Nevertheless, it’s easy to see why people want to be there. Although astronomy is not very glamorous - there are few “Eureka!”s and even Hubble’s discovery was built on others’ ideas - the appeal is in just being there. Strogan, for example, is a former auto mechanic and astronomy hobbyist who made it to the controls of the field’s Holy Grail, and for him there’s nothing like sitting for a night at the desk. “It’s tough living up here,” he says. “But the hard part is the downtime, when we’re not working. The fun is when we’re in here.” If you like the night sky, what better place to be? After all, when the dome opens, it really is just you and the heavens.
Which is an unavoidably impressive feeling. When I first see the door slide out to reveal the stars and an invading sliver of moonlight, I can’t help wondering if the mere sense of place influenced Hubble’s discovery: Looking out into that expanse, how could you not find an expanding universe? From Mount Wilson, it’s easy to see why the early narratives and rituals of civilization were rooted in the stars - they tell us a lot, especially now that we can add scientific understanding to superstition. The night sky, as those of us who seldom see it forget, invites both awe and interpretation. The first marvel is that the stars are really there, drifting around a universe indescribably far beyond our scale. More startling is that we actually know a lot about these things and can derive scientific, if not metaphysical, meaning from them.
Photograph by Leor Levine
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This, for me, has always been the essence of Hubble’s discovery - that science constantly navigates the edge of fathoming the unfathomable. From lines exposed onto glass plates, we can deduce the nature of a cosmos that will always be outside our experience. Like relativity, or other great discoveries, that kind of intuition is sort of the cosmological equivalent of Hitchcock’s zoom-dolly shot: It puts us, uneasily, at the center of a center-less universe. Human intellect keeps revealing, in very certain detail, a universe that is indifferent to it. And that’s the rub: We learn ever more about a physical world that can be described but not fully understood. Every time science answers How? at a place like Mount Wilson, the Why? question only looms larger. As a friend rejoined after I tried to explain Hubble’s discovery: “Aah. So, the universe must be expanding, because the dots on the balloon are moving away from each other. But,” - he turned, leaned in, and added with a pointed finger - “then who’s blowing up the balloon?”
