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I of course saw the images of the Arecibo telescope coming to an exciting,
brilliant end. I was there in the 80’s. The Arecibo telescope
played a very important part of my development as an astronomer.
I was there for a couple of summers; got there through my college and through a wonderful
astronomy professor who did research down there. And he was like, “Hey why don't
you go down to Arecibo and help me with my research.” I had never been to Puerto Rico before,
and you come down there and you get driven there and the first thing i noticed
was the bamboo forest in the middle. So when you come up to the
location and you're going to take a right up to the housing units, right? So, you're arriving
with your suitcases but then as you take that turn, you see this enormous circle, probably the size of
I don't know like four tennis courts or something. And the 40 foot, maybe 50 foot bamboo,
and the bamboo stalks, they got to be like eight inches across and I get out of the taxi and I just go
running down to the bamboo forest and I'm just like, oh my god, oh my god
and the poor taxi driver and the poor person who was trying to meet me there and what not.
Anyway, they finally get me out of the bamboo and we get settled and I was studying pulsars.
The one I was studying was PSR 1913+16, which is just an address,
it's just a location in the sky. And it was being used to study Einstein's theories of general
relativity because, according to general relativity, a very massive, quickly rotating system
will give off gravitational waves. Hence it will lose energy, and its spin rate will slow down.
So, that's what I was going there to study. One of the things I remember the most was, I had to give
a presentation. So, imagine a college student right, in front of my heroes.
The people I am in awe of, right? The top radio astronomers of the world and “Oh,
could you please give a talk, Michael on our Thursday lunch hour?”
And so I was studying, at the moment, I was studying how the pulsar waves travel
through the interstellar medium. Pulsars ,you might remember, are these
very strange objects which emit pulses of radiation at a very fast rate,
hundreds of times a second, thousands of times a second, right? Very mysterious objects,
and those pulses when they travel through the interstellar medium,
those pulses, the shape of those pulses changes. And you can you can learn some things
about the interstellar media, what's between you and the pulsar,
by how that pulse shape changes. And so I was, you know, asked to talk about this. And I
remember preparing this talk, and my mentor at the time I kind of
showed him what I was going to talk about. He was like “Whoa, slow down there, you
know, Buck Rogers. You have to imagine that the people you're talking to,
are very smart and they know a lot about astronomy, but they know nothing about what you are
going to talk about. And that was such a revelation for me, to think, or to
even consider the fact that I was going to be in a room of my intellectual heroes and that they
didn't know everything about astronomy. I can hardly convey what an enormous change that was
for me intellectually. And I was so grateful for that opportunity,
to boil it down, bring it down to simple ideas. Tell a story, make some simple drawings,
right? Maybe one equation. Maybe, if things are going good, then you can bring out equation number
two, right? But that's it. That is all you get. Since I've been there, you know, I've
circled back to pulsars several times in my career, and they've got to be the most
beautiful mysterious objects. Every pulsar is different; no two are alike.
We don't know, we don't really know how they become what they are.
We know that they came from something, they came from something,
They used to be a stellar system of some kind. And then this incredible transformation takes place.
Unfortunately, most of the textbooks talk about the death of the star.
That's so unfortunate. I mean it's not. Well, okay. Maybe it's the death of the star in the same sense
that when the caterpillar dies, then the butterfly is born. Okay, but you have to know there's a
butterfly. If you don't lose a butterfly, then it's a very incomplete story.
And the same is true of pulsars, right? There is some continued existence at a higher level,
at a more developed, more expansive level that's taking place with these stars.
And just like all the butterflies in the world, they're beautiful, their shape is unique, all their
colorings are unique. So when I saw the Arecibo telescope hit the ground, you know what, frankly
I was happy the way it went. I thought it went in a great fashion, right? It was getting old,
and things were falling apart, and they were talking about, oh we got to do this and that,
and then the whole thing just let loose. And it was like boom!
I am done, right? I just gave you 40 years of the best radio astronomy and I'm out of here.
So I was actually kind of happy. Happy and sad, but mostly happy, when I saw the pictures.