The computer room is just down the hall from the plate stacks, in fact. The instruments' hum, not completely muffled by the heavy metal-cased door, grows louder as you approach. Inside, the maze of complex machinery makes the room vibrate. Arny Epstein, one of the researchers working on the HEAO-A3 satellite experiment, tries to make the names charts and computers comprehensible. He runs through the basics of his work in a matter-of-fact tone. Then he grins: "Now I'll show you something." He sits down in front of a TV screen hooked up to a typewriter keyboard and a piece of equipment that holds trays of minute interconnected objects. "Me and some other people put this together on a sort of alarm clock principle. This part"--he indicates the stack of trays--"is a Nova 1200 computer. But this part"--he waves at the TV-typewriter hookup--we did" Arny elaborates on the advantages of the screen system, which is labelled "Cosmic Investigations, Inc."
"This is the coup de grace," he continues, pushing more buttons. "Have you ever played Tanks at the 24 Rest? Well, this is better. It's called Space War. You have a satellite, and I have a satellite. Now you're in orbit". he says, pointing at the screen, on which two objects are rotating about a dot. "You can change your orbit by firing your engines, like this." Blips emerge from the back of one satellite and it starts to describe an ellipse. "Then you have torpedoes." He turns his spaceship, fires an arrow-shaped blip and the other ship disappears. Space War has an infinity of variations. "There is always the final escape--you can send yourself into Hyperspace." Arny's ship disappears in a flash of light. "But you don't know if you'll come back", he adds. "And if you do, it'll be in a totally random spot." Space War's cosmic overtones of that other world are only less intriguing than the mechanics of the game itself.
SEVERAL DECADES BACK IN TIME, at the other end of the binary-star research chain, Sergei Gaposchkin preserves the older world of Astronomy in his 6' by 8' cubicle under the Great Refractor a 15-inch telescope installed in 1847.
The room is hung with photographs of himself doing handstands. Each is labelled. "Sergei at 73" "Sergei at 67" etc. Gaposhkin describes his life's ideals in classical Greek terms. "I aimed to perfect my mind and my body." Tiny but muscular, the 77 year-old Gaposhkin is irrepressible. In the midst of conversation he stretches his arms up to the ceiling and implores God, "Why did You give me this incredible desire?" He is a bit of a dandy too; his yellow and brown patent leather shoes dictate the tone of his dress.
Gaposhkin has been around the Observatory since 1933. As he says in his opus, SERGEI, or the Divine Scramble, "Harvard College Observatory greeted very sweetly the stranger SERGEI, coming from the superior Regions of Divine power in Mind, Heart, Frame, as if knowing that he will contribute to Harvard a glory second to none; will discover 13 most remarkable stars and catch more star-stellar denizens than all astronomers observers at Harvard since its foundation in 1843..." Unpublished in two volumes (so far ...he is working on a third), SERGEI combines the hour-by-hour detail of Gorky's Autobiography with the expansiveness of War and Peace. Gaposhkin claims "everything is in there." He generously distributes the work to his friends, with a note: "Dear Friend, I hope in view of the present shortage of construction your shelves will endure the Weight and Size of this humble work."
Gaposhkin will talk on any subject, the bigger the better. He expands on universal peace and love, on a letter he wrote to President Nixon: "I said we should take all the biggest bombs, and drop them in the biggest ocean." Before technological progress gave birth to Space War, stargazing seems to have had a pacific influence.
PERHAPS JOHN WOLBACH '48, is right when he says, "The problem with astronomy today as I see it, is that the science has divorced itself away from philosophy and religion." Wolbach, an amateur observer, doesn't fit into the hierarchy very well; he is not a professional astronomer, nor a student, nor an employed research worker. "Many people," David Layzer says, "don't understand Mr. Wolbach."
Wolbach speaks jerkily, emphasizing most of the words in his sentences. This habit; combined with his propensity for Elizabethan phrases, makes his speech hard to understand. But having been at the Observatory for 25 years, he knows a lot about the backwaters of the place. In one continuous phrase, he sums up the history of the Observatory, commenting in passing on everything from Astro 1 (" ... the Harvard freshman course, which at one time, ahem, was a gut or football course") to the nature of astronomy (...there is a great deal of continuity in this science, unlike many others...") to the influence of the space race on astronomy. "The Apollo program, plus bad publicity, killed off public interest; it was extremely ill-advised to sell such things on TV, which, after all, goes for the lowest common denominator of mentality, because as a result, space programs became a bore; they were not astronomically illuminating to the few, and the many were never really excited." He straddles the chair and adjusts his tie--red, with green football players on it.
Wolbach is disenchanted. He has given up trying to get astronomers interested in the world outside. "I can't seem to describe to them what the public would like," he says. "So I have found it useless."
It is still possible for a man like Wolbach to retire from the world to the Observatory. But he will be the last untonsured astronomer there. The logarithmically increasing expansion and division of the field is widening the gap between those within the Observatory and those without.
The three telescopes at the Observatory are survivors of that same past era of the amateur. All are now obsolete, or rapidly becoming so. The smog and city lights make serious observing impossible in Cambridge. The gap between Cambridge and the stars widens both ways, unintentionally but inevitably.
A TOP THE SEARS TOWER, the Great Refractor, around which the HCO developed, is the focus of Open Nights, when interested outsiders are shown around the precincts. The Observatory ignores it.
John Wolbach is one of the few persons who has a key to its dome. He has been in charge of the Great Refractor during the last 15 years, during which the Tower, the dome and the telescope itself have decayed rapidly. Wolbach, distressed, would like to restore the Tower from the bottom up. "This room, the rotunda at the base here, has potential," he says, walking around the granite pier that supports the Refractor. Brilliant murals signed "Sergei Gaposhkin, 1957" line the walls. Wolbach frowns at them. "A Russian individual by the name of Sergei Gaposhkin--Dr. Gaposhkin--was given liberties, here. He, ahem, found the ultraviolet paint, as you see, and then he--painted." Wolbach comes down with emphasis on the last word, and stops in front of a vivid pink, flaming "SUN".
The mahogany and brass telescope points upward in the center of this decaying elegance. It smells of ships; between it and the white, wooden dome the room seems a reassembling of some old dismantled Pequod. Wolbach stumps to the door leading out to the roof, then turns looking back, up at the white curve. "They say this was built by a shipwright, a man who built whaling boats," he says. "But it leaks."
On the Science Center a metal dome glints brightly, catching the last light of the spring sun. The "Michael" telescope has just been mounted on the roof there; Art, a former professor of his, and some other students set it up. Nat Sci 90 will use it, instead of the "9" telescope on the Observatory roof, for the simple projects that can still be done there, where the city obscures the stars. The occasional amateur can come up on Friday nights to peek at the lavender and cornerless box of Cambridge sky. If the moon rattles, the Observatory will doubtless hear about it from a computer, or a satellite.