Pictures Worth Millions
Nowadays Big Science requires Big Money. Recognizing that fact, the W. M. Keck Foundation has come up with a $70-million gift to Caltech to build the world’s largest optical telescope, a 10-meter (400-inch) instrument that will enable astronomers to peer farther into the universe and further back in time than ever before. Because the universe is expanding, the farther away an object is, the longer ago it was created.
The gift is believed to be the largest private donation ever made for a single scientific project and the largest ever to any West Coast university. It will make possible continued progress in some of humanity’s oldest questions: Who are we? Where are we in the cosmos? How did the universe begin? What is the nature of matter?
Many of the major telescopes in this country were built with private money, including the Yerkes, the Mount Wilson and the Palomar Mountain observatories. The Keck gift continues that tradition. It also continues the tradition of oil money being used to build these impressive astronomical devices. Much of the money for the 200-inch Palomar telescope was put up by John D. Rockefeller, who made his fortune in Standard Oil. The Keck money was amassed from Superior Oil. Fortunately, some people with vast fortunes see wisdom in spending money on projects such as these telescopes, whose benefits to society extend for years and touch every person who has ever looked at the stars and wondered.
If all this sounds familiar, it is because this same 10-meter telescope was announced last year by the University of California, which had received a $36-million gift to build it from Marion O. Hoffman, widow of Maximilian E. Hoffman, importer of foreign cars. The $36 million did not cover the full cost, so the university went looking for other donors, eventually asking Caltech what it could suggest. Caltech, in turn, found the Keck Foundation, which said that it would put up almost all the money that was needed. Now it looks as if the Hoffman money will be returned, probably to be put to another philanthropic use. “We’re not angry with them (the University of California), and we don’t believe they’re angry with us,” Ira H. Lustgarten, a lawyer representing the Hoffman Foundation, told us Thursday from New York.
At the time of the Hoffman grant, we said that we couldn’t wait to see the pictures of the universe from the Maximilian E. and Marion O. Hoffman Observatory. Now we can’t wait to see the pictures of the universe from the W. M. Keck Observatory.
