The New York Times - USA (2020-12-02)

A2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2020

In my years as a journalist I’ve had the

opportunity to crawl around in all sorts of

forbidden high-tech environments: under-

ground at CERN, giant water tanks in

Houston where they trained the space

shuttle and International Space Station

astronauts, observatories where the ghosts

of famous astronomers lurked in the perpet-

ual twilight of telescope domes. I watched

them build the space shuttle and then retire

it, and saw them almost abandon the Hub-

ble Space Telescope. Don’t ask me about the

Superconducting Super Collider.

On Tuesday we learned that one of as-

tronomy’s greatest sites had fallen. That

would be the Arecibo telescope, technically

the National Astronomy and Ionosphere

Center, in Puerto Rico. Its 1,000-foot-wide

antenna had been used by scientists study-

ing the cosmos, the atmosphere and dan-

gerous asteroids, and was a symbol of the

search for extraterrestrial life.

Two weeks ago, Arecibo’s operator, the

National Science Foundation, said the tele-

scope was damaged beyond repair and

would be demolished. But on Tuesday it fell

down on its own. Nine hundred tons of

equipment crashed into the great dish

suspended above the rural flora, kicking up

dust and stirring a sense of mourning.

It was a slap-in-the-face reminder that

nature and chance are the ultimate arbiters

of our ambitions, our pride, our destiny.

I visited Arecibo once, in another lifetime.

It was 1968 and I was working for a com-

pany affiliated with the old Atomic Energy

Commission. We were there as part of an

experiment with high-altitude clouds of

ionized gas. It was a sci-fi dream of an

experience, all that gleaming white high-

tech in the jungle mountains.

I became a science writer a few years

later, when I published a piece in Technol-

ogy Review about cosmic rays. In 1976 I

joined Sky and Telescope magazine as an

assistant typesetter and overall go-fer. That

led to a job at Discover magazine, part of

Time Inc., and then a decade in the woods

of upstate New York, where I wrote two

books. In 1997, the science editor of The

Times, Cory Dean, invited me to lunch.

I never made it back to Arecibo. I had

planned to stop by on a vacation trip in

2008, but a diving accident sent me to the

emergency room instead.

The Arecibo Observatory was on a star-

vation diet for the last few years. One les-

son of all this is that if you don’t maintain

something, you will lose it, whether it is a

robot on Mars or a telescope on Earth.

But you could argue that all of science

has been on a starvation diet since the

Apollo years, once we no longer had to

worry about beating the Russians. It is

worth remembering that the Arecibo tele-

scope started off as a defense project to

understand how missile warheads would

interact with the atmosphere.

Covering science, you learn that some of

the things that have the biggest emotional

pull with the public are not always the

things that have the biggest weight in the

professional scientific community. There is

always a push and pull between the old and

the new, and sentiment doesn’t always have

a vote. That’s just the way scientists are.

When the debate about servicing the Hub-

ble was going on 15 years ago, in the wake

of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia,

some astronomers were arguing it was time

to move on, referring to Hubble as “an old

jalopy” that had had its day.

As a journalist, I can’t take sides in these

kinds of debates, as much as I have my own

preferences and tastes in exploration. I still

think one of the coolest proposals I’ve heard

recently was to send a boat to sail the meth-

ane seas of Titan in search of life or at least

the kind of chemistry that could lead to it.

Money plays a big role in these delibera-

tions, although history will record that the

most recent $12 million operating budget

for Arecibo was too much of a bargain to be

true.

What never goes away is the ingenuity

and brilliance and perseverance of humans.

The scientific community has its own

procedures for determining priorities. But

us journalists, we’re always writing obits of

one sort or another.

Inside The Times

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

The Arecibo telescope’s giant antenna had studied the cosmos for decades. It collapsed Tuesday.

RICARDO ARDUENGO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

A Writer Reflects on a Fallen Wonder

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Read about the Arecibo telescope’s collapse

on Page A20.

December 2, 1998.In the biggest merger in history at the time, Exxon, the nation’s larg-

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