The Quiet Zone Read online

  Rockefeller retired from politics in 2015 and lived full-time in Washington, D.C., but he still had an account at Trent’s, his name handwritten on an index card inside a wooden box beneath Betty’s register. I asked why a millionaire who could have lived anywhere chose Green Bank.

  “Because it’s quiet,” Betty said. Obviously.

  Too quiet, for some. Within a decade of the observatory’s establishment, Green Bank had a handful of world-class telescopes of unprecedented size, but life in Appalachia proved challenging for the newcomers. Health care was an issue; on at least two occasions in the early ’60s, wives of observatory personnel delivered babies en route to the nearest full-scale hospital, fifty miles away. Education was a concern. In an August 1962 letter, NRAO director David Heeschen called local schools “our biggest problem, and it offers a real threat to the permanence of the NRAO at Green Bank.” Scientists’ spouses had trouble finding employment. In response, in 1965, the NRAO relocated its administrative headquarters to Charlottesville, 120 miles away. Locals felt snubbed by the exodus. An editorial in the Pocahontas Times poked at the scientists’ “desire for urban so-called advantages and luxuries.”

  The telescopes needed to remain in a quiet place, so Green Bank retained a number of scientists and support staff, including Kellermann, the astronomer, who arrived in 1965 in a red Chevy Corvair convertible, top down. He’d grown up near Coney Island, Brooklyn, and earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology outside of Los Angeles. Now his only entertainment options were a television with three channels and a drive-in theater that showed old westerns. “The audio was terrible,” Kellermann said. A tiny speaker would sit in the window of the car, connected by a wire to the sound system. “If you weren’t careful and you drove off, you’d break the wire.”

  By the time I arrived, the theater had shut down and Rockefeller’s estate was up for sale. The community seemed to have grown that much quieter.

  Chapter Three

  “Lots of Bad News”

  THE WORLD FALLS STILL when you’re suspended nearly five hundred feet in the air. I was standing atop the tallest man-made structure in West Virginia, having taken two elevators and traversed a series of catwalks to arrive at a small platform above the 2.3-acre dish of the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.

  “What’s going on up here?” Bob Anderson, the head of telescope operations, asked a handful of engineers crowded on the airy platform.

  “Lots of bad news,” one man responded. “Looks like the feed blower motor’s broken.”

  The engineers stood around a motor that powered a hot air blower, which played a supporting role in the telescope’s efforts to “hear” the faint waves of electromagnetic energy emitted from stars, pulsars, and cosmic events light-years away. When those radio waves hit the big dish, they bounced up nearly two hundred feet to a subreflector dish above our heads; the subreflector concentrated the waves down through a window at our feet and onto a receiver that converted the waves into electronic signals. The hot air blower prevented ice from forming over the window. If ice formed, the signal would be blurred. On a telescope of this size, it seemed as if a million things had the potential to act up at any moment.

  Stretching out below us was the telescope’s clam-shaped dish, 330 feet by 360 feet, made of 2,004 aluminum panels, each painted a special matte white because a glossy coat would reflect so much sunlight as to cook the radio receivers, like a magnifying glass concentrating sunlight on an ant. Because the dish flexed with the changing temperatures, twenty-seven sensors gauged the expansion of the panels and communicated that information to a computer that commanded 2,209 actuator motors mounted underneath the dish to adjust the panels. Anderson called this “dynamic corrections.” He was even prouder of the seventeen-million-pound telescope’s sheer precision. With the touch of a button, the dish could point at any spot in the sky, slowly tracking it as it moved with Earth’s rotation. During high winds, the dish tilted horizontally to reduce drag. After a heavy snow, the dish pitched 90 degrees to release an avalanche known as “the big dump.”

  As the morning fog burned off, surrounding landmarks came into view. I could slowly make out the long concrete building of Green Bank Elementary-Middle School, and then the observatory’s 3,500-foot-long airstrip, rarely used since Jay Rockefeller stopped flying into town. Because of frequent cloud cover, landing a plane here could be a harrowing experience, and I was told of pilots being forced to reroute in thick fog and snowstorms. Six other telescopes emerged from the haze, their dishes pointing toward the sky like giant earlobes. Half the scopes were dormant, too old and antiquated to be worth operating. I finally glimpsed the Sheetses’ white farmhouse, a basketball hoop in the driveway.

  A loud, clanging noise came from below us in the radio receiving room, where radio waves were measured, filtered, and cryogenically cooled to negative 433 degrees Fahrenheit, which preserved their signal and mitigated outside electrons from mixing in. The signal was converted into electricity, then into light, and then transmitted through underground fiber-optic cables to the observatory’s control room a mile away, where terabytes of new information every day were stored on five-foot-tall stacks of hard drives. Twenty-four hours a day, a telescope operator sat at a desk with more than a dozen computer screens that provided instant feedback on what the observatory was picking up from deep space. The control room was sealed off with copper-lined walls and copper-screened windows, acting similar to how a screen on a microwave window prevents radiation from escaping. A dreadlocked engineer named Galen Watts, whom I’d first met while playing music on the Sheetses’ porch, likened working at the observatory to doing sound for a rock concert, as he had done for bands including the Grateful Dead and Kansas. Just as a sound engineer amplified a rock band’s performance into an intimate experience for thousands of people, so did a telescope engineer turn the faint radio waves of space into comprehensible data for astronomers.

  Anderson’s team would soon have the feed blower fixed. But other problems loomed. To learn more, Anderson recommended that I talk to Jay Lockman, the observatory’s principal scientist. I already knew Lockman—he was that damned fast fiddler and banjo player.

  ON LOCKMAN’S OFFICE DOOR was a photo of himself with the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who’d visited a few years earlier for the documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, which portrayed Green Bank as the antithesis of a digitized society. Herzog reportedly doesn’t use a cellphone and has described life in Green Bank as “America at its best.” He included a scene in his movie of Lockman playing music with his band. On the scientist’s desk was an inscribed copy of the book Herzog on Herzog: “To Jay,” Herzog had written, “let’s look together to the deepest abysses of the universe!” The movie mementos in Lockman’s office continued, curiously, with a poster of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers tap-dancing in the 1935 film Top Hat.

  “Every time I watch Fred Astaire, it makes me a better scientist,” Lockman explained. “He was such a perfectionist. He did things till he got them right . . . It’s that kind of devotion to the craft, the intense effort, that I admire. It comes off as being totally flawless, totally at ease. There’s no awkwardness.”

  Lockman’s work required a perfectionism that would impress even Fred Astaire. In the 1990s, he oversaw construction of the Green Bank Telescope, which I had climbed atop. It was the largest movable object on land and one of the most sensitive large-scale scientific instruments ever built. It was his great tap dance. On his computer, Lockman brought up an image of the Orion Molecular Cloud based on data collected by the telescope. A flame-orange ribbon, circled by a ghostly halo, bisected a patchwork of stars that formed the constellation Orion, 1,344 light-years from Earth. The orange was ammonia—the same kind used in household Windex—and it gave off a unique radio wave picked up by the telescope. Everything emits electromagnetic radiation, with each frequency a kind of fingerprint for the astronomer to study. “This shows the GBT at its best,” Lockman gushed.
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  A leading authority in his field, Lockman had first visited Green Bank in 1967 while an undergrad at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where he grew up. While later interning at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory headquarters, he had been one of the first to realize that a Green Bank telescope had detected ionized gas at the galactic center, suggesting a black hole in the Milky Way. Lockman had thought, “I know something that nobody else does!” Such excitement propelled him to a lifelong career in science, and he was at the moment recording a Great Courses series on radio astronomy. Working in Green Bank was “a nice combination of being at the center of the universe and way out on the fringe all at once,” Lockman said.

  It was a warm summer day, so he suggested a stroll around the observatory’s campus. In khaki shorts, Lockman kept a brisk pace toward the telescopes. He pointed to a clump of asparagus growing by a fence. So much grew in Green Bank that he never bothered going to the store for it. He just walked into his yard or down his dirt road and picked a few pounds. A neighbor with the Sheetses—at least as much as you can be a neighbor when separated by a river and a forest—Lockman lived in a renovated farmhouse filled with regional folk art and lacking television or WiFi. Nor did he have a smartphone, which was more than just a default of living in a town without cell service. He loathed the device, comparing it to cigarettes in its purposeful addictiveness—something he knew about, as a former smoker. It was a comparison I’d often heard. A few months earlier, I’d interviewed a psychotherapist in Manhattan named Robert Reiner who treated people for tech addiction, and he described smartphones as the modern cigarette—a way to relieve social anxiety. Suggestions I’d read for how to break the addiction included reinstating the “away” message on email, leaving the smartphone at home, or buying a purse too small to fit a phone. Reiner recommended setting boundaries. If his kids’ grades fell, he took away their smartphones. And he banned devices from the dinner table.

  Lockman had a simpler solution: live in the Quiet Zone. When he left his office, he was offline and unreachable. Work calls and emails couldn’t follow him, which freed him from what so many people today report as a major source of anxiety and burnout. He believed that time offline boosted his productivity, giving him headspace to focus and think. This wasn’t a new idea. The tech writer Nicholas Carr argued in his 2010 book, The Shallows, that “quiet spaces” help people to think deeply, make new associations, draw inferences, and foster ideas. In the 2012 book Quiet, Susan Cain wrote that “companies are starting to understand the value of silence and solitude” with the creation of “quiet zones” for uninterrupted workflow. Lockman said the quiet made science conferences more productive in Green Bank; attendees weren’t distracted by smartphones or tempted to skip meetings in favor of hitting the town. He reminded me of David Helfand, the sage-like astrophysicist in New York City who had encouraged me in my quest to live without a smartphone. As it turned out, Helfand and Lockman had been officemates as doctoral students at UMass Amherst. Their career paths had led them to very different places, yet they espoused a similar aversion to smartphones and embrace of quiet.

  Lockman and I walked up to a gate. An old sign read “U.S. Gov’t. Private Property. Authorized Diesel Vehicles Only.” Gas-powered engines were not permitted any closer to the Green Bank Telescope a mile away, as their motors relied on spark plugs, which emit a burst of electromagnetic radiation. A weathered sign had the image of a spark plug with a line across it, like a “No Smoking” sign for radio noise. During guided tours of the observatory, tourists were at this point ordered to completely power down all electronics.

  We turned into the adjacent Arbovale Cemetery—an ominous place for a stroll, given how the observatory was potentially facing its own end of days. Green Bank had lost key political support in 2010, when West Virginia senator Robert C. Byrd died in office. Considered the longtime “king of pork,” Byrd had personally brought more than $4 billion to his state through his leadership of the Senate Appropriations Committee and seniority as the longest-serving senator in U.S. history. More than forty major facilities in the state, from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope to the Robert C. Byrd Highway, bore his name. For decades, his staff had called the observatory every year to offer financial support. “He’d say, ‘We’re getting ready to start our budget appropriations meetings, and do you need money for anything?’” recalled Michael Holstine, the business manager.

  No more. Soon after Byrd’s death, as part of a decadal review process, a committee of the National Science Foundation announced the observatory may not be worth its annual $14 million upkeep. With an $8 billion budget, the NSF was tasked with keeping America at the cutting edge of everything from geology to zoology, and its annual outlay for astronomical sciences was about $250 million. Other new astronomy facilities were coming online, taking up a greater portion of the budget, and something had to give. Green Bank apparently no longer fit the bill, despite its research having contributed to numerous scientific discoveries as well as advancements in microwave communications systems, data recording technology, image restoration techniques, remote sensing, navigation, and geodesy. In 2016, the NSF announced it was considering mothballing the facility.

  The same year, the NSF split Green Bank from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and made it an independent unit, which gave Green Bank more flexibility over its operations. The observatory shifted away from Open Skies, a program where anyone in the country could apply for free telescope viewing time. The telescopes were increasingly rented out. By 2017, nearly one-third of Green Bank’s funding was coming from Russian sources—primarily the billionaire Yuri Milner’s initiative to search the universe for intelligent life, a project known as Breakthrough Listen. The NSF still owned everything and funded around two-thirds of the observatory’s budget, but that financial support threatened to crater. The future appeared bleak for Green Bank.

  Walking among the gravestones, Lockman discussed another existential challenge for the observatory, one rooted in the fabric of modern life: radio noise. WiFi and other forms of wireless communication and gadgetry were spreading like wildfire in the area. Lockman said the Green Bank Telescope had recently detected a new molecule in space but was unable to confirm the finding because of interference from satellite television transmissions. (The National Radio Quiet Zone only protected against interference from ground-based transmitters.) To confirm the molecule’s discovery, scientists had to use a radio telescope in Australia, where satellite TV operated on a different frequency, fortunately. “That was a wake-up call for radio astronomy,” Lockman said. “You can’t just hide in a place like Green Bank.”

  Scientists have for decades lamented the loss of quiet. In 1979, the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Radio Frequencies warned that “the electromagnetic spectrum is now so heavily used on Earth that much of its potential value for passive scientific research has already been seriously affected.” In 1987, Claud Kellett, program manager for the NSF’s National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, told the trade journal FCC Week, “The only quiet zone [in Green Bank] is gradually being whittled away. The day will come when there will be no way to reduce all the noise.” In the same article, Dr. Robert Riemer, program manager of the Committee on Radio Frequencies of the National Academy of Sciences, urged that “we have to preserve bands of spectrum in much the same way we have to preserve wildlife and wilderness.”

  Governments have shown some willingness to make concessions to radio astronomy. In the 1960s, scientists successfully lobbied to ban TV stations from broadcasting UHF Channel 37, which would have interfered with a major radio telescope in Illinois as well as encroached on readings of interstellar hydrogen. The most abundant molecule in the universe, hydrogen has provided astronomers key insights into the behavior of the cosmos, and its radio band is still reserved for astronomy research. Scientists also successfully lobbied to prevent microwave manufacturers from operating in the range of 10.6 gigahertz to 10.7 gigahertz. Such would have allowed m
icrowave ovens to brown meat instead of merely heating it to a limp pulp, but it would have polluted the 10.68 gigahertz frequency allocated for radio astronomy. That’s why microwaves operate in the 2.4 gigahertz frequency. So does WiFi. Unlike microwaves, however, WiFi routers are always on, always radiating, always polluting the airwaves.

  The observatory was working on ways to cancel out interfering signals—essentially noise-canceling headphones for a telescope. But it was still vital to have the quietest environment possible in Green Bank. Lockman compared it to purifying drinking water. “If you want clean water, you start with the cleanest water you can get, and then you take out a little bit of something,” he said. “You don’t start with something terrible.”

  In other words, you can’t turn sewage into Evian. And you can’t operate a radio telescope in a noisy environment.

  GREEN BANK’S FIGHT for quiet rested for a quarter century on the shoulders of Wesley Sizemore, a man so passionate about his job that he was once reprimanded for overstepping his jurisdiction in trying to protect the Quiet Zone. A native West Virginian with a thick beard, ponytail, and glasses, Sizemore had been known as a kind of quiet enforcer, patrolling Green Bank and knocking on doors to tell people to unplug their microwaves or turn off their WiFi routers. But when he retired in 2011, his position was eliminated. Because of budget constraints, his responsibilities were spread among several other employees, none of whom was tasked with policing the quiet full time.