Eventually, we arrived at a tiny solar-heated shack on the polar plateau, dubbed Hotel South Pole and used by Pole residents who need even more isolation. The wooden shack is painted black on the outside to absorb the perennial sunshine, and is furnished with a table, a small bed, a Coleman stove, and a big supply of tea bags and camp meals. Though the air outside was many degrees below zero, the hut’s interior was toasty.

Drugged by the beauty, silence, and space, I asked Solarz question after question, first about neutrinos, but then moving on to other physics matters. We covered Chaos Theory, God, nature (and the difference between those two), quantum physics, music, and our own life stories.

Solarz was born in a small Russian village in 1942. "Right after the war," he said, "Stalin had a brief moment of sanity in which he let the Polish people repatriate themselves." So when the war ended in 1945, his Polish parents went to Poland, "but there was nothing there." The family spent a year and a half in displaced-persons camps until a sister of his father’s was found in Sweden, where they went to live for five years. Then his mother’s brother was found in the United States. "The decision was made to clandestinely save dollars, and when we had enough, we bought tickets for passage on the S.S. United States." He and his family landed in America in 1953, when Solarz was eleven. Many years later he met his wife on an Israeli kibbutz after which they eventually moved to Berkeley.

Our meeting–two Berkeleyans at the Pole–was, in his opinion, a perfect example of Chaos Theory, which he explained like this: "With each decision you make, you’re sending the universe on a unique course. We cannot truly know with perfect accuracy the initial conditions in a causal chain. The whole universe takes a road from which it can’t extricate itself."

Eventually, I forced myself to ask, "So what does the common Joe on the street get from this? I mean, we are talking tax dollars."

Solarz caught his breath. "Poetry –that’s all. We are endowed by the universe to be astrophysical detectors. We’ve evolved to be sensitive to certain windows to the universe but not to others. Beyond the walls, there are whole vast universes of astrophysical phenomena that, if we limit ourselves to our bodies, we can’t detect. Only the universe can be totally sensitive to itself."

Chaos Theory did not deliver me so easily to UC Berkeley cosmologist William Holzapfel. Though he also worked at the Dark Sector, he was difficult to track down and I ended up chasing him around, futilely except for a quick photo session, for about three days. And yet, like so many Antarctic experiences in which the object of pursuit was elusive, the payoff was nonetheless rich as I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with his many colleagues. Eventually, much later, I caught up with Holzapfel at a Berkeley cafe next to campus.

An assistant professor in UC’s physics department, Holzapfel works on two of the most interesting projects in Antarctica, the Viper and DASI (Degree Angular Scale Interferometer) telescopes. Both South Pole telescopes are built to look at the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), ancient light coming from a time when the universe was still very young–about 300,000 years old–so the light these telescopes detect nearly is "the eye of God." CMB was only discovered in 1965, and since that time, cosmologists have been busy trying to "see" it.

Nils Halverston, DASI’s Field Manager, told me, "We’re seeing the most ancient light it’s possible to see with a telescope. This light has been traveling for nearly fifteen billion years" –about the age of the universe.

CMB light comes from the time, shortly after the Big Bang, when the universe was much hotter and denser. Theorists believe that the universe then was also very uniform, basically one smooth gas, without the structures we know today such as stars and galaxies. Three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, this uniform gas was just beginning to condense, or clump–creating the very beginning of structure.

Those who operate the DASI and Viper telescopes hope to confirm or refute current cosmological theories of the origin and structure of the universe. Astrophysical theorists have made very precise predictions about the range of these nascent temperature fluctuations. If the theories and predictions prove correct, then the cosmologists can measure the temperature variations and find out the mass/density of the universe as well as its curvature. They will finally be able to determine whether the universe is going to expand forever or begin crunching.

Halverston explained that the South Pole is the best place for observing CMB light for three reasons. The Pole’s high altitude means that there is just that much less atmosphere to look through. Secondly, the South Pole is very, very dry. Since water absorbs microwaves, they are more easily detected in very dry places. Finally, the airflow is very smooth at the Pole, so the scientists can read it correctly and minimize false signals.

DASI has thirteen different antennas. The cosmologists will combine the signals from those antennas, using the data to make two-dimensional maps of the microwave sky. After months and months of building the telescope, transporting its parts to the South Pole and assembling its parts, the massive apparatus was ready to receive its "first light"–meaning that it would look at the sky for the first time–during, amazingly, the very week I was at the Pole!

I was amazed. But the hard-working scientists appeared somewhat nonchalant. There were some bottles of beer, a little cheering and hand-shaking, but mostly a lot of very intense staring at the monitors revealing the data. I had a little more trouble containing my excitement as I also stared at the monitors, thinking, "So this is the eye of God?" When I got up my nerve to interrupt their staring, I learned that in fact, for today, for "first light," they were merely looking at the most obvious object in the sky, the sun. Nevertheless, they quietly celebrated the fact that DASI worked.

Feeling a bit like I was crashing the small, private wedding of someone I didn’t know, I left the DASI scientists to their monitors and set off, once again, to track down William Holzapfel. He had passed through the Dark Sector a bit earlier, and indicated to me that I might be able to find him in the galley later on. I returned to the dome, didn’t find Holzapfel in the galley, and so decided to find the gym instead. I had heard that one existed and was curious to see what it would look like.

Many of the passageways under the dome are off-limits, but I was never clear which ones. I found a door that I thought would be the gym and opened it. Since the room was totally dark, I felt around on the wall next to the door and tried a couple of the switches. Finally, a light came on. Bingo: the "gym." It was tiny, but there were some yoga mats, and a hoop for shooting baskets. I shut off the light and sauntered back to the galley.

Just as I arrived, a siren sounded throughout the dome. A man plowed out of the galley, and rudely shoved me aside, shouting, "Move!" People came streaming out of the buildings, heading for the tunnel leading out of the dome. Then over the intercom, a voice announced, "Fire in the gym, fire in the gym."

I was mortified. Had I flipped a fire alarm? Would someone be stupid enough to put it right by the door? Well, this was the South Pole, and things were not necessarily laid out logically. Still, it was hard to believe the fire alarm would be right in line with the light switch. I followed the group leaving the dome, wondering whether I should say something.

Then an even worse thought occurred to me. Perhaps there was a fire under the dome. Fire is the worst danger at South Pole Station. If the buildings burn down, the people are in serious trouble.

Apparently, however, there was no fire. The whole episode blew over, and I never heard anyone even mention it. I still have no idea if my being in the gym was coincidental to the fire alarm, or if I set it.

Near the end of my week at the Pole, I decided to take a solo adventure out to Hotel South Pole. The temperature had dropped to sixty below, if you counted windchill, and I definitely counted it. So I bundled up, meaning that I covered every square millimeter of skin, borrowed some skis, and took off from Pole Station.

Soon I was on my own on the polar plateau, with nothing to contemplate but the curvature of the earth. The air was full of diamond dust, tiny particles that look like bitsy crystals, each one carrying the entire spectrum of the rainbow.

I kept moving fast enough to stay warm but slow enough to keep from fogging up my goggles. I wore a lot of clothes and carried many more in my pack. When I arrived at the tiny shack where I would spend the night alone, a few kilometers from the South Pole, I faced each direction, taking in the perfect expression of silence and space. At least for that night, 007’s mission was to have no mission at all.

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