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> In 1995, astronomer Bob Williams wanted to point the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of sky filled with absolutely nothing remarkable. For 100 hours. It wa

> In 1995, astronomer Bob Williams wanted to point the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of sky filled with absolutely nothing remarkable. For 100 hours. It was a terrible idea, his colleagues told him, and a waste of valuable telescope time. People would kill for that amount of time with the sharpest tool in the shed And by 'Bob Williams', we mean the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble. Williams chose to use some of the predefined Director's Discretionary Time to explore the limits of the telescope and our understanding of the universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(astronomer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(astronomer)

JamesLeonis 6y ago
I adore these images, and deeply respect the reputation risk in getting them. I also believe that even if we found nothing at all, it would still advance our understanding of the universe as we could confidently say what limits there might be.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  Unfortunately people would not have gotten nearly as excited when seeing nothing, and the nay-sayers would have made this very clear. These things are always as much science as they are politics, so the reputation damage would have been real.
  - JamesLeonis 6y ago
    While I agree with you about PR and reputation (sadly), it would be valuable for scientists as a Null value. I would put it on the same level as the Aether experiments.
    - stingraycharles 6y ago
      Yes the point I tried to make was explicitly about the political aspects. I agree that from a scientific point of view, the null value is almost as valuable as what we got now.
  - YinglingLight 6y ago
    The greatest flaw we possess today en masse is that Science, as it is conducted today, is pure. Ironically, a dogmatic belief in it's purity. There is science, which got Western Civilization where it is today, and there is Science™.
  - ianai 6y ago
    More importantly, could he have done the same thing in today’s world and political realities that he did then?
  - ISL 6y ago
    If nothing had been seen, the implications would have been spectacular. Experiments worth doing are worth doing no matter the result.
    - mirimir 6y ago
      Right, I suspect that there was much more behind Bob's deep field study than TFA presents.
    - Tegran 6y ago
      The implications aren't automatically "there's nothing out there", more "this was the wrong tool for the job".
      - ISL 6y ago
        True, but I doubt that anyone would have gambled that much Hubble time without working out the statistical sensitivity of the measurement.
- soneil 6y ago
  I think it's not so much that it was a huge gamble. It was more that it was a sensitive time politically, to make that gamble. I mean, if they found nothing? Sure, that's still a question Hubble should be trying to answer. But right after such a rocky start, the politically obvious choice would have been to go for easy wins. The timing was as ballsy as anything else, if not more so.
hawski 6y ago
From the article: > And, to be honest, it didn’t really matter how much his colleagues protested. As director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he had a certain amount of Hubble’s time at his personal disposal. “The telescope allocation committee would never have approved such a long, risky project,” he explains. “But as director, I had 10 percent of the telescope time, and I could do what I wanted.” Also: > “Scientific discovery requires risk,” Williams says. “And I was at a point in my career where I said, “If it’s that bad, I’ll resign. I‘ll fall on my sword.’”
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Well, my opinion (now) is that it wasn't so huge a gamble and completely unknown. The galaxy luminosity function (# galaxies per brightness, basically for those unfamiliar) is a curve they knew the beginnings of through images to date, and it wasn't unreasonable to suppose it would keep going beyond what had been done. It's not like you would expect galaxies to suddenly stop being found if you took exposures a little deeper. It was a good (and not outrageous) bet. I would liken it to -- if we built a better microscope and looked deeper into a cell, is it likely we'd find nothing new? Probably not.
  - Complexicate 6y ago
    I'm glad you prefaced this with "(now)" ie: hindsight. There's always a considerable chance that tests of the untested / unproven will remain inconclusive, even if there's some evidence we should find something. It's extremely risky to allocate a huge amount of finite resources to these unknowns, when there are so many areas we KNOW we can help advance with those finite resources. The fact that he was ready to retire, if the picture came back with barely anything in it, gives a sense of how bad that waste of resources would have been. Future us might not think it is such a gamble to send a probe to look for life in the oceans of Saturn's moon Enceladus. There's evidence of abiogenesis from deep sea vents on Earth, and Enceladus has very similar conditions. But present us knows there are so many unknowns and possibilities of failure even if something is there. And there are so many other useful ways to use the finite resources of our space program. It took a lot of courage on Bob Williams' part to explore this.
jostmey 6y ago
Wow! The culture sounds very risk averse. I mean 100 hours is not much given how long the telescope remained opertional
- dheera 6y ago
  Exactly, this is exactly why I decided not to pursue academia. Too many times I heard things along the lines of getting "low hanging fruit" to get "published" and that "don't try that you won't ever graduate". Why is graduating and publishing papers and tenure and theses the goal of academia, instead of trying the highest possible risk things that even companies wouldn't want to risk? Why isn't academia about doing the most utterly crazy things possible in the name of advancing science for civilization?
  - Kalium 6y ago
    You're absolutely right. What's good for civilization is to advance scientific understanding and knowledge. To take risks, because sometimes they pan out! So go on, pour resources into a thousand crazy ideas. Something will work out eventually. Yet, what's good for the academic? Each effort costs potentially years of your life. A great discovery will catapult you to the stars, a small one will advance your career, and a negative finding does nothing. You're not alone, you have peers competing for the next round of funding, tenured position, or residency. There are literally never enough to go around, and each will judge applicants in part on their record of results. I think you're describing a conflict between what's valuable for a system at scale and what's valuable for individual actors within it.
    - db48x 6y ago
      If you want to find nothing without hurting your career, spend your time reproducing other people's results. Lots of the time you will find what they found, which doesn't help your career much. But sometimes you'll find frauds or mistakes, and that will help your career and our civilization quite a lot.
      - 6y ago

JamesLeonis 6y ago

I adore these images, and deeply respect the reputation risk in getting them. I also believe that even if we found nothing at all, it would still advance our understanding of the universe as we could confidently say what limits there might be.

stingraycharles 6y ago
Unfortunately people would not have gotten nearly as excited when seeing nothing, and the nay-sayers would have made this very clear. These things are always as much science as they are politics, so the reputation damage would have been real.
- JamesLeonis 6y ago
  While I agree with you about PR and reputation (sadly), it would be valuable for scientists as a Null value. I would put it on the same level as the Aether experiments.
  - stingraycharles 6y ago
    Yes the point I tried to make was explicitly about the political aspects. I agree that from a scientific point of view, the null value is almost as valuable as what we got now.
- YinglingLight 6y ago
  The greatest flaw we possess today en masse is that Science, as it is conducted today, is pure. Ironically, a dogmatic belief in it's purity. There is science, which got Western Civilization where it is today, and there is Science™.
- ianai 6y ago
  More importantly, could he have done the same thing in today’s world and political realities that he did then?
- ISL 6y ago
  If nothing had been seen, the implications would have been spectacular. Experiments worth doing are worth doing no matter the result.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    Right, I suspect that there was much more behind Bob's deep field study than TFA presents.
  - Tegran 6y ago
    The implications aren't automatically "there's nothing out there", more "this was the wrong tool for the job".
    - ISL 6y ago
      True, but I doubt that anyone would have gambled that much Hubble time without working out the statistical sensitivity of the measurement.
soneil 6y ago
I think it's not so much that it was a huge gamble. It was more that it was a sensitive time politically, to make that gamble. I mean, if they found nothing? Sure, that's still a question Hubble should be trying to answer. But right after such a rocky start, the politically obvious choice would have been to go for easy wins. The timing was as ballsy as anything else, if not more so.

hawski 6y ago

From the article: > And, to be honest, it didn’t really matter how much his colleagues protested. As director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he had a certain amount of Hubble’s time at his personal disposal. “The telescope allocation committee would never have approved such a long, risky project,” he explains. “But as director, I had 10 percent of the telescope time, and I could do what I wanted.” Also: > “Scientific discovery requires risk,” Williams says. “And I was at a point in my career where I said, “If it’s that bad, I’ll resign. I‘ll fall on my sword.’”

supernova87a 6y ago
Well, my opinion (now) is that it wasn't so huge a gamble and completely unknown. The galaxy luminosity function (# galaxies per brightness, basically for those unfamiliar) is a curve they knew the beginnings of through images to date, and it wasn't unreasonable to suppose it would keep going beyond what had been done. It's not like you would expect galaxies to suddenly stop being found if you took exposures a little deeper. It was a good (and not outrageous) bet. I would liken it to -- if we built a better microscope and looked deeper into a cell, is it likely we'd find nothing new? Probably not.
- Complexicate 6y ago
  I'm glad you prefaced this with "(now)" ie: hindsight. There's always a considerable chance that tests of the untested / unproven will remain inconclusive, even if there's some evidence we should find something. It's extremely risky to allocate a huge amount of finite resources to these unknowns, when there are so many areas we KNOW we can help advance with those finite resources. The fact that he was ready to retire, if the picture came back with barely anything in it, gives a sense of how bad that waste of resources would have been. Future us might not think it is such a gamble to send a probe to look for life in the oceans of Saturn's moon Enceladus. There's evidence of abiogenesis from deep sea vents on Earth, and Enceladus has very similar conditions. But present us knows there are so many unknowns and possibilities of failure even if something is there. And there are so many other useful ways to use the finite resources of our space program. It took a lot of courage on Bob Williams' part to explore this.

jostmey 6y ago

Wow! The culture sounds very risk averse. I mean 100 hours is not much given how long the telescope remained opertional

dheera 6y ago
Exactly, this is exactly why I decided not to pursue academia. Too many times I heard things along the lines of getting "low hanging fruit" to get "published" and that "don't try that you won't ever graduate". Why is graduating and publishing papers and tenure and theses the goal of academia, instead of trying the highest possible risk things that even companies wouldn't want to risk? Why isn't academia about doing the most utterly crazy things possible in the name of advancing science for civilization?
- Kalium 6y ago
  You're absolutely right. What's good for civilization is to advance scientific understanding and knowledge. To take risks, because sometimes they pan out! So go on, pour resources into a thousand crazy ideas. Something will work out eventually. Yet, what's good for the academic? Each effort costs potentially years of your life. A great discovery will catapult you to the stars, a small one will advance your career, and a negative finding does nothing. You're not alone, you have peers competing for the next round of funding, tenured position, or residency. There are literally never enough to go around, and each will judge applicants in part on their record of results. I think you're describing a conflict between what's valuable for a system at scale and what's valuable for individual actors within it.
  - db48x 6y ago
    If you want to find nothing without hurting your career, spend your time reproducing other people's results. Lots of the time you will find what they found, which doesn't help your career much. But sometimes you'll find frauds or mistakes, and that will help your career and our civilization quite a lot.
    - 6y ago