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Music provides the Schmidts with still another form of diversion. Maarten plays the violin, Corrie the piano, and both are fond of chamber music. Visiting astronomers and relatives are often pressed into chamber music recitals at the Schmidt home. "If I play," admits Schmidt, "it has to be in an intimate circle. Only my best friends can really stand it."
Even as Schmidt strives to learn about his quasars, scientists are busy investigating other clues from the distant reaches of the universe and looking for new ones. In New Jersey, researchers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories have recorded the dying whisper of what might be radio waves emitted by a cosmological bang 10 billion years ago. In Washington last week, Navy scientists reported that a high-flying Aerobee rocket had detected strong X-ray sources associated with distant galaxies. And NASA officials are preparing for the launching later this month of an orbiting observatory equipped with telescopes for the continuous detection of ultraviolet, gamma and X-ray radiation that cannot be seen through the earth's atmosphere.
All the astronomical excitement, all the ambitious experiments, all the arguments over theory seem more and more a modern version of the confusion that boiled in the wake of Galileo Galilei's telescopic report on the realities of the solar system. The 17th century Italian startled scientists and theologians alike; the 20th century Dutchman has had an equally jarring effect on his own contemporaries as his discoveries have pushed man's scientific horizons out to the farthest reaches of the observable universe.
Just as Galileo set the stage for Sir Isaac Newton, who compiled the laws of planetary motion and gravitation, Schmidt and his colleagues are forcing their contemporaries to exercise their inventive imaginations merely to comprehend what the great observatories have seen, and the clues collected from faint spectrograms may lead science into a new era of understanding. If astronomers can find an explanation for the birth of quasars, they may yet be able to find the secrets of Creation itself; and if physicists become familiar with the mechanics of elemental reac tions far out at the boundaries of perception, they may yet learn the ultimate secrets of matter and energy on earth. For science is fast advancing into areas where the old theories may no longer apply, where the old rules may no longer work. And if Maarten Schmidt's inspired deductions point the way toward totally new equations to account for the nature of the cosmos, Palomar's telescope will have led man to his closest glimpse of universal truths.
* A light-year is the distance that light, at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, travels in a year: about 6 trillion miles. * "3C" stands for the Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources. The other numbers designated each source's position in the sky.