(See Cover).
Some 30 evenings a year, Astronomer Maarten Schmidt, 36, struggles with an electrically heated flight suit and enters the great, silvery dome of California's Mount Palomar Observatory. There, his tall, gangling frame seems suddenly reduced to Lilliputian proportions by the mammoth, 200-in. telescope that towers above him. An elevator hauls him slowly to a cylindrical observer's cage inside the telescope itself, and the dome's curved doors slide open to the cold mountain air. Perched high above the observatory floor, with classical music from an all-night Los Angeles radio station in the background, he checks his instruments, loads a camera and settles down to his lonely vigil.
Until 5:30 the next morning he stays on the alert for clouds that might obscure the image on his photographic plate or for a sudden movement that could blur it. He nurses his equipment fastidiously as the world's largest telescope swings slowly across the sky, tracking the elusive targets that astronomers call quasars. They are the most distant objects ever seen by man.
By analyzing faint quasar light that traveled billions of years before reaching telescope mirror and camera, Schmidt has uncovered clues to the ancient secrets of the universe. The remote and starlike objects he studies were born, and may have died, long before the earth existed. By decoding some of their signals that have been so long in transit, the Dutch-born astronomer has upset the familar pre-quasar universe of stars and galaxies. He has rocked the worlds of astronomy, physics and philosophy. He has undermined established theories and stimulated fantastic new ones, provoked scientists into bitter controversies and brilliant hypotheses. The cosmic questions that Schmidt's observations have raised reach far beyond mere manned landings on the moon, or even the search for life on nearby planets.
Did the universe have a true beginning? Did it start with a great primeval bang, and has it always been expanding? Or has it existed forever, essentially the same, its galaxies drifting apart while others are born to fill the space between, so that the words "eternity" and "infinity" maintain their literal meaning in an unending past and future? Somewhere out in the vast reaches of space and time, there are sources of energy as yet unimagined by man—unbridled physical reactions that dwarf any conceivable nuclear explosion?
Signals from Space. The distant starlike objects not only pose the questions, they promise the answers. Merely finding them in the first place — detecting their radio voices and photographing their odd and telltale light— was a cooperative triumph of radio and optical astronomy. It was Schmidt who discovered the enigmatic properties of the quasars.