• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 155 0

the computer or the camera to be perfect. I had anticipated that every morning I would have to look through some of the pictures to sort out the real objects from the fake ones. I had even taken the time to write a quick computer program to make this sorting extremely efficient; I could simply sit at my computer, press a single button, and a little postage-stamp-sized bit of the pictures from the previous night would appear on my screen. Three images would blink through in succession, and by eye, I would quickly be able to see what the computer had thought was moving. The eye is really good at finding the computer’s mistakes or verifying true finds. After some practice, I could look at perhaps as many as twenty different candidate objects in a minute. But to look at thirty-seven thousand would take me thirty hours straight for every one night’s worth of data. This was potentially a disaster.

I sent an e-mail to David Rabinowitz, an astronomer at Yale University, describing the problems. David had helped build the new camera and had joined Chad and me as the third member of our planet search team; if anyone knew any clever solutions to the problem, it would be David. He quickly responded: There was nothing that could be done to fix the camera’s problem.

The only plausible solution I could think of was to somehow make the computer program much, much smarter. But Chad was on to a new job and new responsibilities and couldn’t spend the next two years writing new computer programs the way he had for the previous camera. And even if he was working on this project, I couldn’t think of an obvious way to make the computer program smarter. Everything that I could think of doing to get rid of the thirty-seven thousand camera-junk objects had a chance of getting rid of the real objects, too.

There was one solution: I could quit. Shut the project down. Declare an end to the solar system. In fact, it almost seemed like a good idea. Our chances of finding new objects were remote. The effort to find them was going to be extreme, if not impossible. If ever there was a time to cut our losses, now was it.

I needed a second opinion. I walked up the road to my favorite café with Antonin Bouchez, one of my graduate students at the time and someone whose opinion I greatly trusted.

“I’m done,” I told him. “We’ve looked at enough sky; if there was anything else out there, we would have seen it by now. The new camera is low quality, and I don’t think there is really any way to move forward.”

I laid out all of my reasoning. I outlined the regions of the sky we had covered. I talked to him about the very slim probability of finding anything else. I showed him data on the new camera.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“No no no,” I told him. I went through the arguments again. Look at the problems with the camera! Look at how well we’ve already done with the sky!

“No, really, you’re crazy.”

We drank more coffee. I described how I believed the solar system was laid out and why it now seemed clear that there was nothing larger than Pluto out there to be seen. And thirty-seven thousand moving things to look at in one night? Impossible!

“Do you really believe there’s nothing else out there?” he asked.

“I do,” I said.

“So how are you going to feel when you pick up a newspaper one morning and read about someone discovering something right where you didn’t look?”

I was reaching for the coffee again but stopped short. “Uhhhhhh. But it’s not going to happen since we’ve reached the end of the solar system.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

What, indeed? Ten years earlier almost no one had thought that there was anything to be found beyond Pluto at all and that anyone spending all of his time looking was crazy. Even just two years earlier almost no one had thought that something as big as Quaoar would be found and that anyone spending all of his time looking was crazy. I hadn’t bothered believing what most people thought back then, so why was I bothering to believe what most people thought now?

“Do you really know there is nothing else out there?” Antonin asked