First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (36 page)

For their friendship and encouragement, many thanks to John and Yolanda McPhee, Bonnie Hunter, Bill Howarth, Lewis and Ellen Goble, and Helen and Robert Alexander.

My particular thanks to Prof. John Thorstensen, of Dartmouth College, for his thoughtful reading of many parts of the manuscript for scientific accuracy, and for often helping me to find the right words. Any errors of scientific fact in this book, however, are entirely my own folly.

I owe a debt of scholarship to two historians of science: Spencer Weart, of the American Institute of Physics, and David DeVorkin, of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Dr. Weart and Dr. DeVorkin have built up and nurtured fine collections of oral-history interviews with astronomers, physicists, and space scientists, among which Dr. Weart’s
interview with Maarten Schmidt and Dr. DeVorkin’s interview with James Westphal were especially interesting and useful to me.

I owe a debt of another kind to the late Wilbury A. Crockett, a retired teacher of English from Wellesley High School, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, I was not one of Mr. Crockett’s better students, but he somehow managed to instill in us his respect for words. And many thanks to Robert Chambers, of Pomona College, for taking his astronomy class on a field trip to see the Hale Telescope. That was my first meeting with the Big Eye.

Also many thanks to Harry Evans of Random House, for making this new edition of
First Light
possible, and to my remarkable editor at Random House, Sharon DeLano. And thanks to Charlie Conrad at Anchor Books for his enthusiasm and help.

A large number of people gave interviews and supplied background material and expertise for this book. Many, many thanks to:

Finally, for all of his help, I wish to thank Larry Blakée. When he was twelve years old, he saw the two-hundred-inch mirror being polished in the Caltech optical shop, something he never forgot. When he grew up, he became the first electronics technician for the Hale Telescope—he devoted his working life to that mirror and to all of the things that surround it.