The Last Word On Nothing

I received an email the other day from Nicholas Suntzeff, the director of the Astronomy Program at Texas A&M as well as a friend. (Readers might remember that he has published two guest posts with LWON.) His email was in fact a series of emails that he thought I might enjoy. It started with a link to an article that Nick sent to a colleague at Texas A&M, and then one thing led to another, and before long they were trading stories about odd, weird, you-couldn’t-make-this-stuff-up historical details from their adventures in astronomy over the past three decades. At one point in their reminiscences, Suntzeff sighed (if only virtually), “Becoming interested in history is a disease many astronomers get as they age.”

That statement in particular got me thinking. From interviewing Suntzeff for a book, I knew that he enjoyed the living history of astronomy. He had spoken fondly of cloudy nights he’d spent as a young astronomer at an observatory in Chile; the telescope out of commission, he would retire to the library and explore the archives or, better yet, sit and listen to stories from Allan Sandage, who had long ago been Edwin Hubble’s assistant, and who was a formidable astronomer in his own right, as well as a raconteur par excellence. I myself once spent a couple of days with Sandage for a magazine profile, after he had retired from astronomy but while he still regularly went into his office at the Carnegie Observatories headquarters in Pasadena. He’d come down with the history disease, too. He talked about salvaging old books that young colleagues would leave in the office’s discard pile; he walked me through cabinets full of fifty- or sixty-year-old photographic plates and daily observing logs. “The library is my telescope now,” he said.

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