Secrets of the Hoary Deep: A Personal History of Modern Astronomy , Riccardo Giacconi
Johns Hopkins U. Press, Baltimore, MD, 2008. $45.00 (411 pp.). ISBN 978-0-8018-8809-0
Accustomed to using memoirs as part of the raw material on which they draw, historians of science will find Riccardo Giacconi’s Secrets of the Hoary Deep: A Personal History of Modern Astronomy an unusual source. Here, the scientist’s reminiscences appear in print well after the historians have had their say. Important aspects of Giacconi’s career have already been covered in such works as Richard Hirsh’s history of x-ray astronomy, Glimpsing an Invisible Universe (Cambridge University Press, 1983), and several histories of the Hubble Space Telescope , most notably Robert Smith’s The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Science, Technology, and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Giacconi offers his text not as an autobiography but as a history of contemporary astronomy illustrated by his own experiences. This is not the story of a typical astronomer: He has led not a representative life in science but rather an extraordinary one. His memoir describes, very much from his own perspective, a number of episodes that were, until now, little addressed by historians of science, and offers important insights into the politics and the administration of national and multinational astrophysics observatories and facilities.
Intellectually, Giacconi’s career has been defined by his quest to understand the fundamentals of x-ray astronomy. His success at that endeavor led to his receiving the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering contributions to that field. Born in 1931, Giacconi grew up in Benito Mussolini’s Italy. After World War II, he attended the University of Milan, where he completed his doctoral studies in physics. He went to the US in 1956 on a nuclear physics fellowship; at Indiana University and Princeton University, he practiced the art of detector design for subnuclear physics experiments. Once his visitor’s visa expired, he faced the prospect of a return to Italy and diminished access to the resources necessary for cutting-edge research. Instead, Giacconi found work at American Science and Engineering Inc, an R&D contractor that relied mainly on US Air Force support and that had spun off from the MIT physics department; MIT’s Bruno Rossi served as chairman of its board.
Arriving at AS&E in 1959, Giacconi became a leader in the company’s efforts to secure research funding from the newly formed NASA. Since the late 1940s, a loose confederacy of institutions under military auspices had been pursuing rocket-based solar UV and x-ray spectroscopy. With NASA support, Giacconi joined that effort and applied his expertise in designing detectors to x-ray telescopes. He also became a manager, first for projects dedicated to sounding rocket instrumentation, and then for design and deployment of astronomical satellites. An immediate result of his work at AS&E was the discovery in 1962 of Scorpius X-1, a localized extrasolar x-ray source. Giacconi’s team at AS&E spent the 1960s planning and overseeing the design and instrumentation for Uhuru, the orbiting NASA x-ray observatory that was launched in 1970.
The book devotes considerable attention to Giacconi’s career as an administrator. He was first director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, located at the Johns Hopkins University. With Giacconi at its helm, the European Southern Observatory undertook construction of its Very Large Telescope in Chile. Even more than his work as an instrument designer and an astronomer, it was his administrative experiences at AS&E, STSI, and ESO that Giacconi stresses as providing the most important insights to be drawn from his career. Questions about the most effective way to manage a scientific staff and divide responsibilities among scientific researchers, industrial contractors, and funding agencies had concerned Giacconi from the beginning of his career in space-based observing and led to conflicts with his NASA sponsors. Departing from the pattern of many autobiographical accounts written by scientists, Giacconi’s book emphasizes the importance of such administrative issues as management structures, post-observation data processing, and data-sharing mechanisms for the pursuit of modern astronomy.
Giacconi sees telescope building as a competitive enterprise in the best sense. In his view, US astronomers, drawing on the financial support of Gilded Age capitalists, built the instruments and institutions that helped define the period from the late 19th century until after World War II. During the cold war, the immense resources that were poured into the military-academic-industrial complex almost made up for the inefficiency in which resources were expended on space science projects and the Americans began to lose ground. Giacconi says the US should have noticed that in recent years the leadership in astronomy has begun to pass back into European hands. Among the reasons for that, he argues, are the entities that frustrated him throughout his career as researcher and administrator: NASA administrators who intruded into research projects (often managing the wrong parts) rather than leaving scientific decisions to the investigators, and theorists serving on advisory committees who dictated targets for observational astrophysicists, rather than allowing a broader research program defined by the observers themselves. According to Giacconi, “the slow pace of discovery” associated with investigations of galactic clusters “came about because theorists … had struck again and convinced themselves … that there were no clusters to be found. … Once again the theorists were wrong.”
As those concerns will, if anything, play more prominent roles in the building of large 21st-century astronomy instruments, Giacconi’s account is an important one.
Bruce Hevly is a historian of science at the University of Washington in Seattle who specializes in the history of physics and astrophysics. He has studied extreme UV and x-ray astronomy in the postwar decades, and in 2003 he served on the National Academy of Sciences committee on setting priorities for NSF-sponsored large research facility projects.
