ix
Dr. John C. Mather
Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
I got my start in scientific ballooning at the University of California, Berkeley. I
was looking for a Ph.D. thesis project in 1970, after two years of graduate school
classes on particle physics and relativity and quantum mechanics and studying in
the library, and I was giving up on my dream of being a theoretical physicist like
Richard Feynman. I really wanted to build something. I felt my hands itching to
hold a screwdriver. I found Paul Richards and Charles Townes and Mike Werner,
who were all thinking about how to measure the newly discovered Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation. I said yes, I want to play! So the first project
was to build an instrument and take it up to White Mountain in eastern California,
on the east side of the Owens Valley. We built it and it worked, and we learned a
new technology, but it wasn’t surprising, it just agreed with expectations that the
cosmic background seemed to have a temperature of about 3 degrees Kelvin.
Then Paul went off to England for a sabbatical and came back with an idea for
a balloon payload that could get an instrument above most of the interference of
the Earth’s atmosphere. It would be a satellite on a string, as I called it. The plan
was to make a new kind of interferometer, which Paul had learned about in
England, called a Polarizing Martin-Puplett, and use it as a spectrometer. It would
Foreword
Dr. John C. Mather
Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
I got my start in scientific ballooning at the University of California, Berkeley. I
was looking for a Ph.D. thesis project in 1970, after two years of graduate school
classes on particle physics and relativity and quantum mechanics and studying in
the library, and I was giving up on my dream of being a theoretical physicist like
Richard Feynman. I really wanted to build something. I felt my hands itching to
hold a screwdriver. I found Paul Richards and Charles Townes and Mike Werner,
who were all thinking about how to measure the newly discovered Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation. I said yes, I want to play! So the first project
was to build an instrument and take it up to White Mountain in eastern California,
on the east side of the Owens Valley. We built it and it worked, and we learned a
new technology, but it wasn’t surprising, it just agreed with expectations that the
cosmic background seemed to have a temperature of about 3 degrees Kelvin.
Then Paul went off to England for a sabbatical and came back with an idea for
a balloon payload that could get an instrument above most of the interference of
the Earth’s atmosphere. It would be a satellite on a string, as I called it. The plan
was to make a new kind of interferometer, which Paul had learned about in
England, called a Polarizing Martin-Puplett, and use it as a spectrometer. It would
Foreword