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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Brief Life of a Breakthrough Astronomer: 1900-1979 by Donovan Moore

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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Brief Life of a Breakthrough Astronomer: 1900-1979 by Donovan Moore VITA Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Brief life of a breakthrough astronomer: 1900-1979 by donovan moore ffirmative actionfor portraits,” was how Nobel laure- laureate Ernest Rutherford, would look directly at her and begin each ate Dudley R. Herschbach, Baird professor of science, de- lecture with, “Ladies and gentlemen.” She recalled that “all the boys Ascribed the oil painting of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin that regularly greeted this witticism with thunderous applause…and at he and his wife, associate dean of the College Georgene Botyas Her- every lecture I wished I could sink into the earth.” schbach, had commissioned. For years, he had argued that there Unable to get an astronomy job in England when she graduated, were too few women on the faculty, and too little recognition for she applied for a fellowship at the Harvard College Observatory. Its the few there were. The portrait would hang in University Hall’s director, Harlow Shapley, offered her a $500 stipend. Arriving in the Faculty Room where, in the winter of 2002, there was only one oth- fall of 1923, she met the observatory’s hard-working women “comput- er painting of a woman: historian Helen Maud Cam. ers” who across four decades had produced nine 250-page volumes At the dedication, Jeremy Knowles, dean of the Faculty of Arts of stellar spectra. Those stellar data, etched into thousands of glass and Sciences, told the audience: “Every high-school student knows plates, made up a giant jigsaw puzzle waiting for the right person to that Newton discovered gravity, that Darwin discovered evolution, fit it together. By looking down through a jeweler’s loupe, Payne was even that Einstein discovered relativity. But when it comes to the able to do what centuries of astronomers had tried to do by looking composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most up through telescopes: determine what stars are made of. prevalent element in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever won- That was the birth of astrophysics—and when the trouble started. ders how we know.” As she was then, Payne-Gaposchkin is today: In 1925, Payne submitted what’s been called “the most brilliant Ph.D. the most famous astronomer you’ve never heard of. thesis ever written in astronomy” to earn Harvard’s first doctorate in English-born Cecilia Helena Payne early on displayed a relentless her field (albeit awarded by Radcliffe). She determined that hydrogen desire to learn. She once asked a London bookbinder to put a fake was a million times more prevalent in the universe than the experts cover on the Apology and inscribe “Holy Bible” on the spine, so her believed; Henry Norris Russell, dean of American astronomers and teachers would think she was working on her religion studies in- head of the Prince ton Observatory, wrote her that the findings were stead of reading Plato. (The bookbinder refused.) That attitude got “clearly impossible.” Her book Stellar Atmospheres therefore stated that her expelled from her Catholic school a year shy of college. Luckily her results were “almost certainly not real.” Four years later, Russell for science, she was accepted to the demanding St. Paul’s School for proved her results correct by a different method.He got the credit. Girls in London. The moment she walked through the door, she said to Astronomy, meanwhile, continued to consume Payne, though she herself, “I shall never be lonely again. Now I can think about science!” made time for a personal life. She spirited Sergei Gaposchkin, her After a wild year of study—mechanics, Newtonian equations of mo- husband-to-be, out of Nazi Germany and they had three children. tion, thermodynamics, astronomy—she was accepted to Cambridge. She worked tirelessly in the observatory for woeful pay—which came For its first 700 years, Cambridge was strictly male. In 1865, as from Shapley’s equipment budget. And though she taught numerous women started talking about attending, a geology professor pro- astronomy courses, her name was missing from the course catalog. nounced them “nasty forward minxes.” When Cecilia Payne—nei- Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell had declared that be- ther nasty nor a minx, but definitely forward—enrolled in 1919 at cause she was a woman, “Miss Payne should never have a position Newnham, one of the two women’s colleges, she complied with the in the university” as long as he was in office. tradition that men studied mathematics; women majored in botany. Through it all, she persevered. On June 21, 1956, The New York Times All that changed on the night of December 2, when Arthur Edding- reported, “Harvard University announced today the appointment ton, head of the Cambridge Observatory, lectured on his recent solar of Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin as Professor of Astronomy. She expedition, which had proved Einstein’s theory of relativity. Payne, is the first woman to attain full professorship at Harvard through one of four women in the audience, raced back to her dorm room and regular faculty promotion.” transcribed the lecture word-for-word into a notebook. “For three Today, a painting of President Lowell dominates the north wall of nights, I think, I did not sleep,” she recalled. “My world had been so the Faculty Room. Surely, Payne-Gaposchkin would appreciate the shaken that I experienced something like a nervous breakdown.” irony: in her portrait, because her eyes look left and slightly up, she is She changed her major to physics, with all the astronomy she could gazing directly at Lowell, no more than 30 feet away. pick up on the side. It was challenging. She bicycled to the Cavendish Laboratory in a full-length dress and a hat (required to enter town), Reporter and writer Donovan Moore is the author of What Stars Are Made and, as a woman, had to sit in the front row. The lab’s director, Nobel Of, a biography of Payne-Gaposchkin just published by Harvard University Press. 38 May - June 2020 Patricia Watwood’s 2001 posthumous portrait of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin echoes Vermeer’s The Astronomer Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Painting © Patricia Watwood/From the Harvard University Portrait Collection. Gift of Dudley and Georgene Herschbach Harvard Magazine 39 Photograph © President and Fellows of Harvard College Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746.
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