The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

by Richard Panek

the LBL director at the time refused to give him access to lab funds. Not because of what the experiment would be doing—particle physics was what LBL did. Rather, the problem was how HAPPE would be doing it: aboard a balloon. “We are an accelerator lab,” the lab director Edwin McMillan, a Nobel laureate in Physics, told Alvarez. “If we stop doing accelerator physics, our funding will disappear.” For Alvarez, turning your back on a particle physics experiment because it went up in the air instead of around and around betrayed a lack of imagination. Alvarez quit the leadership of his own LBL physics group in protest and got funding elsewhere, including from NASA, to see if HAPPE could fly. (It crashed.) By the mid-1970s, Alvarez had his own Nobel Prize in Physics, and the lab had a new director. One day Alvarez was reading a magazine article about an experiment being done by an acquaintance of his. Stirling Colgate, toothpaste scion by birth and thermonuclear physicist by choice, had planted a 30-lnch telescope on a surplus Nike missile turret in the New Mexico desert. The plan was to program it to automatically look at a different galaxy every three to ten seconds. The telescope would then transmit the information through a microwave link to the memory of an IBM computer on the campus of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, eighteen miles away. There, software would search the images for supernovae.