stars it projects by shifting position; the projection surface needn’t move at all. Frank didn’t have that luxury. He would need to paint his stars into fixed places, just as the stars appear fixed in relation to one another in the night sky. He would have to design his tapestry to move in some other way to duplicate the celestial progression through the night as the Earth itself rotates. Given his financial constraints, he resolved to invent what was—as far as he knew—a new way of reproducing the night sky.

He realized it would be a daunting task. “Before the actual physical construction of the planetarium, I could visualize the structure,” he recalls, “yet I knew something of this magnitude would be quite a challenge.”

Although Frank remembers that much of the concept came to him in a single flash, history suggests the revelation had been building up inside him for years. Cosmologists pondering the birth of the universe generally have focused on the big bang theory of sudden universal creation, but that model says nothing about what preceded time and space. What earlier events enabled Frank Kovac’s personal big bang of inspiration?

Pressed to think back, Frank remembers one such moment, when he was fifteen. Before glow-painting the planet Saturn and stars on his bedroom wall, he recalls excitedly telling his classmates he could replicate a planetarium with luminous paint. When the mural was finished a month or so later, Frank ran informal tours, proudly showing the resulting mural to his friends. Among them it became known as Frankie’s Wall.

Marveling

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