I’m writing a review for American Scientist magazine of two recent physics books for general audiences: Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages and Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds. Lisa’s book is a great look at the details of how we come up with crazy ideas like brane worlds by working through attempts to understand particle physics — extremely rewarding for an interested reader, and I hope to say more about it later. I have mixed feelings about Kaku’s book, but one undeniable feature is the large number of interesting stories he relates.
One of the stories is about Vera Rubin, one of the discoverers of dark matter.
Rubin observed the rotation curves of spiral galaxies — the rate at which stars moved around the galactic center, considered as a function of the distance from that center. You would think that the velocity would diminish as you got farther away from the massive galaxy, but in fact it doesn’t — Rubin found that rotation curves were flat, implying a greater gravitational field than can be explained by the visible matter. From Kaku’s book, a story that originally appeared in Ken Croswell’s The Universe at Midnight:
Vera Rubin was ignored, in part because she was a woman. With a certain amount of pain, she recalls that, when she applied to Swarthmore College as a science major and casually told the admissions officer that she liked to paint, the interviewer said, “Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?” She recalled, “That became a tag line in my family: for many years, whenever anything went wrong for anyone, we said, ‘Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?'” When she told her high school physics teacher that she got accepted to Vassar, he replied, “You should do okay as long as you stay away from science.” She would later recall, “It takes an enormous amount of self-esteem to listen to things like that and not be demolished.”
Vera Rubin, with DTM image tube spectrograph attached to the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope, 1970. Images from Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
I’m currently reading the Feynman biography by James Gleick, Genius. In it, he relates the story of Feynman moving from MIT to Princeton and running up against questions about his type of Jewishness.
The discrimination against Jews pre-WWII was insane. To think that someone would be excluded from anything based off of random chance (Jewish, Woman, etc) makes me wonder how we’ve gotten this far.
Lise Meitner did amazing work in Physics in spite of being female AND Jewish!
This is a good point to say (as I have already done on the Greatest Popular Science Book! thread) that I highly recommend Brenda Maddox’s excellent book, “Rosalind Franklin: Dark Lady of DNA” for more of these issues, and Great science, to boot.
-cvj
“Lise Meitner did amazing work in Physics in spite of being female AND Jewish”
True enough. She also missed out on the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, despite playing a pivotal role in the discovery and subsequent explanation of nuclear fission. The fact that she was a woman played no little part in this omission.
Pete
I’m looking forward to these reviews since I’m a fan of American Scientist book reviews and often make a book purchase decision based on them. I don’t think I realized until I read a few reviews of Professor Randall’s book what a difficult task she undertakes with reviewers mixed about how well she achieved it; one was quite negative.
What is there to say about scientists such as Lisa Meitner, Vera Rubin, Rosalind Franklin and their treatment,discriminated against because they were women and/or for religious differences/backgrounds. I just stand in awe, admiring them and their fierce determination as well as intelligence–ever grateful for their deep insights. I also know that I can only dimly imagine the pain they must have experienced but they went on. What integrity and sense of who they were/are.
I agree with Professor Johnson on the Brenda Maddox biography of Ms. Franklin, a book I wish ended differently. Knowing how it ended made it a more difficult read, i.e., her death from ovarian cancer, a result of her work and and an unknown/underestimted hazard. She was a loss. For me this book is must reading. It also has great insights into how different scientists do science, their use of data and evidenciary claims they are willing to make. The absence of any reference to her by Wilkins, Crick and Watson in their Nobel speeches as well as subsequent publications borders on the unforgivable, no matter the contributions.
The three women mentioned here are simply remarkable. I’m glad just to know a little more about them.
Ah….Ed, and others, you should look at my post on Mount Wilson, in which I mentioned some of the great physics done up there (Hubble, etc), and focused on the crucial role of Henrietta Leavitt. She’s also long-forgotten, having struggled to do all she did in what was firmly a “man’s world”. See links given there, and consider also my pitch in the post and in the comment thread of another post to have her paper considered as a perfect example of a great physics paper.
By time anyone realized that she should be put forward for a Nobel Prize, and wrote to her about it, she’d already died from cancer.
-cvj
I’m surprised every time I hear stories like this. It makes me realize how lucky I am that no one ever told me I couldn’t or shouldn’t do math or science. Thanks to all the incredible women who have faced discrimination and ignored it, smoothing the path for future generations.
Yes, Katie, I agree….. I’m also grateful that I was lucky enough (I believe it was just luck) that nobody pointed out to me too early that I was from a racial group that’s not supposed to be able to “do science”…. Otherwise I might have not have continued on enjoying it and doing it, blissfully ignorant of the prevailing view. Of course, there were plenty of people lining up to tell me later implicitly or otherwise (I still encounter them), but it was already too late…. I had too much momentum.
-cvj
Regarding Vera Rubin and “painting pictures of astronomical objects” rather than doing real science: Well, as a “career” artist studying math/physics in middle age, that’s all I ever will be able to do, no matter how much physics I study. I’ve painted scads of trivial but pretty astronomical paintings. I can make art that is inspired by science, but I’ll never really do any science. I think science is more important than art, which is also the implication of that anecdote about Rubin, as well as the unspoken, and not unfounded in this era, assumption that art is for girls.
hey Sean,
I just noticed you are coming to give a talk at my school next week. Hope you have a nice time here when you come!
Pyracantha, I would say it’s about stereotypes more than importance (although some people may also rank “men’s work” more important than “women’s work”, of course). I could easily imagine a male student telling an admissions officer that he wanted to design clothes, and being told “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather design … racing cars?” Gender roles can be imposed from either side.
Suz, yes, two talks at MIT in fact: the colloquium next Thursday (the 8th), and the cosmology seminar the following Tuesday (the 13th). Drop by and say hi if you’re in the audience.
CVj (Blame this greeting, the shortening of your name, on the CV explanation. I LOLed when I read the comment about it and your name.):
I love the coincidence but not my forgetfulness. In the past few days I’ve clipped two articles which mentioned Henrietta Leavitt who also struggled in ways that are barely imaginable to me. She is another person for whom I’ve considerable regard and respect, forcing me to ask again how they managed to do their work. I think it has something to do with the love of science but maybe I ascribe too damn much to love.
I will look at the links again which I didn’t read too carefully, spending too much time on the pictures. Thanks for the reminder. Again, you have a very nice way about such matters. I hope sometime that all of you will say a few things about your early years and experiences with science (since my home ground is K-12 science).
I’m glad to learn that no one discouraged you or said a contrary word. I sometimes wonder just how many people have been dissuaded from a career path in science because of sometimes well-meaning/too often, ill-meaning and sometimes downright prejudicial comments. They can have a chilling effect. Many of us are more fragile than we think.
Take care.
This is slightly off-topic, but speaking of rotation curves, has anyone looked at the new analysis of the EGRET data? At a very prelimary first glance it looks pretty compelling: http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508617
Thanks Ed!
-cvj
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