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An image from Margaret Geller's digitally animated film So Many Galaxies . . . So Little Time, which was inspired in part by her conversation with Berenice Abbott. Each elliptical shape is a false color image of a galaxy in the area surrounding the Milky Way. © Smithsonian Institution, 1992.

When we discussed her generator picture painted with light, I told Berenice that much of science is an exploration with light. I told her about the ancient light that enables our exploration of the universe. Fifteen-billion-year-old photons, particles of light, carry the whisper of the big bang. They reveal how uniform the early universe was. Photons from distant galaxies travel through the universe for billions of years without hitting anything. Finally they end their long journey by hitting the detectors in the instruments attached to the telescopes I use. Photographs taken with these instruments record the ancient photons and show how the universe looks today and how it looked ten billion years ago. Her eyes were wide and her voice was soft as she urged me to tell her more about the giant telescopes, the cameras of astronomy.

She wanted to know whether I had any pictures I could show her right then. I did. There was an immediacy about her energy, her intensity, and her curiosity that made her seem twenty, not ninety. I had brought photographs of galaxies and a short film I had made based on my own work. Berenice had admired black-and-white photographs of galaxies, but she had never seen the color images I had brought to show. She understood without explanation that images through separate color filters had to be combined somehow. She wanted to know just how they were made and I was embarrassed that I could only explain in a broad-brush way. She wanted details as though she were going to go right out to try it herself.

I felt shy about explaining my own work. Her universe of Paris and New York so full of life and history seemed richer and larger than the universe of galaxies I study. I hesitated. She wanted me to get on with the story. "In 1929, the year I came back to New York, the papers had a story about the expanding universe. Is that still true?" I told her it was still the basic idea and that I used exactly that discovery to make maps of the way galaxies are distributed in the universe. I took her through every step of the construction of the map. She wanted to know when she could go to the telescope with me. It is amazing how the mind can still live a young life when the body is old and frail.

As the sun began to set and the beautiful light in her living room began to fade, I put my tape into her VCR to show her the enormous patterns I discovered in the universe. Made for the National Air and Space Museum, my short video is a trip through the enormous patterns–my patterns–marked by galaxies in our neighborhood of the universe. Thousands of galaxies mark the surfaces of giant dark regions a hundred million light years across. The pattern marked by the galaxies is similar to the surfaces of soap bubbles in one of Abbott’s famous science photographs. Berenice watched the video in silence. As soon as it ended she said, "Your map of the universe is fascinating, but I don’t like the way you show it." There was really no preface to the criticism and I had to ask for an explanation. "The symbols you use to represent galaxies look like stars. Most people don’t know the difference between a star and a galaxy. If you want them to understand that you are looking at galaxies, show them galaxies. The picture has to say clearly what you mean." I explained that we were limited by the computer graphics capabilities, but it was foolish to try to explain these limitations to a woman who had used an 8x10 camera to do the seemingly impossible. She didn’t budge from her blunt initial opinion. Technical obstacles were irrelevant to the importance of the message a picture carries.

When I mentioned computers, Berenice asked, "Didn’t Norbert Wiener have something to do with computers?" I told her that he was the father of cybernetics, the science of communication among people and machines. She nodded and added, "He was a wonderful man. I photographed him–his soft belly." I laughed inside at the incongruity of a soft belly as the sole descriptor of a scientist who invented a whole field of research. In spite of Berenice’s short description, the expression on her face said that she saw him again in all the dimensions that informed her portrait.

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