Error Budget

So in the same week that I'm subbing long term alone in a class with 18 rapscallion 8 year olds, I also went with Emma to meet an astrophysicist in Monrovia.

A lot of the time I don't know where I'm going because I'm just the driver on someone else's journey. There was alot of laundry, but it was Saturday and the Monrovia trip sounded better than teaching 3rd grade. Monrovia, as my brother told me years ago, "Not the end of the world, but if you stand on a box, you can see it from here."

Emma likee da math, especially the star kind, so we go meet the guy and the guy zoomed in to park next to us at what to me looked like an unmarked abandoned warehouse and then jumped out with his Australian (although he was British) accent and told us to come on in.

Inside the "lab," we waited for a handful of other star junkie people and he showed us what looked like the world's most boring objects in this lofty high ceilinged lab. There was like a giant metal plate. A round scaffolding type thing. Some stacked up metal boxes with some neatly wrapped wires coming out of it. A humming machine inside of a refrigerator. It's like if you shrunk down and could walk around ankle deep inside the mushy mechanical workings of your brain and its functional, no nonsense wiring. It's like backstage at a magic show if there was no magic invented yet. Like if you went to Magic Mountain and none of the rides were there. In fact all the magic is erased and it's just a parking lot in Valencia.

But as the people straggled in (the whitest teenager who ever lived with his parents - his sharp shoulder blades sticking out the back of him, the biggest things on him; a star trek nerd child molester whose teeth aimed down into his mouth like he'd been gulping fish in a strong current; a fat English astronomer for whom the word mirth was invented) into this dry white room full of haphazard metal leftover from a Chrysler Assembly Line Christmas Party, I realized that the magic of the stars wasn't the junk you had to build to see the stars. As we talked to Hank the guy we had come to meet, who loved science and the stars so much he bounced in his tennis shoes as he talked,  I realized that the magic of the stars is in all the questions.

Hank explained happily that for the last 14 years he's been working on the biggest telescope ever, a thirty meter one they're hoping to set up in Hawaii. The biggest ones we have now are 8 meters. He said you'd be able to point the laser and take a picture of a dot of space the size of-- well a dot, like a period - and inside that dot there are 400,000 galaxies. (pause. 4. HUNDRED. THOUSAND. In that period right there.) This telescope would help us be able to see layers of space we can't see now. We are blind. If all goes well it's only ten more years until the thing will be working and he will be dead just kidding. Except the people of Hawaii juuuust decided they don't want the world's biggest camera on their volcano so now unless you own a tall mountain it might end up strapped to Hank's car but at least it will be built. So they're gonna keep building it. Hope for the best.

It works with 400 mirrors, and all the mirrors are being built by us and Canada and Japan and India, and then polished in Rochester NY at the Canon lab (because who needs cameras anymore) and he said there they have to polish it mechanically until the concavity is exactly right because otherwise the pictures won't be clear. He said they can make them almost perfectly smooth but that on the project as a whole there is an Error Budget. Every piece of the telescope will still work even if in each piece there are tiny defects, as long as all the errors accumulated are contained within the error budget.

I'm thinking dammit I didn't know we could have an error budget. 

Here I am walking around the lab looking at the pieces of what looks like King Kong's handcuffs, or somebody's robotic team project suddenly abandoned for pizza at Shakey's, and he's talking about all the bunches of people who are figuring out the rivets and the weights and the dynamics of things and all I'm thinking about is man I want to spill my water all over these wires.

Also, I got a free bagel sandwich on the way in because the lady at the bagel place knows my family and I'm thinking, YES, I want to know all about the stars and feel confounded by the immensity of all we don't know but YES I also think a free bagel is its own kind of miracle.

My error budget is so high.

So I took back all my questions to my little class of 8 year olds where they are asteroids whizzing around me and crashing into me and just getting them to OPEN A BOOK IN A TIMELY MANNER is every bit as difficult as the little guy making the metal plate that holds the telescope at the precise angle and earthquake resistant springiness - YES but have you ever tried to get 8 year olds to STAND IN A QUIET LINE

For some reason I am in this life that is sloshing around me and over me and there is Emma leading me down this what is this science math path and the telescope warehouse had such high ceilings and why do high ceilings make you feel better

And the guy said if aliens were looking down at our earth they'd see that something was weird there because the atmosphere is unique and that is because we have so much oxygen here and that is not normal and all the other planets we have found don't have oxygen and I said but Hank why do we have oxygen and he said because we have trees

But why don't they have trees. Hank.

Why are we alone

So I let the kids in my class read in the closet and under the tables. Because in 5th grade when I was a kid I had a teacher who said reading should be fun, and comfortable, and she let us do that. So I prayed the principal didn't walk in and I let them do what I got to do, which is read with someone's head on their lap or against the bookshelf, lounging like cats on a rainy day. Because maybe someone, one of these kids, will grow up and remember to encourage another kid to think bigger or differently or sideways. We can get to the same place on a crooked path. It just takes longer.