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Coming in With a Bang:
Interview with Ron Voller
By Carin Chea
Author Ron Voller has always been a creative at heart.
Raised in a multi-faceted household brimming with intellect and an affinity toward exploration, Voller went on to earn an undergraduate degree in music and literature.
He would immediately put this to use, performing with a popular Denver-based band. Later, he landed as a writer in the world of children’s fiction. But, as we know, the artistic journey is rarely linear.
Voller’s newest book, Hubble, Humason, and the Big Bang: The Race to Uncover the Expanding Universe, tackles the ever-looming, ever-present question “how did we get here?”
Voller fearlessly explores the topic of time and space and its nativity. And, who better to explore this tricky and impossible topic than Voller, who has traversed various callings and peered through countless windows of life?
What made you leave your career as a musician? It seems like you made this sharp left turn into writing one day.
I actually double majored in Music and in English Literature. They’ve been my twin loves since I could read and write.
The connections I made in college were more on the music front. I always knew that I wanted to explore the more physical sides of myself as a younger person; I was an athlete in college.
Music played into that a little more than writing, which is a pretty isolated affair.
So, about the time I moved to New York City in the late 90s, I had decided that I wanted to explore writing.
Was children’s fiction your first genre as an author?
I was writing all the time when I started. I was writing on the subway, creating characters out of the people I’d see on the subway.
I bet you got endless inspiration there!
Oh yeah, that’s for sure.
Children’s fiction was something I was always interested in. I’m not a parent, but I’m an all-star uncle. So, in 2004, I wrote and illustrated my first children’s book. I was thinking I’d give children’s books a shot.
At that time, I was on a writing sabbatical in the Philippines and happened to be reading about the big bang, and this guy, Humason, popped off the page at me. Talk about taking a left turn – I almost overnight went from children’s fiction to Milton Humason.
Twenty years later, I’m finally back to children’s books. Mentorship is a core value of mine; I do that as a board advisor to a charity. I’m very active when it comes to helping young people in various ways.
So, children’s literature is a very natural thing for me to write about. I love this genre. You can be so fantastic, and kids just eat it up.
How did you become enamored with astronomy?
I come from a family with a really diverse set of interests, from architecture to space to mechanics to music.
My dad played drums in a Dixieland band, nights, and mom had been an aspiring song and dance gal in high school. She couldn’t get through breakfast without launching into something out of The Sound of Music, or South Pacific.
My mom, actually, sparked my interest in the stars. She was always noting the solstice, and still does. I have the sense that all of us “look at the stars” with a certain reverence.
I have always been interested in origins. What’s the story behind the story behind the story? That really resonates with me.
That’s why I picked up this book on the big bang, which was about the development of modern scientific thought.
While reading that, Milton Humason’s name came up, but in very scant terms. Nobody knew much about him. He was only 8th grade educated, and later became a janitor at the observatory.
Next thing you know, he was helping Hubble discover the big bang. But, that wasn’t enough information for me. I had to know more.
Tell us about Hubble, Humason, and the Big Bang. What inspired it?
It’s the story of the discovery of the beginning of time by one of the most unlikely scientific duos, ever: Hubble and Humason. Edwin Hubble was an astronomer’s astronomer. He spent his life fascinated by the stars. Humason was the unlikely one.
They’re both about 30 years old at this point; he and Hubble have been at the observatory for some time now. Hubble is the obvious guy.
It's true. All throughout school, all you ever hear about is Hubble. I’ve never heard of Humason before meeting you.
At the same time, there’s Milton Humason. He’s 30 years old, father of one, come off his citrus ranch to become a janitor at the observatory. He’s a real mountain man, a moonshiner, an excellent fly-fisherman, and discovers this facility for photographing stars.
Within 10 years, he’s standing with Hubble and Einstein, having his photo taken. It’s one of the most interesting stories about one of the most charismatic people in history. He’s my favorite person in history in the past 100 years.
This is the second in a series of three books. The first was Humason’s biography. The intention, here, was to put Hubble and Humason in a real conversation on their own terms. I didn’t really explore Hubble that much in my book about Humason.
I wore holes in carpets in libraries across the United States learning about Humason. Without Humason, Hubble doesn’t make the discovery.
Really?
Absolutely not.
We have to consider how difficult the work of photographing these distant galaxies was at that time. It’s easy now, but it wasn’t back then.
Humason was manually driving the most advanced and expensive telescope with three different things moving at once, trying to keep his eye on a single point of light for days on end in the freezing cold.
He’d spend 60 hours sometimes on one object. Most people would do 8 or 9 different photographs in an evening, in about 6 hours. Here, Humason’s spending ten times that on just one image.
Why couldn’t Hubble do that?
Hubble couldn’t do that work. It required a level of skill and stamina and understanding of the equipment.
The hundred-inch was state-of-the-art and the largest telescope in the world at the time. It was also quirky and had glitches. Nobody knew those glitches better than Humason.
Humason figured out new ways to photograph an object that he couldn’t see. Nobody knew their way around these challenges better than Humason. It absolutely was his own genius. If you’ve seen Goodwill Hunting, he’s the equivalent of the real life Will Hunting.
Humason was also color-blind. His particular color blindness allowed him to see contrasts of black and white very clearly, with a clarity most of us don’t see.
Do you believe in God and life after death?
I explore this to some extent in my podcast, Bang! Goes the Universe.
I do not, that’s the simple answer. My mother tried to raise me as a Lutheran. I began my apostasy from religion around the age of 5, which was when I began to be aware of myself and the world around me.
That started me on my path toward finding my own understanding toward life. That has been augmented by my interest and understanding of scientific research.
However, I have the utmost respect for religion. I’m a student of the human animal. Other than origins, the human animal is my favorite topic.
What I’ve come to understand about myth and the development of science and philosophy, is that they are indelibly linked in our past. At one point their paths diverged into modern religious philosophy, including the three most popular monotheistic religions, and scientific philosophy.
They serve different purposes, of course. But either or both can help us grapple with the enormity of creation and our existence. What a hoax that we’ve only been given 80 to 100 years to think about all this.
While I don’t personally believe in a human-esque creator, we probably wouldn’t have evolved a sense of scientific philosophy that made us question our origins without traveling down that road.
I’d like to paraphrase something I heard Brian Cox (an astrophysicist) say recently, which is that we are all just made up of atoms, some as old as time, and some formed more recently by our sun.
And we’ve been assembled here on this tiny planet in our little corner of this vast universe to give the universe a chance to think about and reflect upon itself. I think that’s a lovely and romantic way to think about our place here.
Just curious, if you could go back in time, what time period would you visit?
I would’ve liked to have met a guy like Humason. He was liked by everyone he knew. He was a great storyteller.
However, I’m quite happy living in this age. I sometimes feel like an alien here though.
Why do you say that?
We got a little too smart for our own good in some ways. As a species, we’re evolving very slowly, socially. Unfortunately, concepts like capitalism have created an overflow of materials that have no place to go.
I look down from my imaginary vantage point a hundred thousand feet above the earth, and I can see that, yet I know I’m a part of it. It’s hard to watch.
There’s hope that we’ll figure it out. There’s hope that we’ll learn how to support one another. It’s the hope that makes me feel okay being where I am today.
Are there any upcoming projects you’d like us to know about?
I have some children’s books in the works. There’s one being illustrated now.
I’m also going into the second season of my podcast, which will be the title to my last book in the three-book series.
I also want to write that book to update where we left off with Simon Singh’s book [Big Bang] in the early 2000s. There’s been many new answers, but also a hundred-fold more questions.
That is in the works as I continue with my podcast. There’s also a Humason screenplay in the works.
Who would you say ideally plays Humason?
Chris Pratt comes to mind. He’s got the right combination of ruggedness and playfulness.
For more information, please visit www.RonVoller.com.
To access Ron’s podcast, visit banggoestheuniverse.buzzsprout.com.
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