High Altitude Observatory: Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—Hamlet 1.5.167–68

Fig. 1.

Photograph of the High Altitude Observatory at Climax, 1941 or 1942, with the Roberts’ Graham-Paige car, in which they had driven cross country, in the foreground. The observatory was completed over the summer of 1940, with employees of the Climax Mine assisting in the construction of the dome. (Source: National Center for Atmospheric Research [NCAR] Archives.)

Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, a series of poetic and historical works, takes up the space—literal and figurative, aesthetic and technological—of the Climax Observatory. Built on and with the support of the Climax Molybdenum Company, an enormous underground mining operation at Fremont Pass (elev. 11,500 feet) in Climax, Colorado, the High Altitude Observatory was established by Harvard University in 1940 as an outpost to its Observatory in Cambridge to house the first coronagraph in North America.

I conceive of and structure this project inspired by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s 1686 Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes). De Fontenelle organized these as a series of nightly conversations between an elegant marquise and a gallant philosopher. Over the course of multiple imaginary evenings (five in the first edition), the two discuss matters pertaining to the stars, the planets, and sun, and the question of life or the possibility thereof, in outer space, beyond the terrestrial sphere. Written in the vernacular French, at a time when much scientific writing remained in Latin, and written to appeal to women and men alike, de Fontenelle’s Conversations is considered a seminal work of popular science writing. Almost immediately translated into multiple English editions, six in later editions, its publication marks a key moment in the early Enlightenment.

My Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds seeks to inhabit the High Altitude Observatory; to capture its essence from 1940 to 1947 (when it would be rebuilt on an adjacent mountain) through a series of differently voiced poetic “conversations” among a series of historical and historically inspired human figures. An intermingling of narratives lends itself to conversations in the realm of poetics and politics.

If an early modern such as Bernard de Fontenelle fantasized about the heavens in Conversations, his imaginary was in the service of scientific progress, a new humanistic perspective on the pursuit of knowledge. Georgius Agricola, a sixteenth-century German humanist and metallurgist, had taken an approach to the deepest reaches of the earth, whose textual and visual components equally evoke modern scientific and philosophic questing, and subterranean fantasy: the extraordinary human energies for unearthing the deep below and uncovering the power of terrestrial materials through mining and mineral refining. The spirit of each—de Fontenelle and Agricola—inspire my humanistic approach to the Climax Observatory.

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In late 1939 Harvard astrophysicist and Colorado native David Menzel undertook a new project to detect the solar corona—the ring of energy around the sun only visible to the naked eye during full eclipses—using a newly developed type of astronomical instrument: a coronagraph. He assigned Walter Orr Roberts, a recently married first-year doctoral student, to drive over 2,000 miles cross-country with the equipment and to establish and oversee an astronomical observatory atop the Continental Divide at the highest settled elevation in the United States. A native of the Boston area, Roberts had grown up in West Bridgewater, with a love of photography and stars; he had just completed the second of two summer internships at Kodak and already had in mind the idea of a career with that company in the field of emulsions. Roberts and his wife, Janet, left the Harvard Observatory in a Graham-Paige sedan, loaded down with goods for homemaking and boxes of crated scientific equipment, in July 1940. Menzel had spent the previous year negotiating with the mining enterprise, which agreed to host the project gratis, and doing groundwork for observatory and cabin construction as well as the design of...