Painting pictures of astronomical objects
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.
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Hanmer school left its mark on my mental life, though. For instance, one day in a grammar school maths lesson I got into a crying jag over the notion of minus numbers. Minus one threw out my universe, it couldn’t exist, I couldn’t understand it. This, I realised tearfully, under coaxing from an amused (and mildly amazed) teacher, was because I thought numbers were things. In fact, cabbages. We’d been taught in Miss Myra’s class to do addition and subtraction by imagining more cabbages and fewer cabbages. Every time I did mental arithmetic I was juggling ghostly vegetables in my head. And when I tried to think of minus one I was trying to imagine an anti-cabbage, an anti-matter cabbage, which was as hard as conceiving of an alternative universe.