HALL OF MIRRORS

 

I think it a profound that all telescopes involve mirrors. In 1846 this idea was stumbled upon by the obsessive-compulsive painter Alvin Graham Clark, when he realized there was more money to be made in selling telescopes to rich people than in just painting portraits of rich people. Alvin then dropped his brush and took up the polishing rag. 

It was said this self taught optician could feel imperfections in the glass lenses through his thumb while polishing them. For over a half a century Alvin Clark and Sons ground magnificent telescopes for rich clients who saw funding observatories as grand monuments to their own intellectual beneficence. 

Five times Alvin Clark and Sons produced lenses for the largest refraction telescopes in the world. But it is another sad truth that making optical telescopes is an ephemeral art form, since in the eyes of the viewer all mirrors tell lies. Even a Clark

One of Alvin Clark's most enthusiastic customers was Mr. Percival Lowell, whose mommy gave him a 2 1/4 inch Clark on his fifteenth birthday. Astronomy was the kind of hobby mother and son could share atop their Brookline, Massachusetts mansion. At his father's insistence Percival went into business in Japan (above - the tall one without the hat). But he always returned to his first love; astronomy.  And as the end of the 19^th century approached, Percy was attracted by the approach of Mars. 

The more people looked at the red planet, the more it looked like earth. Kepler was the first to realize that Mars was a neighbor of ours. But it was the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens, who drew the first detailed maps of the distant planet's surface. 

Then in September of 1877, as the orbits of Earth and Mars converged, Giovanni Schiaparelli used a new and better telescope and saw what looked like mountain ranges and plains and long mysterious grooves which crisscrossed the planet. He described the grooves in Italian as “canalii”,  a word meaning a channel, or path.  It is sad to point out here, that although Percival Lowell spoke fluent Japanese, he did not speak Italian. 

In 1896, Percival retired from the business world and built his own world class observatory in the mountains, 7,180 feet above Flagstaff, Arizona, atop a peak he named Mars Hill.  Here, for $20,000 (half a million today) Percival installed a 24 inch Clark refracting telescope. Every summer night for the next 23 years, Percival Lowell (above) sat at the bottom of his telescope, observing Mars. During each day he slept in the 24 room mansion he also built on Mars Hill. Being rich has its advantages, and Percival would have been a fool if he had not taken advantage of his advantages.

And what he saw through the eyepiece of his expensive magical tube when he looked at Mars was amazing. He saw canals - real canals - more than 180 of them, some of them 4,000 miles long. And he wondered what sort of creatures had constructed such a massive, intricate irrigation system. “Quite possibly, “ he wrote, “such Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed...Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.” 

Percival wrote three books, “Mars”, “Mars and its Canals”, and “Mars as the Abode of Life”. Each and every book became a best seller. He inspired H.G. Wells to write “War of the Worlds”, as well as inspiring Edgar Rice Burrows, who besides the “Tarzan” series, wrote 13 adventure books centering on life on Mars. 

By the year his third book was published, in 1907, Percival Lowell (above) was recognized as the world's expert on the planet Mars. And then, almost over night, Percival's magical red world was deflated by his doppelganger, Mr. George Hale.

George Hale also came from a rich Boston family. But where Percival's father had insisted he attend business school, George's father had sent him to MIT to become a professional astronomer. 

And in 1908 George opened the lens cap on his new 60” reflector telescope in a new observatory atop California's 5,700 foot high Mount Wilson (above).  And almost the first thing George peered at was Mars, where he found...no canals. Not a one. No matter how hard he looked. 

It has been alleged that George once saw an elf in his bedroom, but he saw no canals on Mars.

The photographic proof was conclusive. What Percival had seen as canals proved, when seen through a newer, bigger, telescope,  to be just an optical illusion...

...or maybe the blood vessels (above) in the back of Percival's own eye.  Percival had a nervous breakdown. And when he recovered he sought to re-establish his reputation. He took up the search for the the last great mystery in the night sky, the powerful conundrum of Planet X.

According to Percival's own mathematics, there was something very odd about the planets Neptune (named after the Roman god of the sea)  and Uranus (named after the Greek god of the sky - grandfather of the war god Mars). Both planets were too big. Neptune was spinning on its side and they both wobbled oddly.  

It looked to Percival as if there had to be another planet further out from the sun, tugging at Uranus and Neptune. 

He called his suspect "Planet X".  Percival even calculated Planet X's mass, and he knew exactly where it had to be in the sky, 40 times further out from the sun than the earth.

For ten years Percival and his assistants – okay, mostly his assistants – scoured photographs of the night sky, searching for the tell-tale movement in the star field that would herald the discovery of Planet X. 

Twice the camera on Percival's 12” Clark took pictures of the moving X.  But the humans who had to examine each of the thousands of photographs, failed to notice the one dot which had moved slightly. 

And then,  in 1916, at the age of sixty-one, Percival Lowell suffered a stroke and died. 

He was interned in a private mausoleum (above) next to his beloved 12” Clark atop Mars Hill.  But thanks to Percival's fortune, the search for Planet X continued.

In 1930 Clyde Tombaugh (above) found Planet X. And since he was being paid by Perciva Lowell's endowment, and still using Percival's 12” Clark telescope, Planet X was named using Percival Lowell's initials – PL - in it's name - Pluto (Greek god in charge of the underworld). 

And isn't it amazing that Planet X became the official IX planet in the solar system? You don't often get to use Roman Numerals in a joke. But, of course it was not bigger than the earth,, let alone Jupiter.

Ah, but things were about to get even more amazing. With the refinement of observations of the outer planets a number of new great mysteries appeared in the night sky, as they always do. The more you know the less you know, you know.  

The first thing astronomers realized they did not know was why two of those cold blobs of rock and ice - Neptune and Uranus -  circling so far out from the Sun. They were too massive to have been formed at the edge of the spinning disc which eventually became the solar system. Heavier (in proportion) rocky planets like the Earth, Venus, Mercury and Mars were near the center. Lighter gas giants should hgave formed toward the edge. In 2005 the mystery was solved (we think) at the University of Nice, in France.  Neptune and Uranus, said the French astronomers, had originally formed in the inner solar system.

Four billion years ago the newly formed gas giants Jupiter and Saturn had turned the inner solar system into pool table on the break -  with the still molten rocky planets slamming and careening into and off of each other. This gravitational pin ball game had pulled our moon into a collision with the Earth, and allowed its capture. It had ground up rocks trying to form a planet and spewed them into the asteroid belt. 

And it had flung rocky Uranus and Neptune out of their formation orbits and into their current positions, leaving behind a lot of oddities as they swerved out into the edge of our solar system.

And that left Pluto. And the more people looked at the guardian of the outer realms the odder it looked. Better telescopes, including one in earth orbit, have shown it to have less than two tenths of 1% of the mass of the Earth, and to be only about half the size of our moon. That is far too small to have perturbed the orbits of Neptune or Uranus. In fact it is even too small to be classified as a planet.

On 24 August, 2006 the International Astronomical Union struck Pluto from the list of planets and gave it the new title of "dwarf planet".  It seems that for all of Percival Lowell's careful calculations, and for all of Clyde Tombaugh's perseverance, and for all the sensitivity of Alvin Clark's thumb,  finding Planet X right where it was supposed to be was...just a coincidence.  It was the human mind which mistook blind luck for a deep cosmological insight. Just  as the swelling in the blood vessels behind Percival Lowell's eyes, which would eventually burst to create the stroke which killed him,  had built the canals of Mars in his mind's eye.

It makes me wonder how we can ever really be certain we are certain of anything. And it seems that no matter how big our telescopes become, or how far out in the sky we search, such as with the new James Webb telescope,  we are always looking into a mirror.

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