Interview with Marion Littleton "Lit" Meeks

Meeks: 00:02

[?] and she got all the old data organized. And so, she took all the OH data, in particular, all of the original working data notes and all that stuff, and just collected it, filed it away.

Sullivan: 00:18

And this is at the Millstone Library?

Meeks: 00:20

The Millstone Data Library.

Sullivan: 00:21

Let me just make sure…. Okay. This is interviewing Lit Meeks at the AAS meeting in Amherst in August, 71. Now, about this discovery. First of all, was there a competition amongst different groups? I know that Barrett looked for it earlier at NRL and didn't find it.

Meeks: 00:47

Yeah, there was a lot of talk about it, especially [inaudible] I guess, first mentioned it to me a year or so before Sandy Weinreb came to work at Lincoln Laboratory. And so, I'd say it was pretty widely known that among the group that was in Cambridge at the time, that this was a good possibility, a good thing to look for. At the time I think the detection came about, really, because Sandy Weinreb had just finished up his doctorate and he had taken all his equipment down to NRAO to make the deuterium search. And the reason he took it down to NRAO is kind of interesting. He originally wanted, he and Jerry Wiesner, who was his thesis adviser, wanted to bring it up and run it at Millstone. But it turned out there was so much red tape involved in getting it on Millstone, it was easier to ship the whole thing down to Green Bank.

Sullivan: 01:57

Dealing with the Air Force and all.

Meeks: 01:58

Yeah. And dealing with Lincoln Lab at the time when there's not especially close relationship between the campus and Lincoln Laboratory. I don't think anyone had ever come out from the campus and worked at Millstone, so there wasn't any real precedent for it.

Sullivan: 02:17

So, this really was the beginning of that whole collaboration also.

Meeks: 02:20

Yeah. Sandy had just got back from Green Bank, and Alan Barrett took Sandy on sort of as a finishing graduate student to see if he passed his exams and so forth. At that time, we proposed -- I don't really remember the details of exactly how it came about. Certainly, been in Alan's mind for a long time. But the proposal was that Sandy bring his correlator out to Millstone and we use a Millstone antenna to look for OH.

Sullivan: 02:59

But had not Barret looked for OH at NRL?

Meeks: 03:01

NRL. Yeah. And they hadn't found it.

Sullivan: 03:04

What was the main reason for that? Just sensitivity.

Meeks: 03:06

Well, it's very strange. Even though they looked at the-- they looked at the Galactic Center for absorption, and they should have seen it. The absorption in the Galactic Center was above their stated error limits, but they didn't see it. And Alan told me that he thought there was an equipment malfunction at that time, and probably that was responsible. But actually, their quoted limits, with their quoted limits, they should have seen it in the Galactic Center.

Sullivan: 03:37

This was published.

Meeks: 03:38

Yeah. It was given as a paper at the AAS, and I don't know whether it was otherwise published. Well, in any case, I was very anxious to do the experiment for two reasons not only scientific interest in it, but at that time I was attempting to get-- Haystack was then under construction. I was attempting to get as much radiometric equipment for Haystack as possible, and we didn't have an engineer assigned to it. And my thought was that if we could attract Sandy to come and work there after he finished his PhD, he'd be a good person to get the thing started. So, about the time we were thinking about this, the experiment came up, and Sandy decided to bring his correlator out and try it. So, there are essentially three of us involved, Alan Barrett and Sandy Weinreb and myself.

Sullivan: 04:59

What about Ed Lilley? You mentioned him before.

Meeks: 05:02

Well, Ed was not directly involved in this at all because he was at Harvard. There's really no necessity for Ed to be involved.

Sullivan: 05:15

But he had talked about this.

Meeks: 05:16

He had talked about it, and I'm sure he probably knew that we were getting ready to look for it, although he didn't know the details. So, Sandy brought his equipment out and we paid him, I think, something like half time, a quarter time to get the correlator rigged up and get installed. At Millstone, and John Henry did the programming for the Millstone computer to present the spectrum. And he did such fine job that Sandy included—wanted to include John Henry as a co-author in all this. So actually, he invited John Henry before he cleared it with either of us. And I think it probably was an appropriate thing because even now, I don't think there's a better data presentation system than the one that we had running with the old CT 24 computer. Millstone had instant display of the spectrum. We could average spectra. We had all of those facilities going on time. That was pretty much the background. Sandy came in the early part of the-- I guess he first came out in the winter of 1963, and then he worked on this. I can't quite remember the sequence of events, but I remember we were very eager to hire Sandy, and we were able to get a slot for him, funds for him. And he just finished his PhD. I can't remember whether this was before the OH or after, but I think it must have been before.

Sullivan: 07:13

Why was the correlator such a key? I mean, why couldn't you use a filter bank?

Meeks: 07:18

Well, we could, in the light of-- in the light of hindsight, we could have used a filter bank, but Sandy's correlator had a proven ability to reach a very high-level sensitivity on the deuterium and we felt probably it was a better-- it was a better instrument [crosstalk].

Sullivan: 07:42

Which deuterium line was-- where was [crosstalk]?

Meeks: 07:44

327 MHz [crosstalk]--

Sullivan: 07:48

Oh, the one comparable to the [crosstalk].

Meeks: 07:49

Yeah, the one that the Russians thought they had discovered [inaudible]. So, it was a perfectly obvious thing. Sandy, before, when he'd used his correlator at Green Bank, had just read the autocorrelation outputs, by hand, written them down, and put them in the computer. And at Millstone he tied the correlator into the computer so that the whole thing was automated and it was a very nice system, yeah.

Sullivan: 08:18

Well, did the line sort of appear the first time you got things working or how did that work?

Meeks: 08:25

The first night we-- the first night we had everything running. We had detection on Cas A. Well, no, that's not strictly true. The first night-- let's see, Sandy pretty much did all the hardware work. He had one technician working with him. He got everything going and my responsibility was to check on the pointing and sort of--

Sullivan: 08:57

You were most familiar with the antenna, I guess [crosstalk].

Meeks: 08:59

I was familiar with the system, but what we did first was to test the system out on the hydrogen line and just see how well it-- just see that we could get spectra and see that the system was working, the display was working, and that turned out to be really beautiful. I got beautiful lines and good resolution and so forth. And all those data are in the file there. But the ability to see the hydrogen, of course, didn't mean that the system's working well enough to see OH. And there was a little bit of trouble that Sandy had to go to get the thing checked out, but essentially, I believe it was the first or second night that we tried that we found it.

Sullivan: 09:59

Was this a conventional mixer receiver or was there anything unusual about the front end?

Meeks: 10:02

It used an uncooled paramp, which was furnished by some people at Lincoln Lab. So, we managed to borrow that.

Sullivan: 10:10

So that was pretty advanced technology for that time, too. Yeah.

Meeks: 10:12

It was a pretty fair system. I would say yeah, it was a nice system and I always regret that we never bothered to look at any other sources. We looked at Taurus and we looked at Cas

Sullivan: 10:27

So, you missed the emission.

Meeks: 10:28

So, we missed the emission entirely and we-- with the correlator, by switching the sampling rate, you get high resolution. I remember we got this detection with a 1667, and then we tried 1665, I think that was the next night, and we got that. And then Sandy decided to take a higher resolution. Look, he was really interested in trying the correlator out, and I think he properly was the first listed author in the paper because he did most of the work in getting the system going and Alan and I pretty much just waited around until the thing was going and helped out any way we could.

Sullivan: 11:22

[inaudible]?

Meeks: 11:23

Yeah. Then after the first detection, we decided that this zero-velocity absorption feature should be looked at a little more closely just to try the system out. So, he switched to higher resolution, I guess increased the resolution by a fact of two. And then we went home and the next day we came back and the fellow who had run the antenna-- the data shows the spectrum with a double dip in it, which was, of course, this high-resolution picture of the OH and-- well, that was pretty much the way things went, and we got tremendous cooperation from the people at Millstone. Gordon Pettengill was acting director-- or acting group leader at the time.

Sullivan: 12:19

How many day's observations were published-- I guess it was in Nature, wasn't it?

Meeks: 12:23

Yeah. The publications in Nature were, all told, no more than two or three days. Two or three nights [crosstalk].

Sullivan: 12:29

Oh, so [crosstalk] once you had the two lines, I guess there was no doubt about the detection.

Meeks: 12:32

That's right. And we didn't try to look for the other lines, we just published these results.

Sullivan: 12:38

Were you noticeably surprised over the abundance of the OH or was that sort of expected once you got the system running?

Meeks: 12:45

No, I'd say the whole result was kind of just about what we would have expected. Alan Barrett spent the summer, I guess, part of the time of the summer writing a little memo, a little account of the whole search, what he thought results should be--

Sullivan: 13:06

Beforehand.

Meeks: 13:07

Beforehand, yeah. And that memo is in the file. That's a very good [inaudible].

Sullivan: 13:16

I still have difficulty understanding why it didn't happen before. Was it tried somewhere else besides NRL also?

Meeks: 13:22

Well, it's a very interesting story [crosstalk]--

Sullivan: 13:24

The technology was there and the OH was talked about for many years before.

Meeks: 13:27

John Bolton. I talked to John Bolton about this, and he said that they had proposed, several years before, a search at Parkes, but that he said he had sort of turned it off or he hadn't shown any enthusiasm toward it because he expected that the OH would be just like the hydrogen, but just a lot weaker. He couldn't see any advantage, he said, in just spending telescope time looking at something with a far lower signal.

Sullivan: 13:54

I guess he wasn't too interested in interstellar chemistry or abundances or anything like that.

Meeks: 13:59

Yeah, I think John was not especially interested in hydrogen line work either. But then Charlie Townes was at MIT at the time, and he took a lot of interest in the results as soon as they were obtained. And I think one of the biggest things they accomplished was to really make radio astronomy a going operation at MIT. There had been no radio astronomy at MIT up until that time. I guess there been a little bit at Lincoln Lab. Alan Barrett came to the campus about the same time I came to Lincoln Lab.

Sullivan: 14:36

And what did Barrett come as?

Meeks: 14:37

He came as a radio faculty member.

Sullivan: 14:40

I mean--

Meeks: 14:40

He came to build up the radio astronomy program and--

Sullivan: 14:42

But he did come as a radio astronomer, then?

Meeks: 14:45

Yeah. He got funds to build a small, I think, a 12 ft millimeter antenna on the campus.

Sullivan: 14:53

The Berkeley Group was the one that discovered the emission, were they not?

Meeks: 15:02

Well, that's a complicated story, and I don't know how that's been finally unscrambled. [laughter]

It probably hasn't; maybe that'll be my job.

Sam Goldstein first showed me the W49 profiles at 1665, 1667 and said, "There's at least ten years work for astronomers to try to understand this." And this was well before I had ever heard of Berkeley looking, and--

Sullivan: 15:31

Goldstein was at Harvard?

Meeks: 15:32

Yeah. And Ellen Gundermann was doing a thesis, and I think this was sort of work done part of her thesis. But Sam Goldstein saw these lines and then Ed Lilley had a heart attack and he was in the hospital, so this work was never published. And then, about the-- At least I believe-- that's my belief, that--

Sullivan: 15:55

This on the 60 Foot at Harvard?

Meeks: 15:57

Yeah. That if Ed Lilley hadn't had the heart attack, that he would have pressed Goldstein and Gundermann to publish this result, but he didn't. And Berkeley was doing the same thing. From my point of view, I think it was independent, and I think perhaps Harvard was a little bitter.

Sullivan: 16:23

They weren't confident enough, and I guess Goldstein and Gundermann were.

Meeks: 16:27

Well, they didn't have the desire to publish, [crosstalk].

Sullivan: 16:33

Well, they said it was ten years work when they were starting to understand it.

Meeks: 16:35

I think he was so puzzled by it he didn't know what to put in the paper; I don't know.

Sullivan: 16:41

Do you remember which sources these were? Or was this published right after--? I guess Berkeley came out, then probably Harvard came out with his results?

Meeks: 16:47

Yeah, that's right. That was a little bit later. And then Harvard claimed that they had seen it first. But the W49 is what I saw, and I had not seen a W3 spectrum until I saw the Berkeley preprint. [inaudible]. About the only other thing that I could add to that point. First time, we just got the correlator going at Haystack, literally, I mean, within a day or so, it was running. We got this preprint and we decided to look at the W3 emission. We looked at W3 emission, we saw this characteristic peak of 1667, the central peak with the two peaks. [alright?] And it looked just like a modulated carrier, and it was so damn narrow, and it was a completely different-- 1665, 1667. So, we thought. "What would be more logical - communication? To pick something like 1665 that should be weaker and to send out a powerful modulated signal." And we talked about it; in a matter of about a week or two, Alan Rogers had put some headphones on and said-- [laughter] Actually listen. But I'd say there was an exciting few hours or a day there when we thought that we might be seeing a modulated carrier.

Sullivan: 18:23

Now, were you thinking of extraterrestrial, or?

Meeks: 18:26

Yeah, we were thinking it was communication.

Sullivan: 18:27

[crosstalk] really going on? What was he hoping to hear through the headphones? It was just gibberish. I guess.

Meeks: 18:31

Well, I don't know, but--

Sullivan: 18:32

[crosstalk]--

Meeks: 18:33

Alan got so excited about it that he wanted to try it, so

Sullivan: 18:37

Why was there no direct follow-up work after the initial MIT OH absorption discovery? Seems like you could have found the emission with a few more nights looking at different sources, or is that not true? These sources were not that obvious to this, and in things like W49 and I guess.

Meeks: 18:58

Well, in looking back at it, I think we're all very excited about the result, and we would like to observe more. But the problem was that this antenna is being used for radar astronomy and a lot of other purposes, and after we got these first two papers out, we really didn't do anymore, because the energies must have-- that all of us have turned toward Haystack, and we really didn't follow it up. Alan Rogers was very eager to follow it up. He used it a few nights, but then he went on to other things. We just weren't really set up like an observatory. There's that. And then the Australians, of course, began looking for the emissions they never found, and in the process of looking for the emissions, they found this very strong absorption. But I would say, looking back at it, that the discovery of OH and the Millstone was an important milestone because it really established MIT in the business where we got astronomy, we've got [inaudible]. The whole Institute began to take the whole thing seriously, and a little bit later, Bernie Burke came. But I'd say this it helped with Haystack, it helped in getting -

Sullivan: 20:39

Well, in addition to, of course, getting-- that was before the first recombination line, wasn't it? It was a couple of years later.

Meeks: 20:47

Yeah.

Sullivan: 20:48

But it also was the first molecule.

Meeks: 20:50

It was the first molecule.

Sullivan: 20:52

And they got microwave spectroscopy really going, and [pretty interesting?] I have to say, did Townes, he said he took an interest. He had been co-author with Sanders on the laboratory OH, had he not? The same lines?

Meeks: 21:07

I guess he knew that the search was going on and he was interested in it. And when we had the public, we had the release, the press release, he was the one who sort of took charge of the press release.

Sullivan: 21:19

But he never got involved scientifically.

Meeks: 21:21

He never got involved scientifically. He never got involved, interestingly enough, in any work at Haystack or any scientific work while he was MIT. He had that opportunity, but he had to go to Berkeley.

Sullivan: 21:34

He does [crosstalk] in Berkeley now. Yeah. Or maybe he was interested in becoming president, like he was administrating administration or something possible.

Meeks: 21:42

It's possible.

Sullivan: 21:47

Lit also told me that Sandy essentially established his reputation on this project, and that led to him getting the job at NRAO. And since that time, he's been very pivotal in all the line receivers and line work and so forth that's been done in NRAO so that not only was this the first radio astronomy at MIT and the first molecule in microwave lines, but it also really got NRAO going in a big way, at least in line work. This is the end of the interview with Lit Meeks, August 1971, at the AAS meeting in Amherst, Mass.