No Stone Left Unturned

Friday, October 8, 2004, 8:30am

From my passing window the face of Lake Cochituate is even glassier than yesterday morning – a near-perfect mirror with nary a ripple of any kind. Also once again there are no clouds overhead – a day more like Flagstaff in northern Arizona than Natick in southern New England. With this realization, a longer thread of memories comes to life from other times and other journeys…

Twice staying near Phoenix with a free Sunday to burn I headed north towards Flagstaff driving at various times through looping tours of the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Meteor Crater, and Mars Hill where Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 after a year-long photographic search.

Pluto is a Kupier Belt Object (KBO) orbiting through the inner fringes of a vast region beyond the orbit of Neptune. Many other KBOs have been discovered in recent years, some almost as big as Pluto. Yet in 1930 Tombaugh knew nothing about KBOs. He was simply continuing a decade-long program searching for a mysterious “Planet X” presumed to exist based on distortions in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Neptune was discovered on the basis of such thinking in 1846, so the notion wasn’t beyond reason.

Not long after Pluto was found, questions arose because it is much too small and far too remote to have caused observable changes in the orbit of any planet. Further dimming Pluto’s significance – Einstein’s theories combined with further observations showed how there were no significant perturbations in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus – and therefore no need for Planet X. Tiny Pluto had been discovered though a simple misconception – not out of true necessity.

Likely there are hundreds if not thousands of KBOs the size of Pluto or bigger which means we have a situation brewing – because if Pluto is a ‘planet’ then civilization must prepare to absorb a list of planets growing into the hundreds – referring to them by numbers rather than by names and whatever was once special about being a planet could come to an end.

It won’t happen, though.

With so many other ‘Plutos’ being found every few months it won’t be long before some KBO orb even bigger than Pluto is found, and then all hell will break loose as much as it ever does in scientific circles. Down in our guts planets are special, and I can hardly imagine the International Astronomical Union undoing perhaps 150,000 years of human amazement and wonder by adding a huge list of numbered bodies nobody can see without specialized equipment mounted to monstrous telescopes.

What will become of tiny Pluto? The planet Pluto will be removed from the ranks of the major planets – perhaps given a KBO number and grandfathered with its given name.

Yet that is not a bad thing.

Classical notions never find themselves easily overturned apart from significant needling from the real Universe. In this case, rather than diminish his achievement, in the end Clyde Tombaugh will be seen to have made an even greater discovery for the very reasons Pluto is no longer a classical planetary body. KBOs are a whole new category equal to the discovery of moons orbiting planets and realization of galaxies receding from our own. Without careful observations from astronomers like Galileo and Hubble and Tombaugh, our awareness of the Universe would never have grown.

Mars Hill is located at the Lowell Observatory – an institute founded by a member of the famous Lowells of Massachusetts. At the time, Abbott Lowell was already president of Harvard University, and his sister, Amy, would soon have the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. But in some circles their brother, Percival, a mathematician and astronomer, would become the most noteworthy of them all for his famous visual observations of Mars.

In the late 1800s Percival was sifting for meaning in his life when he heard how Goivanni Schaparelli, the ‘discoverer’ of Martian canals, was losing his eyesight – and at the age of 38 Lowell took up the challenge to observe Martian canals with the most powerful telescopes of his time.

In 1907 Lowell borrowed an 18-inch Clark refracting telescope from Amherst College in central Massachusetts and shipped this instrument to South America for the best possible viewing of Mars as it passed through Chilean winter night. Moving the behemoth would have been no easy feat by any standards. The tube assembly spans roughly 25 feet and with its cast iron pedestal and delicate main objective the instrument weighs at least six tons not including a protective dome and related equipment.

Back at Amherst College – 87 years later – I was first in line waiting for my own view through this big old Clark. Next in line Al Nagler was waiting for his own chance while chatting up the crowd much to everyone’s delight. Al is one of the beloved benefactors of amateur astronomy, designing and offering a large selection of eyepieces for visual observing. This particular night he was trying out the first samples from a brand new line he is calling the Panoptic, and I was his first guinea pig.

I remember our view of Saturn low in the southern sky. Working at a power of about 300x the planet seemed as big as a golf ball held at arms-length. But with optical power there is also optical noise and the near-impossibility of sifting tantalizing details from a shimmering mess. According to my dad’s camouflage research, right at the edge of perception, the mind will begin to invent coherent visualizations from any incoherent and fluctuating image, and in the absence of firm ideas about what is really there, the ensuing imagination can stray far from reality as the human mind attempts to assembled missing pieces from a vast reservoir of concrete experience.

Percival Lowell labored under a fixed and preconceived notion that canals really did crisscross the red planet, likely built by some ancient civilization to pull melt water from ice-capped poles. The man was no fool, and his great contributions to science demonstrate this, but at the very edge of observational capacity the human eye can only see what the human mind expects it to see, and based on popular myth and internal conviction, Lowell expected to see canals.

Lowell’s vision of Martian canals lasted just two generations – ending during the afternoon and evening of July 15, 1964 when images from Mariner 4 arrived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. First there was silence, and then gasps, and then finally a palpable sense of loss as television screen after television screen revealed a vast wasteland filled with moon-like craters. Even though no scientist standing in that room had any reason to see Mars as a livable place with flowing water and greening seasons, until that very moment this was still a dream harbored by every one of them since childhood.

Mars did not change – but we did. And when the time comes to reclassify Pluto – Pluto will not change either – but we will.

Ideas and notions and beliefs seem equally important to the human spirit as relationships with other people, and when one of these inner realities is upset by the outward Universe, it is a painful loss no matter how true the new reality may be.

“Back Bay! Back Bay Station! Change here for the Orange Line!”

Norm’s announcement over the intercom brings me back to the present reality. Through an open door I hear the Back Bay platform announcer broadcasting the track number for a westbound train that will retrace our eastbound path. If the signs overhanging the platforms at Ashland Station can be believed, the trains will be using just the south side rails again today. So once again I have a choice about where to sit tonight – at the front or back of the train – depending on just how much I believe this new reality and my resulting need to cross the tracks using the station stairways.

“South Station! South Station! Change here for the Red Line!”