Three years into his 150 year sentence, Madoff has time to ponder his inadvertent contribution to thinking about the origins of life.

I remember clearly the moment at which ‘a billion’ made sense to me not as a fuzzy concept, but a concrete amount.  I was reading a New York Times article about New York pyramid scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff. He personally bilked investors out of about 18 billion dollars.

Reading about Madoff’s kleptomaniacal rip-off I was struck by the fact that it was possible to actually individually steal and spend billions of dollars. Prior to this moment, I’d thought of billions with regard to the unimaginably large, remote and invisible, as in billions of stars or countless bacteria. I can accept both of these as true – and am indeed grateful to the billions of bacteria with whom I share myself. This said, these billions felt more fantasy than fact.

For some reason, though, I could relate to Madoff’s billions, and this made all the difference. A billion became a number I could work with.

This came to mind recently when a scientist I was interviewing dropped the number 10 to the 40^th, or as it’s written 10⁴⁰, one followed by forty zeros. Ten to the 40^th laughs at a billion, which is a puny 10^9th. Even Madoff, I believe, would throw-up his hands in disbelief at10⁴⁰. It’s not a googol, one with a hundred zeros, but lets be straightforward here: once you’ve got one with 40 zeros, who’s really counting anymore?

Well, origins of life researchers, that’s who. Because when it comes to the origin of life on Earth, it turns out that some see 10⁴⁰ as the problem, while others see it as the answer.

Here’s the problem part: if you think of the cosmos as a chaotic place, the chance of life getting itself organized amidst this vast atomic jumble seems impossible. (Just as I imagine those who lost their life savings to Madoff felt the day before the news hit – unimaginable). The prophet of this view of what’s termed irreducible complexity is Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the fathers of the Stardust Revolution.

In the decades following his brilliant work figuring out how stars are the philosopher’s stone – transforming simple hydrogen and helium into all the other elements of the Periodic Table – Hoyle turned to thinking about the next steps in cosmic complexification, from cosmic dust to the molecules of life.

When it comes to complex organic molecules, such as proteins, Hoyle argued that their complexity pointed to a deity, or intelligent designer. His reasoning was in large part based on 10⁴⁰ . Proteins are made LEGO-like from amino acids. Life on Earth involves 20 different amino acids, from alanine to tryptophan. Based solely on chance, there are 10²⁰ possible pair combinations of amino acids for any ten amino acid-long protein. Imagine a pair of interacting ten-amino acid proteins and you have a probability of 10⁴⁰ . You can continue this exercise to produce an effectively endless string of zeros.

Most proteins are built from hundreds of amino acids. To Hoyle, the enormity of this numerical complexity defies a natural origin of life’s chemical complexity. A master of metaphor and analogy, Hoyle suggested a comparison that’s become part of the creed of the intelligent design movement: “The situation would be akin to a tornado sweeping through a junk yard which just happened to fling together a strand of bits of metal in such a way as to form a brand new Boeing 747.”

However, the astrophysicist’s reasoning misses a key factor at work in the cosmic process of complexification: selection. Where Hoyle pointed to the impossibly long odds of random chance, others such as Carnegie Institute origins of life researcher Robert (Bob) Hazen see the numbers at the core of an evolutionary process.

Dr. Hazen believes that the handedness - the left and right 'hands' or faces - of minerals such as the calcite he's holding, could explain the handedness of the amino acid molecules that form all proteins on Earth.

On the nascent Earth there were billions of square kilometres of reactive mineral surfaces on which chemical reactions were taking place. Each reaction was a natural experiment – and some were more successful than others. Some reaction products survived to change their environment and thus catalyze other reactions.

“Even if a particular juxtaposition of molecules is incredibly unlikely, over a hundred million years, over a billion years…these reactions are happening in seconds, you can have literally ten to the 50^th or ten to the 60^th different experiments going on over the course of an Earth-like planet,” says Hazen. “So things that are very improbable, but not impossible, become deterministic.”

Just as the Madoff scheme’s forty year run and $18 billion fraud was improbable, it clearly wasn’t impossible. Given the right conditions, the improbable became the possible. As with all great financial events, what we learn from the Madoff affair is about more than money. Yes, it provides fascinating grist for reflection on greed and self-delusion, but also on the nature of a billion, and even the numbers behind the origin of life.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

Francis Bacon quoted in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

For all its mythos about Eureka moments and breakthroughs, science is equally framed by scientists being wrong. By failure and error. About a third of all papers published in Nature turn-out to be plain, well, wrong. How scientists deal with their public pratfalls says a lot about the person and the scientific process.

The pivotal discovery of the Stardust Revolution – that the elements are forged in stars – owes its origin to Sir Fred Hoyle’s willingness to be wrong.

The brilliant Hoyle isn’t a household name today, in part because of his largest error. Sixty-one years ago, Hoyle was locked in a debate about the origins of the universe. Edwin Hubble’s observations of rapidly receding galaxies led many to envision an expanding universe with a long-ago beginning in singular event. Hogwash, thought Hoyle. He saw evidence for what he called continuous creation – that matter is continually emerging in interstellar space causing the universe to expand analogously to the way lava emerging at mid-oceanic rifts pushes continents apart.

In the winter of 1950, Hoyle gave a series of legendary BBC Radio broadcasts called The Nature of the Universe. In one, searching for a way to describe his opponents’ viewpoint of time and space beginning as a finite huge explosion, he dubbed it “the big bang idea”. The name stuck.

Hoyle, however it appears, was wrong. Even after the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, a cosmic relic that the vast majority of cosmologists interpret as solid evidence of the Big Bang, Hoyle didn’t change his opinion. When he died in 2001, Hoyle still believed the Big Bang was more alliteration than truth.

In coining the ‘Big Bang’ and arguing eloquently and specifically against it, Hoyle proved an enormously valuable adversary. He gave others something to push against. In doing this he contributed as much to Big Bang cosmology as any other 20^th century scientist.

Unlike most others, Hoyle wasn’t afraid of being wrong. Once during lunch at the California Institute of Technology Hoyle was talking astronomy with his friends and colleagues including Richard Feynman, and Geoff and Margaret Burbidge. At one point Hoyle said “Geoff and I reckon that we’re doing well if we bat 500”. One of the tablemates, looked aghast and asked Hoyle “Do you mean to tell me that you and Geoff are prepared to be wrong half the time?” The answer, of course, was yes. (See Jane Gregory’s biography of Hoyle, Fred Hoyle’s Universe, p. 341)

In this, Hoyle took a page from the scientist on whose shoulders he metaphorically stood to get a better view of the heavens, Arthur Eddington.

In what some consider one of the greatest scientific papers of all time, Eddington – the Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, the position Hoyle inherited from him – made the case for the scientific and larger social value of being wrong, even when it results in catastrophic personal failure.

At the end of his 1920 paper on “The Internal Constitution of the Stars”, Eddington asks us to reconsider the legend of Icarus.

“In ancient days two aviators procured to themselves wings. Daedalus flew safely through the middle air across the sea, and was duly honoured on his landing. Young Icarus soared upwards towards the Sun till the wax melted which bound his wings, and his flight ended in fiasco.

In weighing their achievements perhaps there is something to be said for Icarus. The classic authorities tell us that he was only ‘doing a stunt,’ but I prefer to think of him as the man who certainly brought to light a constructional defect in the flying-machines of his day. So too in science.

Cautious Daedalus will apply his theories where be feels most confident they will safely go; but by his excess of caution their hidden weaknesses cannot be brought to light. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking-point till the weak joints gape. For a spectacular stunt? Perhaps partly; he is often very human.

But if he is not yet destined to reach the Sun and solve for all time the riddle of its constitution, yet he may hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine.”

Science is about what’s unknown. It requires pushing the boundaries. Sometimes scientists are deeply wrong. They crash and burn. But Eddington tells us, that’s the cost, of actually reaching the stars.

To read Eddington’s “The Internal Constitution of the Stars”:  http://cosmos.colorado.edu/stem/courses/common/documents/eddington.html

Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn captures the spirit of the season best in his line: Got to kick at the darkness ‘till it bleeds daylight.

Yet, here’s the rub – in only thinking about the light, we miss the great gift celestial darkness holds. This year is the 400^th anniversary of the realization that the winter solstice is the best night for connecting with our cosmic origins in the Big Bang.

It’s only natural that astronomers and poets have always focused on the stars, held by the beauty and wonder of their twinkling light. But in 1610, the famous priest-astronomer Johannes Kepler pointed out a rather sticky aspect of the then current view of the heavens. If all of the stars existed in an eternal, static cosmos, there’d be no night. More to the point, the sky should be as bright as if we lived on the surface of the Sun. (See a cool visualization of this here)

Here’s why: in an infinite, static cosmos the Earth would be surrounded by endless stars, and even if many of these were far away, their light would eventually reach Earth. The accumulated light from all these stars would be the equivalent of you being suspended over a stage in the glare of an uncountable number of spotlights shining on you from every conceivable angle. Our corner, and every corner of the universe would be hellishly hot and bright. Don’t even think of life.

However, one thing was certain: it does get dark. For about 350 years astronomers occupied themselves with more pressing and tractable problems, though in 1823 the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers took-up the question again, and thus it became renamed Oblers’ Paradox – why is there darkness in a seemingly eternal, static universe?

The case of the mystery of night wasn’t cracked until the past fifty years with the discovery of the Big Bang and the expanding nature of the universe. We now know that when we enter into night, we’re immersed into evidence of the greatest event in cosmic history – the universe’s birth. And it’s because of this birth, 13.75 billion years ago that we have both darkness and light.

The first stars weren’t formed until about 400 million years after the Big Bang – an era known as cosmic dawn, currently one of the hottest areas of astrophysical research. This means that when the cosmic lights turned on, what’s called the event horizon, the universe had already expanded significantly. Thus light from regions of the universe beyond this event horizon has yet to reach us.

Similarly, distant starlight that does reach us is red shifted. Due to the Doppler effect – experienced routinely as the change in the pitch of an ambulance siren as the vehicle approaches and then recedes from us – starlight is red shifted to lower energy, non-visible frequencies. Thus we experience the long-ago and distant energy from the early universe as the famous cosmic microwave background radiation, aka the universe’s birthing sounds.

As a result of this cosmic birth and ongoing expansion, rather than a blindingly bright cosmos in which there could be no life, we live in one that offers the twin joys of darkness and light. We owe our existence as much to the stars as the darkness. We are creatures of both.

So on the winter solstice, before turning on the Christmas lights, if the sky’s clear, take a moment to behold the wonder of the story told in the darkness between the stars.

What’s the Stardust Revolution?

What are the two most disparate realms of science, the ones that have the least to do with one another? Until about 20 years ago the answer was hands-down astronomy and biology. There are clear connections between mathematics and physics (think E=mc²); between physics and chemistry (think quantum mechanics) and between chemistry and biology (think of you).

Mixing stars, cells, DNA and amphibians is like a Sesame Street episode of One of these things is not like the others…(Yes, the correct answer appears to be stars). As a result your chance of finding a biologist at an astronomy conference, or visa versa, was about the same as finding a chocolate chip cookie in a bag of shortbreads – possible only due to the vast vagaries of chance. With enough biologists in the world, one is eventually going to walk into the wrong scientific meeting.

Which is what makes the new field of astrobiology so amazing. Any astrobiology conference is an amalgam of biologists and astronomers not by chance, but by necessity.

Why do biologists and astronomers need to talk to one another? Because they’re each holding disparate pieces of a vast cosmic puzzle. Formally, astrobiologists consider the origins, evolution and distribution of life. What makes them distinct from previous folks who’ve discussed the origins, evolution and distribution of life is that astrobiologists aren’t just talking about life on Earth, but in the universe.

Now at this point you might say, but there we don’t know of life anywhere else in the universe. Not in any way besmirching Star Trek and Star Wars, but Klingons and Hoths aside, when it comes to living planets that we know about, it’s a very short list. About as short as a list can be: one. Earth.

This is what’s revolutionary about the Stardust Revolution. Astrobiology describes the science of the merging of astronomy and evolutionary biology. The Stardust Revolution is a term I’ve coined to describe the combination of the scientific and broader sociological phenomenon of astrobiology. You won’t hear scientists talking about the Stardust Revolution (at least not until my book comes out in 2012!)

I’ve used the term “stardust” because it captures a profound shift in our understanding of the word. Most dictionaries still define stardust as does Merriam Webster as “a feeling or impression of romance, magic, or ethereality”. For most of us, stardust is the equivalent of fairy dust – the stuff of fantasy.

Yet, in 2006, NASA’s Stardust Mission became the first sample-return mission to a comet, Wild II. The Stardust robotic probe returned to Earth with microscopic dust from the comet’s tail. These tiny grains are literal stardust. Wild II was formed from a cosmic cloud of dust and gas that gravitationally collapsed to form the Sun, the planets and the countless asteroids, comets and meteorites that compose our Solar System – and ultimately you and me. Stardust is now not the stuff of fantasy, but of fact and science.

This in itself is revolutionary. But the revolutionary part of the Stardust Revolution goes deeper.

I coined the term Stardust Revolution because I believe we’re in the midst of the third in a five-century long series of scientific revolutions that have shaped our understanding of our origins and relationship with the cosmos.

The first was the Copernican revolution. In the 16^th and 17^th centuries the Copernican revolution body-checked Earth as the pivot-point of creation, and joined us with the rest of the cosmos as one planet among many orbiting the Sun.

Three centuries later, came the second great scientific revolution, the Darwinian revolution. It removed us from a distinct, divine biological status to place us wholly in the ebb and flow of all terrestrial life.

Now we’re in the midst of a third great scientific revolution, the Stardust Revolution. It is the merging of the once disparate realms of astronomy and evolutionary biology, and of the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, placing life in a cosmic context.

This blog, and my upcoming book, tell the story of this scientific revolution in the making.

Check-out the latest Stardust Mission results here: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html

Make a virtual visit to the 2010 Astrobiology Science Conference.

In June 2007, the Nobel Foundation sponsored a symposium in Stockholm, Sweden on the physics of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the Sun. For the world-leading astrophysicists in attendance, the event was a nudge-nudge, wink-wink indication from the secretive Nobel folks that one of its annual prizes in physics would be awarded, perhaps as early as this October, for one of the greatest accomplishments of 20th century astrophysics—the discovery of the first exoplanet. That much is certain. What’s uncertain is who will get the prize.

Will the committee take the obvious route and award the duo of Swiss astronomers who announced the global headline-making discovery of exoplanet 51-Pegasus in 1995? Or, will they side with the American astronomer whose university press releases claim he discovered the first exoplanet three years earlier?

Or will the committee members have an empathetic eye for the vagaries of scientific fate and award the prize, at least in part, to the dark horses in this Nobel race: Canadian astronomers Gordon Walker and Bruce Campbell. After all, the pair of British Columbia-based astronomers’ pioneered the world’s most succesful exoplanet search technique. In the 1970s and 80s they devoted the core of their careers to a quest that many of their colleagues thought was akin to UFO-ology. They even published the first scientific paper that accurately reported the detection of an exoplanet.

But, on this last point it’s certain that a Nobel-committee member will point-out the odd twist to this scientific paper and its history making claim. In a case of scientific self-doubt, Professor Walker retracted the exoplanet claim. But only after his colleague Campbell quit astronomy in frustration and professional heartbreak.

In this the 2009 International Year of Astronomy as we stand on the historic brink of the possible discovery of the first alien Earth, Campbell and Walker’s story is emerging as the centerpiece of the other space race of the past half-century, the search for other worlds.

“Gordon Walker and Bruce Campbell were the real true pioneers of (exoplanet) detection,” says Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. and author of the new book The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets, which recounts the history of the modern search for exoplanets.

But to many, theirs is an untold Canadian story of enormous promise, near victory and eventual heartbreak. As compelling a tale of the physical and psychological challenges of the scientific journey as any in history. A story of reaching into the vast unknown of space to behold a magical star, but be uncertain of its true message.

—

“Bruce Campbell is the father of all of the exoplanet work that is happening in the world right now,” says University of California at Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy, the world’s leading exoplanet hunter. “There are several thousand people working on exoplanets, and it all goes back to Bruce Campbell.”

Marcy has co-discovered 170 of the approximately 360 exoplanets found to date. Most importantly, he’s done it using a technique pioneered by Campbell and Walker.

“(They) invented the technique that we stole,” says Marcy, who in the cast of characters involved in the exoplanet search plays the role of a central witness, having worked in the field since 1982. “If it wasn’t for Bruce Campbell, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

On the August evening I speak with him by phone, he’s at the UC Berkeley campus remotely directing the giant 10-metre Keck Telescope, atop Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano. He’s trying to verify new exoplanet sightings as a member of NASA’s Kepler space telescope mission.

Kepler, launched this past March, is the first telescope capable to spotting Earth-sized rocky planets around stars like our Sun. In mid-August, the Kepler team announced that the telescope is working perfectly and is on-target to reach its ambitious goal: conducting a census of possible nearby Earth-sized planets, due to be completed by 2012. To do this it’s staring at approximately 100,000 stars in the Milky Way, watching for planetary transits. A transit occurs when a planet passes in front of its star resulting in a mini-eclipse, a temporary dimming of the star’s light as seen from Earth.

“Kepler will not find ET, it’s hoping to find ET’s home,” said Bill Borucki, the NASA visionary leading the Kepler mission, on the occasion of Kepler’s launch. “Whether we show that there are lots of Earth-like planets, or very, very few, we’ll answer a question that has been asked by mankind for millennia: Are there other worlds, or are we alone? We should get that answer.”

——

The current excitement over the search for alien worlds belies a huge shift in our view of the cosmos. While by 1980 movie goers were accustomed to a Star Wars menagerie of fictional other worlds, from desert Tatooine to icy Hoth, astronomers counted only nine real planets in the entire cosmos—those of our solar system.

“It is quite hard nowadays to realize the atmosphere of skepticism and indifference in the 1980s to proposed searches for exoplanets,” writes Gordon Walker in a recent scientific article chronicling his exoplanet search.

The skepticism was fuelled by almost a half-century of amazing exoplanet false alarms, as recounted in the new book Pluto Confidential: An insider account of the ongoing battles over the status of Pluto. (It was the discovery of hundreds of exoplanets that reshaped astronomers thinking about the nature of planets and demoted Pluto to dwarf planet status.)

The grand challenge in finding exoplanets is that the planet is hidden in the glare of its star. It’s still only possible to detect an exoplanet indirectly by looking for the minute ways it changes the light coming from its star.

In 1967, a seeming exoplanet discovery around Barnard’s star famously made it into astronomy text books, only to ingloriously fade-out in 1973 when it was shown to be not a planet, but a telescope problem. In another case of mistaken exoplanet identity, a venerable American astronomer arrived at what was planned to be the announcement of an alien world he’d found, only to announce that what he thought was a planet was in truth a mathematical error. (He was none-the-less hailed by his colleagues for having been brave enough to break the news himself.)

“There was literally a gravesite with lots of tombstones of planets that had come to life erroneously and then laid to rest over the decades as false planets,” says Berkeley’s Geoff Marcy.

If other world’s were out there, astronomers knew they were devilishly hard to detect, maybe impossible. Into this astronomical minefield walked Campbell and Walker.

—–
Modern Galileo’s

The two astronomers met forty years ago this month, when Campbell, a 21-year-old third year engineering student at the University of British Columbia walked into his first astronomy class. At the front of the lecture hall was Gordon Walker, a Cambridge-trained, 33-year-old recent immigrant from Scotland in his first year as a professor.

It was little more than a month after Neil Armstrong put humanity’s first step on another world, and the cosmos suddenly seemed a little more accessible, that humans were capable of reaching further into the stars than most had imagined.

However, unlike the Apollo program, Walker and Campbell didn’t initially deliberately set-out on the first dedicated search for alien worlds. They were astronomy tech geeks—Campbell scored top marks in Walker’s class, ‘Astronomical Measurements’—drawn together by a love and fascination for building better, faster telescopic equipment.

And in astronomy, the better you see, the more you see. Just as Galileo’s radical insights were based on a better telescope, Campbell and Walker knew they were onto something when they created a radically better way of studying starlight.

“I heard myself say (to Bruce), We could start looking for planets,” said
Walker from his home in Victoria, BC, where at 73 he’s still very active in astronomy as an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. “I don’t know where the idea came from. That’s how these things happen in science, suddenly a light turns on. It’s the art of the possible.”

What they developed was an amazingly more accurate way of clocking a star’s movement, or speed.

While we’re used to thinking of stars as fixed points of light in the night sky, stars in fact move. A lot. They expand and contract due to their thermonuclear nature. A star rotates on its axis, just like Earth’s rotation that gives us day and night. And just like a planet, a star has an orbit. Although we think of planets orbiting a stationary star, the star and any planets actually orbit a common centre of mass. It’s like a large adult and small child on a teeter-totter—to make it work, the adult gets very close to the centre of mass, the child far away. The ‘parent’ star is very close to the centre of mass, giving it an orbit not much larger than its own diameter.

Measuring a star’s speed around this orbit depends on a 150-year-old standard of astronomy, the doppler method. The doppler method is based on the same fundamental physics we experience when we hear changes in the pitch of an ambulance siren as it speeds towards us and then away.

In the case of stars, astronomers look for changes in the pitch, or frequency, of starlight to measure a star’s speed towards or away from us. The technique is called the ‘wobble method’ because seen on a graph, the star’s speed creates a wave, or wobble, as it appears to move faster when approaching Earth, and slower when moving away. The bigger the wobble, the bigger or closer the planet.

Astronomers had long known that the accuracy of the doppler method depends on the ability to tease apart light into its various colours, or wavelengths, a technique called spectroscopy.

“(Walker) was the Jedi knight of spectroscopy,” says current UBC astronomer Jaymie Matthews, who initially came to UBC in to conduct research with Walker.

Campbell was his Luke Skywalker, an “audacious, young astronomer,” says Marcy, who brought their star-speed tracking up to exoplanet-finding speed. Campbell who’d graduated UBC in 1971, but returned to work with Walker as a post-doctoral researcher in 1976 after earning a PhD at the University of Toronto. With Walker, he developed a spectroscopy technique that was a spectacular 100 times more sensitive to the movement of stars.

“They were measuring the velocities of stars, for the first time in history, to plus or minus ten metres a second,” says Marcy, who began his own exoplanet search after hearing a talk about the technique by Campbell in the early 1980s. “The best that anybody at any observatory in the world had done was plus or minus one kilometre per second.”

They could use a telescope like a police speed radar gun to clock a distant star’s velocity to within the accuracy of the speed of an Olympic sprinter. It was the magic number for planet-hunting. Astronomers knew that massive Jupiter causes our Sun to wobble at about 12 meters per second. Thus, Campbell and Walker’s technique would be able to spot the wobble’s induced by Jupiter-sized exoplanet’s on their stars elsewhere in the Milky Way.

If they were out there.

—

After a trial run with their system on the telescope at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Saanich, north of Victoria, in 1980 Campbell installed their star speed system on the new, much larger Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, where he was now on staff.

Their exoplanet hunt plan was straightforward: assuming that other solar systems existed and were like ours, Jupiter-like exoplanets would take about 12 years to orbit their star, just as Jupiter does. So Walker and Campbell began a decadal search of 26 stars looking for Jupiter-sized exoplanets, ones large enough, they reasoned to tug at their stars to a degree visible with their telescope.

“Out of two dozen stars, and if you observed for a decade or longer, it seemed that it was a sure thing that you’d find something like Jupiter,” says UBC’s Matthews.

Three or four times a year Campbell, Walker, or University of Victoria astronomer Stephenson Yang the other long-term member of the team, would spend several nights atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea summit, 14 000 feet above the Pacific, searching for other worlds. They’d start just after dusk and work through the night in winter parkas, enduring high-altitude induced headaches, until dawn’s light drowned-out the stars.

“It was deadly,” says Walker, of the psychological challenge of searching for exoplanets no-one knew existed, or could even be found. “Of course, you never knew from one night to the next if you were observing anything. You could only tell when the data were reduced about once a year, whether we were seeing trends.”

But by 1987, they believed they were seeing something no Earthling had ever seen before—stellar wobbles caused by orbiting planets.

That summer, at a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Vancouver, Campbell announced their preliminary results: they showed a half-dozen stellar wobbles indicative of possible exoplanets, but one star’s motion was particularly intriguing: gamma Cephei.

It was a fitting star for the Canadian planet hunters. A bright star 45-light years away gamma Cephei is always visible from Canada in the night sky shining near Polaris, the pole star. Campbell described how from their detailed measurements they’d seen that gamma Cephei had a periodic 2.5 year-long wobble. As viewed from Earth the star moves towards us and then away over a two-and-a-half year cycle—evidence, they thought, of an exoplanet gravitationally tugging at the star.
“I presided over Campbell’s press conference and remember to this day the charged atmosphere and excitement that greeted his announcement,” says Steve Maran co-author of the book Pluto Confidential, who retired recently as the long-time press officer for the American Astronomical Society.

The New York Times headline read Planets Outside Solar System Hinted. “They were calling us planet hunters. We were on the track, “ says Campbell, from Victoria where he now lives.

His professional colleagues weren’t as impressed. In an arena of super-charged skepticism, their tentative announcement generated more doubt than accolade. An astronomer in the NYT’s article said: I probably won’t call it a planet until I can get out and walk on the surface of it. No researchers attempted to confirm the results.

Walker says the press conference, ironically, was more the beginning of the end, rather than a high point, increasing the pressure to deliver results from a project that was by its nature deeply long-term.

Two years later, Campbell, Walker and Yang still had nothing conclusive, and worse, Campbell didn’t have a secure job.

A Vancouver-native, Campbell was determined to stay in the lower mainland. But a decade of effort hadn’t earned Campbell a permanent position at either UBC, UVic, or the National Research Council’s Victoria-based Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics.

“In my view (his not getting a job) had a lot to do with the fact that planet searching was still not above the radar,” says Walker. “It all started to unravel.”

Campbell further alienated those who controlled Canada’s professional astronomy appointments by publicly bemoaning the state of astronomy funding in Canada.

Increasingly frustrated, disheartened and distanced from the academic community, Campbell took a final, renegade approach with the help of an influential supporter, the guru of astronomy popularizing, Carl Sagan.

“I remember telling Carl Sagan we think we’re going to be able to do this,” recounts Campbell, who met Sagan while the two were on a panel about the search for extraterrestrial life together at the University of Toronto in the late 1980s. “He was somewhat incredulous at first, but then I convinced him and he became a great friend and supporter after that.”

Buoyed by Sagan’s endorsement, Campbell raised $125, 000 in private funding to support an endowed planet-hunting chair at UVic. However, the federal government’s university research funding guidelines at the time specified that only tenure-track professors could receive funding, disqualifying Campbell, an adjunct professor, from receiving the necessary matching federal funding for the position.

By 1991, at 42 years old, a salary and family stability were more important to him than the secrets of the stars.

“It had been so frustrating to try to secure some sort of position, and then to try to set up an endowed chair, that, when it all came to naught, I decided to walk away,” says Campbell.

When he did, he went supernova. In a final burst of anger, and a major breach of research etiquette, Campbell erased his computer hard drives deleting a decade’s-worth of compiled and analyzed data.

After the deep uncertainty of looking for other worlds, he turned his back on the stars for good and took-up one of life’s great certainties: taxes.

“It was the advent of electronic filing of tax returns in Canada that got me involved,” says Campbell who started work as a personal tax consultant in 1993 and continues today. “Many accountants were hesitant to get into computers and I pretty much knew how computers worked, so I had the edge there.”

—–

Stunned and bruised by the loss of his younger colleague, it was left to Walker to lead the finalizing of the exoplanet project. It took almost a year of painstaking work for Stephenson Yang, fortunately by then also the University of Victoria’s computer systems manager, and University of Victoria colleague Alan Irwin, to recover the original data and re-analyze it.

In 1992, having re-assessed the data, Walker came to a conclusion about the most promising of the possible exoplanets, the one around gamma Cephei. In a scientific paper, Walker and several co-authors concluded that the star’s 2.5 year ‘wobble’ was probably due to its own cyclical expansion and contraction. As the star expanded, it would appear to move towards Earth, and away as it contracted. There was no invisible exoplanet, just a turbulent star.

“Nobody argued with Gordon Walker at the time that the data did not warrant the proclamation of a planet being detected,” says Berkeley’s Geoff Marcy.

Nobody disputed the conclusion, that is, except Walker himself. In fact he’d quietly agonized over whether the wavy line in their data was in fact a star revealing the presence of another, mysterious world.

“I had written the paper as it being a planet,” revealed Walker, in a recent interview. He was sitting in his office, when the then recently arrived post-doctoral student, now UBC professor Jaymie Mathhews, entered and looked at the data. Mathhews pointed-out that the supposed planet’s 2.5 orbital period coincided with what appeared to be periods of the star’s heightened surface, or chromospheric, activity.

“I think (Jaymie) had a very valid point,” says Walker, who deferred to the dominant view and re-wrote his paper, changing an exoplanet into stellar rumblings.

“Being Canadian we were much more cautious in announcing something like that,” says Stephenson Yang. “Of course, no-one would believe you anyway.”

But Walker had been right. Canada’s planet hunters had found their prize. Yet it wasn’t until 2003, after assessing almost 20-years of data, that exoplanet hunters finally concluded definitively that every 906 days a Jupiter-sized planet completes its orbit around gamma Cephei.

“I feel some responsibility for this,” says Jaymie Matthews. “Had I not piped-up it might have gone forward and gone to a referee who wouldn’t have discussed that and it could have gone forward as the detection of a planet. They could have gone out and had a press conference and said, We think we’ve found a planet. Nobody in the media would have asked if they’d checked the chromospheric activity. The headline would have been ‘Canadians find the first planet’.
—-

Within months of Walker’s about-face, Polish-American astronomer Alexander Wolszczar announced the discovery of two Earth-sized bodies around a pulsar, the remnant of a supernovae. Completely unexpected—astronomers are still uncertain how planets survive or result from a star’s detonation—they were the first planet-like objects found outside our solar system, earning Wolszczar, in 2002, the honour of a Polish postage stamp with his image.

Then in 1995, Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the discovery of 51-Pegasus b. A veteran astronomer, Mayor had led the definitive study of binary stars, those that occur in pairs, and was thus accomplished at studying stellar movements for the wobbles caused by unseen orbiting bodies. After only two weeks of observing 142 stars for exoplanets at the Haute Provence Observatory in France he and his graduate student Queloz scored an exoplanet game winner that stunned astronomers: a Jupiter-sized planet so close to its star that it orbited in only four days.

“Nobody, but nobody, suggested there were going to be Jupiters in few day orbits,” says Walker. “In looking for the familiar you miss the obvious.”

Like a hockey player watching the other team hoist the Stanley Cup after a grueling seven-game series, Gordon Walker was among the first to receive the news—he was one of the scientific referees for Mayor and Queloz’s scientific paper on 51-Pegasus b that appeared in the journal Nature.

In retrospect, says Marcy, Walker, Campbell and Yang were thwarted by too small a sample of stars.

“They’d a technique that would have worked immediately, if only by luck they’d chosen the right stars,” says Marcy. “We now know at least 200 stars that if they’d chosen them as their target stars, any one of them, they would have immediately seen the planet with their existing precision.”

After all this, the final vindication of the detection of gamma Cephei in 2003 “was like a Eureka moment in tortuously slow motion,” Walker recently wrote.

David Charbonneau, an Ottawa-native and now leading exoplanet hunter at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says that Walker’s experience is a testament to the excruciating nature of the search to discover new worlds.

“We like to imagine that the scientist looking through the microscope or telescope sees something and then they know that this is the thing they’ve been looking for and it’s just a matter of getting the news out,” says Charbonneau. “But the point is that when you’re actually involved in a true discovery it’s a very uncomfortable process, because you really don’t believe that this is the thing you saw and you want to make absolutely sure you’re not being confused by some spurious signal and you start to question the date yourself.”

In 2000, Charbonneau discovered the first exoplanet that transits its star, setting the stage for the Kepler space telescope mission in search of an alien Earth, of which he’s a team member.

After a half-century of probing the night sky for ever dimmer and more distant as yet unseen truths, Gordon Walker is undeterred, still searching for answers and wondering. He’s a core member of Canada’s MOST space satellite team, a project that includes searching for and studying exoplanets.

“You can’t help but be a little cynical that people (today) can’t get money for big telescopes without mentioning (searching for) exoplanets,” says Walker.

But there’s sadness in his voice when it comes to his old stargazing buddy, Bruce Campbell. Until this past August they lived only several blocks away in the same Victoria, BC neighbourhood, exchanging pleasantries when passing, but not talking of the stars, the emotional pain of an old rupture never fully addressed.

While all agree that Walker and Bruce Campbell’s contribution to the search for exoplanets is significant, will one or both get the nod for a Nobel Prize for leading the way in changing our view of the cosmos?

“In some sense they’re worthy. Walker and Campbell began the field,” says Crowded Universe author Alan Boss. “But my guess is that (the Noble prize) will go to the folks that actually find something in the end. This is a very competitive world. And the Nobel Prizes are as competitive as it gets in science.”

At UC Berkeley, pointing one of the world’s largest telescopes towards the night sky in search of alien worlds, and soon maybe an alien Earth, Geoff Marcy readily acknowledges the giants on whose shoulders he’s standing.

“It’s a real human tragedy, but it’s the way science often goes,” says Marcy. “Somebody has to stick their neck out and try a technique that everybody else thinks is wrong and then interpret the data very carefully, and that other people may not appreciate. You’re not going to break a paradigm, you’re not going to easily make one of the greatest discoveries of the century, the discovery of planets around other stars.”

Sharpshooters posted on suburban roadways. Mass carcass composting. Dawn and dusk collisions leaving hundreds of commuters hurt – or dead. Scenes from the latest apocalyptic Hollywood blockbuster? No, it’s the latest in the increasingly desperate — and at times bizarre — effort to keep Canadian and American drivers and white-tailed deer apart.

This past month, as fall deer-vehicle collision season is upon us, deer collision experts gathered at the International Conference on Ecology and Transportation —aka the roadkill conference — in Duluth, Minnesota to take stock of the situation. The news isn’t encouraging.

A study released this week by the State Farm Insurance company reports that we’re colliding with white-tailed deer at record numbers.

Last year approximately 60,000 Canadian drivers hit a deer—double the number from a decade ago. The total cost to drivers, taxpayers and insurance companies was about $400,000,000. The numbers are drawn from the insurance company study, which covered Ontario, Alberta and New Brunswick, and by compiling the latest national and provincial data.

In Canada, white-tailed deer account for about 9-in-10 of all vehicle collisions with large animals such as moose, elk and bears.

Ontario leads the way in deer collisions, with about 14,000 in 2008. Across Canada this year as many as 50 drivers and passengers will die, and thousands will be injured, in collisions with wildlife.

In the U.S. the situation’s even worse, and a warning for what could happen north of the border as deer populations and the number of cars on Canadian roads grows, say roadkill experts. In 2008 there were 1.2 million collisions between vehicles and deer in the U.S., according to the State Farm study. The estimated bill for these deer run-ins: $8 billion.

In New York state there’s so much deer roadkill littering roadsides that they’ve turned to mass carcass composting at an Ithaca-NY area facility.

“We were running out of options,” says Elisabeth Kolb, with the NY Department of Transportation, which last year composted 7000 of the more than 25000 deer carcasses picked-up from state-controlled roadways.

Roadkill experts say that since the vast majority of deer-vehicle collisions occur in rural and suburban areas, it’s an issue that’s off-the-radar of many urbanites—and politicians. But in deer country, the collisions are taking a broad toll.

“Everybody hits deer,” not just less experienced drivers, says Bruce Knapp, who directs the University of Minnesota-based Deer-Vehicle Crash Information Clearinghouse.

Deer Whistles Don’t Work

The agency is part of a trend in the past decade as researchers, aware of the increasing human and ecological cost of roadkill, have put wildlife-vehicle collisions reduction techniques in the scientific spotlight.

“Most wildlife-vehicle collision mitigation methods aren’t effective,” says Marcel Huijser, a roadkill researcher at the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University.

Last year he co-authoured of the first U.S. Congressional report on the topic, the Wildlife-Vehicle Collision Reduction Study, which included a report-card on mitigation techniques.

Top of the fiction-not-fact list: deer whistles. Many Canadian drivers swear by the small plastic whistles affixed to their bumpers and hoods. While driving, air passing through the whistles is supposed to create a high-pitched noise that scares-away deer. But in research worthy of an episode of the TV series Myth Busters, U.S. researchers showed that the whistles are worthless. In one study researchers strapped headphones onto sedated deer and played the whistle tones – the deer didn’t react.

“If you put a deer whistle on your car, don’t change the way you drive,” says Bruce Knapp.

He says traditional yellow roadside ‘jumping deer’ signs are also generally ineffective. “Drivers become habituated to them and don’t change their driving behaviour.”

What Works?

Many of the techniques to reduce roadkill that show promise, say researchers, involve community-based approaches.

“The first thing you have to do is to figure-out where your problem is,” Knapp says.

It’s something Manitoba Public Insurance has done. The agency has identified deer-vehicle collision “hot spots” within Winnipeg city limits, and for the entire province’s annual 10,000 deer-vehicle collisions. The information is posted on-line in an effort to help drivers avoid deer collisions.

Once roadkill hotspots are identified, says Knapp, the challenge is what to do about them.

In Quebec and New Brunswick, provincial transportation agencies have installed roadside fencing at roadkill hotspots to prevent moose-vehicle collisions, an approach that in some cases might to prevent deer-vehicle collisions, says the U.S. Congressional report on the topic.

The City of Ottawa claims to have reduced deer-vehicle collisions through its Speeding Costs You Deerly Campaign, begun in the fall of 2006. Using temporary roadside signage—large portable, illuminated advertising panels that grab commuter’s attention—and heightened police enforcement of speeding laws, the campaign appeared to put the brakes on the number of deer collisions in the peak months of October and November, from 344 in 2005, to only 214 in 2008.

In the U.S., communities more desperate to reduce suburban deer-vehicle collisions have turned to using sharpshooters to selectively cull local deer populations.

In Iowa City, Iowa and Princeton, New Jersey, city officials called in a U.S. company that specializes in deer sharpshooters. According to a scientific paper published last year, the result was that deer-vehicle collisions dropped in lock-step with declines in local deer populations, reducing collisions by as much as 75 per cent.

The company that supplied the sharpshooters, White Buffalo Inc., has culled more than 10,000 deer in American cities—donating almost a quarter-million pounds of venison to food banks.

Designing Roads for Deer

For communities not ready to call in the sharpshooters, deer crash experts say the future lies in a combination of new technologies now being field-tested, and government’s spending money on those crash-avoidance techniques with a proven track-record.

“It absolutely makes economic sense to put in mitigation measures,” Marcel Huijser says.

In a just published study, working with an economist he calculated the average cost of a deer-vehicle collision in Canada at $6,600. At this cost, he says, if a road-kill hot spot has more than three deer-vehicle collisions per year, it makes long-term financial sense for governments to act.

One new wildlife avoidance technique Huijser recently field tested are roadside motion detectors linked to signs that alert drivers of wildlife on, or near, roads. In initial tests (using corralled llama and horses and deer and elk stand-ins) he’s found that several of the commercially available systems provide accurate detection 90 per cent of the time.

However, as much as transportation agencies try to retrofit existing roadways, some roadkill scientists believe the future lies in building communities with deer in mind.

Bill Ruediger, a Montana-based wildlife ecologist is working with a new, large tract-development housing project in Boise, Idaho to build-in eco-passages for deer movement—green spaces where deer, and other animals, can move without crossing roads.

“We’re trying to work with ways that we can facilitate human development and having (animals) remain part of our communities,” says Ruediger, a who co-founded the first international roadkill conference in 1996. “It’s not going to be easy.”

For years, Ed Atwell has been a Tim Hortons regular, always drinking his Timmy’s coffee with a hint of envy and admiration. That’s because for years, Mr. Atwell has had a doughnut dream, one that in his mind’s eye he could see and taste, but couldn’t quite cook up. Until now.

After years of perseverance, Mr. Atwell’s creation is finally here — and it has made him the first Canadian with a patented doughnut.

The Sunnymoon doughnut is a half-chocolate, half-vanilla hoop of cakey dough. It’s formed through a patented mixing process so the chocolate and vanilla doughs don’t mix, but rather bond in a yin-yang alliance. Sunnymoons started rolling out to grocery stores across Canada this spring.

Mr. Atwell, 39, who lives in the village of Clayton, 15 kilometres southwest of Almonte, has deep roots in the doughnut business. He attended public school in Brampton, Ont., where he chummed with Steven Joyce, son of Tim Hortons co-founder Ron Joyce.

When he was 18, fresh out of high school, he landed his first job as a baker at Country Style Donuts’ head office doughnut shop on Highway 7 north of Toronto. He went on to bake and then consult for a number of independent shops, including the now defunct Bytes Donuts in Kanata.

“I take doughnuts very seriously,” says Mr. Atwell, who with a beard and unruly shoulder-length hair resembles a biker as much as a doughnut philosopher.

In the 1990s, he felt that Canada’s legendary doughnut R&D had gone stale. The 1960s and 1970s were Canada’s glory days. During the era of flower power, Timmy’s bakers created the apple fritter and the Dutchie. In 1976, a brainwave launched the Timbit. (According to a Tim Hortons spokesperson, none of the company’s doughnuts are patented.) In this creative furnace there were the inevitable flops, including a protein-fortified health doughnut — a doughnut for body-builders of the weight-lifting sort — patented to U.S. inventors. But since Timmy’s introduction of the cake-style sour cream doughnut in the late 1980s, Mr. Atwell says our creativity has been on the shelf.

“Since that time, I don’t think I know of a doughnut that’s been very significant,” he says over coffee in a diner near his home.

Until now.

Mr. Atwell’s Sunnymoon doughnut offers “uniqueness to a fairly flat category,” says Toronto’s Robert Shapiro, who handles Sunnymoon’s national sales. In what is essentially a dozen-variety business of grocery-store doughnuts, from glazed yeast rings (Canadians’ favourites) to mini-doughnuts, Sunnymoon is making its bid for shelf space by being different.

“It has eye appeal,” says Luis Deviveiros, general manager of Toronto-based Annette’s Donuts, which cooks up the Sunnymoon. Annette’s is Canada’s largest producer of grocery store doughnuts, frying up almost a million doughnuts a day, five days a week.

Sunnymoon’s symmetry certainly hooked Mr. Atwell. He says that making the first one (at an undisclosed location; Mr. Atwell is wary of a doughnut patent war) was a moment of inventor’s euphoria.

“When I made the product for the first time they were the most beautiful doughnuts I’d ever seen,” says Mr. Atwell, who still has the now-puck-hard prototypes.

Since March Canadians have had no trouble gnoshing Sunnymoons. Annette’s has shipped almost half a million of them to stores from Vancouver to Halifax.

But will Sunnymoon survive the vagaries of Canada’s highly competitive doughnut market? We’re the world’s No. 1 doughnut eaters per capita and buy two-thirds of our sugary dough hoops in the supermarket.

“Doughnuts are an impulse buy, and the first buy is always on the look, the second is on taste,” says Annette’s Mr. Deviveiros, noting that Sunnymoon is getting repeat orders, an initial sign that the product could have an enduring shelf life. It’s Canada’s children who’ll make the final call, since they’re the driving force behind grocery-store doughnut purchases, says Mr. Shapiro.

After seven years of work to turn an idea into a reality, Mr. Atwell is philosophical about the future. He has lots of other ideas for the Sunnymoon line, including other mixes of flavours. “Just watch me,” he says with a smile. But Mr. Atwell doesn’t want to talk about possibly building an empire, or his first royalty cheque. What excites him is sharing what he’s learned from his quintessentially Canadian creative journey.

“Going down the whole inventor route made me a better person,” reflects Mr. Atwell of the entrepreneur’s inevitable emotional peaks and disappointments, hard work and dark nights of doubt. “It taught me to be more sure of myself. The doughnut taught me to realize who I am.”

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