Paul Butler sits at his desk, utterly still. He's transfixed by the image displayed on the computer in front of him. The screen shows a field of dots. To the untrained eye, they seem utterly random, strewn like flecks of black pepper sprinkled chaotically onto a sheet of white paper. They look that way to Butler's exquisitely trained eye as well. He's usually very good at spotting patterns in data like this; the hidden shapes tend to jump right out at him. This time, however, if there is order underlying the apparent chaos, it's beyond him--and therefore probably beyond the capacity of any human being.
He has a software program, though, that can make sense of this mess, providing that there is any sense to be made. What Butler is hoping, assuming that the last eight years of painstaking, frustrating, rarely appreciated work has not been a complete waste of time--and if nature has chosen to cooperate, which is by no means guaranteed--is that the dots will fall along a curve. He doesn't know exactly what this curve will look like, but broadly speaking, it should snake from left to right, rising toward the top of the screen, then falling gracefully to the bottom, then rising again, over and over. It should resemble, in a very rough way, the reassuringly regular pulse of a healthily beating heart, displayed on the cardiac monitor of a hospital coronary care unit. Most important of all, the curve should pass through just about every one of the dozens of spots on the screen, linking them together as through this were an incredibly difficult connect-the-dots game whose picture is impossible to pick out in advance.
If the curve exists, concealed in the data, his software will be able to find it and trace it for Butler's merely human eyes. He was here very late last night, looking at screen after screen of data for such a tracing, plugging new information into the computer, scanning the results, moving on to the next data set. His colleague and mentor Geoffrey Marcy--like Butler, an astronomer with joint appointments at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley--was here, working alongside him, until midnight. By two in the morning, Butler, too, had to quit. He got on his bike and pedaled back to his tiny apartment in the South Berkeley ghetto (his own description of the neighborhood). Now, only six hours later, he's back at the task that has consumed him for the past two months. While Butler slept, the software was patiently searching for that elusive perfect fit, a curve that would slice neatly through most of the dots on the screen. It has tried fat curves and skinny curves, examining each one and discarding it when too many dots were left floating, unanchored.
The program finished its calculations a few minutes ago. Butler is looking at the result. There is the line, as lusciously curvaceous as the illustration in a textbook. Every dot on the screen is sitting right on the line, or very very close to it. No stragglers. This is precisely the pattern Butler has been aching to see. And now that he is looking at the squiggle that has haunted his dreams since he began this project eight years ago, all he can do is...stare. The Berkeley campus is slowly coming to life on this winter Saturday morning, but Butler is completely unaware of it. He hears nothing, feels nothing, sees nothing but the glow of a cathode ray tube, bearing news that will forever change humanity's understanding of where it stands in relation to the cosmos......
"My mind simply shut down," he will tell me a few months later, when things have finally begun to return to normal. "Archimedes jumped out of the bathtub and ran naked through the street shouting 'Eureka.' But I just sat there, dumbfounded. Nobody was around. I'd blink, and it was still there. I couldn't move. I could only turn my head. I kept thinking, 'They were right. Copernicus and Kepler and Newton were right.' I felt like Kepler himself was looking over my shoulder and smiling."
After about an hour, the phone rings. His girlfriend, Nicole, wants to know what's up. He can barely speak a coherent sentence. After she hangs up, it occurs to him that he should let Geoff Marcy know what has happened. The two astronomers have gotten to be good friends, working together for almost nine years, but given the long hours they both put in, they're very respectful of each other's off-duty time. Butler hates to disturb Marcy at home. He does it anyway.
At his house in Berkeley, Marcy is heading out the door with his wife, Susan when the phone rings. They're on their way to buy supplies for a New Year's Eve party the next night. He hears Butler say, in the most serious tone of voice Marcy has ever heard him use, "Geoff, get over here." Then silence. Marcy has to pry the information from him. "What is it, Paul? Have the computers been stolen? No? Is the building on fire?"
After several minutes of trying, the most he can get from Butler is that the news is good. "Come...now," is all Butler can manage to say. So Marcy comes. He and Susan drive over to campus, burst into the office, and find Butler still looking at the screen. The data are still up on the computer. Marcy looks for approximately a second, then says, "Oh my God."
Other Worlds at Amazon Books
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