May 10, 2025 • 36 mins
This 2020 episode covers Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, an accomplished astronomer. She grew up in a society that didn’t really prioritize education for girls, and she was determined and creative about getting around that.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Cecilia Payne later Cecilia Paine Gaposhkin was born
May tenth, nineteen hundred or one hundred and twenty five
years ago today if you're listening to this episode on
the day it comes out. She made truly revolutionary discoveries
about the chemical makeup of stars, and she's really one
of my favorite people I've ever learned about on this show.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Our episode on her originally came out on November ninth,
twenty twenty. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A couple of months ago.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
We got a pile of listener requests for an episode
on Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin. She was an astronomer who made
a lot of firsts, including being the first person to
figure out that stars are made of mostly hydrogen and helium.
Usually when we get a whole bunch of listener requests,
one right after the other, I can figure out what
(01:08):
prompted them, like usually there was a Google doodle, or
there's a viral post that's circulating around this time. It
was kind of a mystery because there is a new
biography that came out earlier this year, which is Donovan
Moore's What Stars Are Made Of, which is beautiful.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I recommend it.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
And there have been some viral posts, but none of
this lined up with when we got this file of requests.
And then on top of that, when I tried to
go through our inbox so I could make a list
of all the listeners that I wanted to thank here
at the top of the episode, I found nothing. Zero emails.
I remember them coming in, yet I could not find them.
(01:49):
Honestly though, this feels like just a mysterious gift from
the universe, because by the time I got to this
end of the research for this, I.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Just loved Celia Paynekubashkin.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I don't love the sexism she faced that we're going
to talk about, but like her whole story I really
delighted in She grew up in a society that just
did not prioritize education for girls and that regarded women's
academic ambitions as suspect. But her determination and her creativity
at getting around that just was so delightful to me.
(02:24):
So that's what we're going to talk about today. So
Cecilia Payne was born in Wendover, England, on May tenth,
nineteen hundred. Her father, Edward was a barrister and a historian,
and her mother, Emma, was an artist. Cecilia was the
oldest of Edward and Emma's children, with a younger brother,
Humphrey and a sister, Leonora. From a very early age,
Cecilia was curious and imaginative, with a keen memory and
(02:48):
sharp observation. Their home was full of music, art and literature,
and they had a large library. They were a pretty
comfortable middle class family. They had enough money to afford
house hold help, and that allowed Emma to keep working
as an art copyist even when her children were still
really small. But that changed after Edward's sudden death when
(03:09):
Cecilia was four. Edward had married Emma somewhat later in life,
and he died the day after Christmas nineteen oh four,
at the age of sixty.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
His body was.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Found in a river where he had apparently drowned. He
had been experiencing some heart trouble and some dizziness, which
may have contributed to his death, but it's just not
clear exactly what happened.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Although Emma received a widow stipend after Edward's death, it
really didn't match what his income had been, and money
was a lot tighter. Even so, Emma tried to make
sure that her children were immersed in culture. She would
scrape together enough to travel and attend concerts and go
to museums. The children's upbringing also wasn't always conventional. When
(03:52):
Cecilia asked for a bedtime story, her mother read her
The Odyssey. When Emma decided Cecilia was too old for stories,
Cecilia started by telling herself stories at bedtime, before moving
on to making up bedtime stories for her younger sister,
ohth Cecilia was really bright and driven to learn. When
she started school, she had some struggles the teachers at
(04:13):
the little school across the street from their home, which
she was attending. They encouraged her, but Cecilia was also
left handed, and they taught her to write with her
right hand. This really deeply frustrated her, so she taught
herself to be more ambidextrous and to do things like
right upside down, using techniques and exercises from a pamphlet
(04:34):
that her great grandfather had written that pamphlet was called
painting with both Hands. I know so many people who
were natural lefties that were forced to write right handed,
and it was never delightful for anybody.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
No. I my preschool teachers kept telling me to put
the pencil in the hand that felt most comfortable in
and I was like, I don't know what you're talking about,
so I just imitated what the other children were doing,
And like I to this day don't know if I
really should have learned to write with my left hand.
And that's why my penmanship has been terrible my entire life,
(05:08):
or maybe my penmanship is just terrible for my entire life.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
You know, everybody scribbling. My dad was a lefty that
was pushed to right handedness, and his penmanship has always
been a little bit fraught, looking like it always looks stressed. Yeah.
But when Cecilia was eight, she was out in the
family's orchard when she spotted a bee orchid growing in
the grass. She recognized it not because she had seen
(05:33):
one before, but because her mother had described one to
her once. And when she convinced her mother that yes,
there really was a bee orchid growing out in the orchard,
Emma had the gardener transplant it to a better location,
and after this experience, Cecilia decided that the one thing
she wanted to do was study nature and science. It
(05:54):
was a few years before she could really do that though.
When Cecilia was twelve, the family moved from Wendo, which
was a little more rural surrounded by woods and hills,
to the Bayswater neighborhood of London. They moved there for
the sake of her brother Humphrey's education, to give him
access to a better public school. Cecilia was enrolled in
a parochial school called Saint Mary's. That school was really
(06:17):
not a good fit for Cecilia, though. A big part
of her school day was religious instruction, which really did
not interest her so much so that she would pretend
to feint to try to get out of going to chapel.
She also tried to get a bookbinder to make her
an addition of Plato in a Bible cover so that
she could read classical philosophy during her religion classes. Unfortunately,
(06:39):
that brilliant plan was sorted because the bookbinder said no
to it. Yeah, apparently the bookbinder was appalled by that
very suggestion. On top of all of that.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Girls who've truly wanted to learn and who excelled at
school were viewed with a lot of suspicion. When Cecilia,
who was in the youngest class, came in second out
of the entire school school in a year end exam,
she wasn't praised for her performance. The other students were
scolded for allowing her to beat them. Classes for girls
(07:09):
were also mostly focused on reading and writing, not on
the subjects that Cecilia felt a real passion for.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Cecilia turned to the family library to try to make
up for what she saw as huge holes in her education.
And while she did love theater, opera, music, and literature,
which were all represented there, which she really wanted to study,
with science and there were almost no books on science
on the family shelves. She finally found one book on botany,
(07:36):
but it was in German and French, which she did
not speak, so she got a dictionary from school and
laboriously translated that book into English. She turned to this
kind of resourcefulness again and again during her education, including
for example, transcribing an entire textbook from the library by
hand before she started at Cambridge because she could not
(07:57):
afford to buy a copy of her own.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Eventually, the tea that Saint Mary's started to get really
tired of Cecilia's persistence at demanding to study science and
to be more challenged in her schoolwork. In addition to
trying to teach herself outside of school, she was essentially
badgering her teachers into tutoring her in other subjects than
the ones that the school offered. Finally, somebody told her
(08:19):
that the only way she might be able to study
science was as part of training to become a school teacher,
so she volunteered to teach Sunday school classes to try
to prepare herself. Although she focused her Sunday school teaching
a lot more on science than on the Bible.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Today's lesson dandeliance what Cecilia spent years as Saint Mary's
butting up against all kinds of barriers to the education
that she wanted for herself, and that, of course, was
frustrating and exasperating for everyone involved. Teachers and administrators saw
her behavior as inappropriate and disruptive, and when she was
(08:56):
seventeen and had just a year left to go, she
was expelled. However, it does seem that the headmistress of
Saint Mary's, wrote a letter encouraging Saint Paul's Girls' School,
which had been established by the Worshipful Company of Mercers,
to allow her to enroll there for her last year.
Saint Paul's was far more focused on the academic success
(09:17):
of its students than Saint Mary's had been, and once
she got there, Cecilia was finally encouraged in her pursuit
of science, and she excelled in other courses there as well,
including polishing her skills in public speaking and studying music,
which was actually being taught by Gustav Holst, who was
not a famous composer. Yet when Holst finished his orchestral
(09:38):
suite that's known as the Planets, Cecilia was actually one
of the students who got to hear a performance of it.
That is the coolest. Later on, Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin wrote
in her autobiography that the first time she walked through
the door at Saint Paul's, she thought, quote, I shall
never be lonely again. Now I can think about science.
She finally had the freedom to really pursue her ami ambitions,
(10:00):
and one of those ambitions was to go to Cambridge,
which we'll talk about after a sponsor break.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Although Cecilia Payne really thrived in the year that she
spent at Saint Paul's, she still had a huge amount
of catching up to do if she wanted to go
to the University of Cambridge. It wasn't just the challenge
of getting into school there. She could only afford to
go if she got a scholarship and aside from her
self taught knowledge of botany from that book, she translated
(10:37):
herself out of the dictionary. She was way behind in
all the sciences and in math, but she devoted herself
to catching up, and in the end, not only did
she get into Cambridge, but she also scored well enough
on a competitive exam to earn the only scholarship that
was big enough to cover all of her expenses in full.
Cecilia started at Newnham College, which is a women's college
(11:00):
at Cambridge, in nineteen nineteen. Getting into Cambridge, though, did
not mean that she had left behind the kind of
sexism that was such a big part of her earlier education.
Newnham is a women's college, and it had strict rules
for students' behavior, from standards of dress to curfews to
a ban on male visitors. There were also specific rules
(11:22):
for Newnham students when they attended lectures or other functions
at other Cambridge colleges, and even though all the students
at Cambridge were meeting the same academic requirements regardless of
their gender, only men were actually awarded degrees. There were
also expectations about which courses women should take. There wasn't
really a barrier to studying the natural sciences in general,
(11:46):
but from the first part of their time at Cambridge,
women's studying the natural sciences were expected to focus on botany.
Botany was like the women's science. Students selected two other
subjects to go along with that primary focus, and the
companion courses for botany were typically zoology and chemistry. So
(12:06):
if a woman wanted to study science at Cambridge during
this time, it was just generally understood that she would
start out studying botany, zoology and chemistry.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Well, of course, because ladies like flowers and animals. Correct
In spite of Cecilia's childhood experience with the bee orchid
and her self taught study of botany by this point,
she was really a lot more interested in chemistry and
physics at the same time, trying to make either of
those her primary course of study seemed incredibly risky, given
(12:40):
how shaky her earlier instruction in these subjects had been,
and in the math that was required, which she was
also behind on, and in the uphill battle she would
face as a young woman pursuing either of these subjects.
So she initially chose to study botany and chemistry as expected,
but she added physics to that rather than zoology. But
(13:02):
on December second of nineteen nineteen, Cecilia Payne had an
experience that completely shifted her focus, much like the discovery
of that bee orchid had when she was a child.
This time it was a lecture by Arthur Stanley Eddington.
Eddington had been part of an expedition to view the
total solar eclipse that took place on May nineteenth of
(13:22):
nineteen nineteen, and that expedition was to measure how the
Sun's gravity affected light from stars. We talked about that
expedition in our twenty seventeen episode on historical eclipses. The
data gathered during this eclipse supported Einstein's theory of general relativity,
and Cecilia was absolutely captivated by this lecture, She later
(13:44):
wrote quote, the result was a complete transformation of my
world picture. When I returned to my room, I found
that I could write down the lecture word for word.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
At about the same time, Cecilia was also starting to
question her choice of studying botany. Most of the material
she was hearing and lectures was already familiar to her,
but at the same time she was so inexperienced at
the more practical side that she made mistakes that caused
her to doubt herself. After Eddington's lecture, she really wished
(14:13):
she could change her focus to astronomy, but that was
flatly impossible. Astronomy was classified under math, not under natural science,
and students could not jump into a totally different course
of study that way. So she changed her main focus
from botany to physics, and since students were allowed to
(14:34):
attend lectures outside their particular field of study, she also
went to astronomy lectures and spent as much time at
Cambridge Observatory as she could with the help of astronomer L. J.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Comery. She also repaired the clock at Newnham's small observatory
and started spending her evenings there making observations and recording data.
At one point, she ran into Arthur Eddington again at
Cambridge Observatory and told him that she wanted to to
be an astronomer. When he realized how set she was
on this idea and how much study she had already
(15:06):
done on her own, he recommended some journals that she
could use to continue her studies, and also told her
that she could use the Cambridge Observatory library. As all
of this had been happening, debate had been ongoing about
how women's education should work at Cambridge, and on October
twenty fourth, nineteen twenty one, the Cambridge Council of the
(15:26):
Senate voted that women would be granted titular degrees from
the university. This was better than the previous setup, which
was that women who completed all the requirements of the
degree were awarded nothing, but it also meant that women
were to be given the title of the degree, but
not the degree itself. This sparked outrage, mainly from men
(15:47):
who objected to women being acknowledged at all. In early
nineteen twenty three, Cecilia Payne was getting toward the end
of her study at Cambridge, and she had spent those
years dividing her time, adding as much as astronomy as
she could to her study of physics and natural sciences.
She had learned from luminaries like Nils Bohr, who was
awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with Adams in
(16:10):
nineteen twenty two. She also studied computing, including joining the
computing section at the British Astronomical Association, and she had
been elected to the Royal Astronomical Society while still a
student as well. She had done all this while facing
derision and resentment, not just from her male peers, but
also in some cases from the faculty. At lectures women
(16:33):
were required to sit in the front row by themselves.
She described how at the start of his lectures, Ernest
Rutherford would very pointedly begin ladies and gentlemen. She'd also
come to understand that she just had no future as
an astronomer if she stayed in England because of her sex.
The only path that was really open to her was
(16:54):
still becoming a school teacher. LJ.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Comra offered to take her to a lecture that Harlow She,
who was director of the Harvard College Observatory, was giving
in London. Comray could introduce the two of them, and
then maybe that would open a door for Cecilia to
continue her education in the United States, where she might
have more opportunities than she did in the UK. This worked,
(17:17):
Payne told Shapley directly that she wanted to come to
Harvard to work for him. Shapley encouraged this idea, casually
suggesting that she might replace Annie jump Cannon, Harvard Observatory's
curator of astronomical photographs when she retired. This was more
of a reflection on the rules that women filled at
Harvard rather than an actual job offer. Yeah, it was
(17:38):
sort of like offhanded, Hey, maybe you could be Annie's replacement,
because obviously a woman does that job, and a woman
would do that job.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Just as going to Cambridge had required Cecilia to gain
admission and also to get a scholarship, going to Harvard
also required her to secure some funding, otherwise she just
would not have the money to do it. On February
twenty sixth, nineteen twenty three, she wrote to Shapley about
trying to get a fellowship. She also got recommendations from
Arthur Eddington, L. J. Comer, and her old headmistress at
(18:11):
Saint Paul's. It really seems like she got a recommendation
from every conceivable person that could give her one. She
also applied for as many scholarships and fellowships as she
could to try to scrape together enough money to afford
her passage across the ocean, to buy appropriate clothing, and
to pay for her living expenses while she was there.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
And once again she was successful. As she prepared to
leave England, astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne suggests that if he
were in her place, he would take advantage of the
wealth of data available at Harvard to verify an equation
that astrophysicist Mignod Saha had developed in nineteen twenty. This
equation expressed the relationship between a star's pressure and temperature
(18:54):
and the ionization of the elements in the star. We'll
get so what she did with that?
Speaker 1 (18:59):
After one month sponsor break, Cethlia Payne left Cambridge, England,
for Cambridge, Massachusetts in September of nineteen twenty three. Her
fellowship at Harvard College Observatory gave her the freedom to
(19:20):
choose the focus of her research, and, as E. A.
Milne had suggested, she started studying photographic plates of the
spectra of stars to try to confirm SAHA's equation to
make sense of what she was doing all the way
back in sixteen sixty six, Isaac Newton used a prism
to separate sunlight into a continuous series of colors, using
(19:42):
the word spectrum to describe what he saw. Later, William
Wallaston and Joseph Fraunhoffer each observed that if you looked
at the sun's spectrum in fine enough detail, there were
dark lines within that spectrum. These became known as Fraunhoffer
lines or absorption lines, but Fraunhoffer did not have an
explanation for what those lines were or why they were there. Then,
(20:04):
in eighteen fifty five, Robert Bunsen built on earlier designs
to develop the Bunsen burner. The Bunsen burner produced an
almost colorless flame, and that made it useful for studying
the light that was produced by heating or burning different elements.
Not long after, Gustav Kershoff suggested that they could use
a prism to separate this light into its spectrum. That
(20:26):
would make it easier to distinguish the fine differences in
flames that have really similar colors. This was an early
version of the spectroscope. Through this work, Kershoff discovered that
each element had its own unique set of spectral lines
when it was heated, almost like a fingerprint. We talked
a little bit about this when we talked about the
discovery of helium. Emission lines come from the wavelengths of
(20:51):
light that elements emit when they're excited, and absorption lines
appear when wavelengths of light are absorbed in between when
they're produced and when we observe them. Today, we know
that the presence of these lines relates to the structure
of the atom and what happens when adams are excited
to different levels of energy. But at the end of
the nineteenth century, physicists and astronomers knew that these spectra existed,
(21:14):
but they didn't quite know what they meant. At Harvard
College Observatory, astronomers started using these spectra to classify stars.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Wilhelmina P. S.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Fleming, who had been the housekeeper of observatory director Edward C. Pickering,
developed a classification system that was primarily based on the
strength of the hydrogen lines in these spectra. Ani Jump
Cannon later simplified and refined this system into one that
still exists today. The types BAFG, K, and M often
(21:47):
put into the mnemonic obia fine girl Kiss Me that
was purportedly coined by Henry Norris Russell. There are also
a few other classifications that can be added into that mnemonic,
and some other attempts at mnemonics that are less gendered,
relying on the idea that, like, you want a woman
to kiss you, maybe whether she's really up for that
(22:09):
or not.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
That includes only.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Bad astronomers forget generally known mnemonics.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
But as was the case with Fraunhofer's discovery of absorption spectrum,
canon didn't really have a sense of why stars fit
into these categories or what those categories meant. She was cataloging,
not analyzing or interpreting. But the Observatory did have more
than two hundred thousand photographic plates documenting star spectra organized
(22:36):
into these categories, thanks to the work of Williamina Fleming,
Anti Jump Cannon, and other women at Harvard Observatory.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
I have Anti jump Cannon on my list for a
future episode, just in case folks are like I wish
you had an episode on anti jump Cannon. After getting
to Harvard Cecilia Payne got to work examining these.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Plates through a jeweler's loop. She worked with an intense
and unshakeable focus, some times going days without sleep, chainsmoking
the whole time, rarely remembering to empty the ashtray. A
lot of accounts of her office talk about the overflowing astray. Eventually,
she realized that she was seeing four different ionizations of
(23:15):
silicon represented in the spectra on the plates. This ultimately
led her to the discovery that the variations she was
seeing among these spectra were coming from different levels of
ionization of the elements that were involved based on the
stars temperature, not on actual differences in the amounts of
elements that were present there. Through all of this work
(23:38):
folded into SAHA's equation. Pain gradually came to understand that
all the stars had roughly the same proportions of eighteen
different elements, with hydrogen and helium being most abundant. However,
this was totally contrary to the theories of the day.
Most astronomers and physicists at the time were working from
the principle of uniformity, that all the planets stars were
(24:00):
made of the same elements that Earth was in about
the same proportions, and while there were a few elements
that did have similar proportions to what was found on Earth,
she discovered that helium was one thousand times more abundant
than expected, and hydrogen, which we now know is the
most prevalent element in the universe, was a million times
more abundant. So pain had always been ambitious, but she.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Also realized that it was possible that she had not
just discovered something that would completely rewrite our understanding of
the stars, that maybe she had just made a mistake,
like it's a shorter walk to I made a mistake
than I have just discovered something that fundamentally changes our
understanding of how the universe works. So she painstakingly went
(24:44):
through her work over and over trying to figure out
where she had made an error, and she could not
find one because she had not made one.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
She was right. At this point, Harlow Shapley was trying
to transform Harvard Observatory into a department of astronomy. At heart,
he convinced Paine to use her findings to write a
thesis which would allow her to earn the first PhD
in astronomy ever to be awarded at Harvard University. At first,
Paine doubted that this would be worth her time, but
(25:14):
she ultimately agreed. However, some of.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
The people who were involved with reviewing and approving the
thesis doubted her conclusions. In particular, Henry Norris Russell, whose
work hinged on the principle of uniformity, demanded that she
allow for the possibility that she was just mistaken. Her
thesis included the caveat quote the outstanding discrepancies between the
(25:37):
astrophysical and terrestrial abundances are displayed for hydrogen and helium.
The enormous abundance derived for these elements in the stellar
atmospheres is almost certainly not real. Russell would not have
accepted Pain's thesis without this concession, so if she hadn't
included it, she wouldn't have had a thesis at all
(25:57):
or been awarded a PhD. So including this couching was
a pragmatic decision. This wasn't something that she brooded over,
but it was something she regretted. She would later say
quote as a warning to the young, if you are
sure of your facts, you should defend your position, even
with its downplaying of the most revolutionary for findings in
(26:19):
nineteen sixty two, Atto, Struva and Delta Zieberg's called this thesis,
which was published under the title Stellar Atmospheres, a Contribution
to the observational study of high temperature in the reversing
layers of stars. They called it quote undoubtedly the most
brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy. It was also
(26:39):
the first monograph ever to be published by the Harvard Observatory.
Cecilia Paine was awarded a PhD from Radcliffe College in
nineteen twenty five, as Harvard itself did not yet award
degrees to women. Harlow Shapley had thought her work was
so obviously profound and worthy that after she took her
final oral exam for her PhD, he didn't tell her
(27:00):
she had passed. She only found out after astronomer Margaret
Harwood found her weeping inconsolably in her office, thinking that
she must have failed. I want to time travel and
hug her. I'dn't want a time travel and yell at
Harlow Shapley. Well, I feel like though his thing wasn't
even he was just thoughtless.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Yeah, he was like, obviously you passed. How what?
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Anyway? Eventually the field of Astronomy did come to realize
that Payne's conclusions about the compositions of stars and the
abundance of hydrogen and helium in the universe were correct.
This included Henry Norris Russell, who acknowledged that fact in
nineteen twenty nine. The completion of her PhD meant that
Pain no longer had fellowship money to live off of,
(27:44):
so she started looking for a job. She got offers
from other observatories and universities, but she ultimately stayed at Harvard,
where she was hired as Harlow Shapley's assistant. This didn't
pay very much, and she had to pawn some of
her belongings to make ends meet in the gap between
when her fell u ship ended and when her job started,
but it was enough for her to move out of
(28:04):
the dorm and into her own apartment as long as
she had a roommate. Being Shapley's assistant also meant that
Pain no longer had the freedom to choose the research
that she wanted to do, and at first Shapley had
her keep working with photographic plates of stellar spectra, even
though there was more sophisticated technology becoming available by that point.
She was also expected to teach courses for the newly
(28:26):
established Department of Astronomy at Harvard, although since she wasn't
technically on the faculty, her name was not included in
the course catalog. Her students described her as very intense,
sometimes intimidating, and her lectures were both beautiful and memorable.
Even though she was not being paid or recognized accordingly,
(28:47):
Chapley was definitely aware of what an asset pain was.
In one letter, he described her as quote one of
the most outstanding astrophysicists of America of any and all sexes.
In nineteen twenty six, she also became the youngest person
to be listed in American Men of Science. She became
a US citizen in nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Then in nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
In nineteen thirty three, Cecilia Payne experienced a series of tragedies.
Her closest friend from Harvard was astronomer Adelaide Ames. The
two of them were so close that they had been
nicknamed the Heavenly Twins. Adelaide drowned after being swept from
a canoe during a sudden storm. In nineteen thirty two.
While at Cambridge, Cecilia had been similarly inseparable from her
(29:31):
friend Betty Leaf, and they had remained very close in
the years that had followed. Cecilia learned that Betty had
also drowned in nineteen thirty three. As she later wrote
in her autobiography, quote Adelaide and Betty all that I
was not beautiful, delicate, beloved were dead and I was alive.
I was absorbed in my work, shy and unattractive. What
(29:55):
was I giving? I made a silent resolve. I would
open my heart to the world. I would embrace life.
She decided to travel, making a trip to the Polkovo
Observatory outside Saint Petersburg. During that trip, she also went
to an astronomical conference in Guttengen, Germany, and there she
met Sergei Gaposhkin. Kaposhkin was from Russia. His parents and
(30:17):
most of his siblings had died during a Typhus outbreak,
and at the end of the Russian Civil War had
left him with no money and no documents that could
prove his identity. Eventually, he had made his way into Germany,
where he had earned a PhD in astronomy, but Hitler's
rise to power put him in a really impossible situation.
He was a Russian living in Germany without any papers.
(30:40):
Kapashkin traveled by a bicycle for four days to get
to Guttingen for this conference with the hope that one
of the other astronomers there could help him get out, and.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
The person who helped him was Cecilia Payne. She got
Harlow Shapley to offer him a position at Harvard and
to contact the American consul in Germany to try to
get gap Oshkin out of the country. After she got
back to the United States, Cecilia personally went to Washington,
d c. To try to get his visa expedited.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
In nineteen thirty four, three months after Sergei arrived in
the US, he and Cecilia got married. Most of her
colleagues were baffled. It did seem quite sudden, but in
a lot of ways their marriage really made sense. Both
of them were dedicated astronomers, and Sergei was also an artist.
At the time, it was expected for women to leave
(31:30):
the workforce after getting married, but serge was a refugee
and his temporary job at Harvard paid even less than
Cecilia's did. If they got married, that meant that he
would be dependent on her income to survive. There would
be no possible way for her to just leave the
workforce because she was a married woman.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Now. In other ways, it made less sense. Over time,
Sergei developed a reputation for being opinionated and hard to
work with, and he openly flirted with other women in
the observatory. He was a cape astronomer, but Cecilia was brilliant.
In some accounts, Harvard tolerated his rough edges just to
keep Cecilia there.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Between nineteen thirty five and nineteen forty, they had three children, Edward, Catherine,
and Peter, and Cecilia broke with convention yet again by
continuing to teach while she was pregnant. Since they couldn't
afford childcare, they pretty much bought the kids with them
to work. Cecilia and Sergei also started doing research together,
publishing a book on variable stars in nineteen thirty eight.
(32:30):
That same year, the American Astronomical Society awarded Cecilia Payne
Gaposhkin the first ever Anti Jump Cannon Prize, which still
exists today and recognizes outstanding postdoctoral research by a woman.
Also in nineteen thirty eight, Payn Gapashkin was finally named
to the Harvard faculty with the title of astronomer. In
the summer of nineteen thirty nine, serge and Cecilia traveled
(32:54):
to Paris for a conference in spite of the growing
tensions in Europe, but Sir Arthur Stanley Addington was also
going to be at this conference, and Cecilia wanted the
chance to see him again. This actually turned out to
be her last opportunity to do so.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
He died.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
In nineteen forty four. Germany invaded Poland just days before
Cecilia and Sergei arrived back in the US aboard a ship,
the French vessel called the SS Normandy.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Cecilia and Sergei continued to work at Harvard during and
after the war. Cecilia's name was finally included in the
course catalog starting in nineteen forty five. In nineteen fifty six,
she became the first woman to be a tenured professor
at Harvard, and soon after she was also the first
woman to share a department that wasn't specifically for women.
(33:40):
At this point, her salary was doubled, but her children
were still a fixture around the laboratory. The Harvard Observatory
Council formally warned Peter the Youngest to stop bothering the
staff in nineteen fifty eight. She was away when the
meeting happened when they had this discussion, and was outraged
about it. It's very embarrassing. And she was also like,
(34:02):
he's old enough for you to be talking directly to
him about these issues anyway. During her career as an astronomer,
Cecilia Pangaposhkin published more than one hundred and fifty papers
and several monographs, as well as multiple books on astronomy.
In addition to the one we mentioned earlier. This included
The Stars of High Luminosity in nineteen thirty and Variable
(34:23):
Stars in Galactic Structure in nineteen fifty four. In nineteen
seventy six, she was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Prize,
which is essentially a lifetime achievement award by the American
Astronomical Society and a nice irony considering his earlier appearance
in this story. Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin died of lung cancer
(34:44):
on December seventh, nineteen seventy nine. Her daughter published her autobiography,
The Dyer's Hand, along with other collected writings in nineteen
eighty four. Today there is a portrait of Cecilia Payne
Gaposhkin hanging in the faculty room in Harvard's University Hall.
It is in the style of vermir sixteen sixty eight
painting The Astronomer, and it was painted by Patricia Wattwood.
(35:06):
We will end with a quote from Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin
quote there is no joy more intense than that of
coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms
of currently accepted ideas. Nature has always had a trick
of surprising us, and she will continue to surprise us.
But she has never let us down yet. I love her.
I do too. She's marvelous and I'm so glad you
(35:26):
picked this one.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
I'm so glad that mysterious people asked for this a
couple of months ago, and now I can find no
record of it. Maybe maybe someone will write and explain
where they saw it, like what maybe what Facebook group
or twitters read or whatever it got brought up on
that got so many people excited about her story. Yeah.
I tried several different searches to try to try, like
(35:51):
try to find the emails. I tried just Cecilia. I
tried Gaposhkin, I tried her whole name. I remember specifically
somebody said, can you do an episod so on the
woman who discovered helium, And I was like, I don't
think that's quite right, quite what, but like and I
like just searching helium, I also didn't find. It was
just a whole big mystery.
Happy Saturday. Cecilia Payne later Cecilia Paine Gaposhkin was born
May tenth, nineteen hundred or one hundred and twenty five
years ago today if you're listening to this episode on
the day it comes out. She made truly revolutionary discoveries
about the chemical makeup of stars, and she's really one
of my favorite people I've ever learned about on this show.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Our episode on her originally came out on November ninth,
twenty twenty. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A couple of months ago.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
We got a pile of listener requests for an episode
on Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin. She was an astronomer who made
a lot of firsts, including being the first person to
figure out that stars are made of mostly hydrogen and helium.
Usually when we get a whole bunch of listener requests,
one right after the other, I can figure out what
(01:08):
prompted them, like usually there was a Google doodle, or
there's a viral post that's circulating around this time. It
was kind of a mystery because there is a new
biography that came out earlier this year, which is Donovan
Moore's What Stars Are Made Of, which is beautiful.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I recommend it.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
And there have been some viral posts, but none of
this lined up with when we got this file of requests.
And then on top of that, when I tried to
go through our inbox so I could make a list
of all the listeners that I wanted to thank here
at the top of the episode, I found nothing. Zero emails.
I remember them coming in, yet I could not find them.
(01:49):
Honestly though, this feels like just a mysterious gift from
the universe, because by the time I got to this
end of the research for this, I.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Just loved Celia Paynekubashkin.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I don't love the sexism she faced that we're going
to talk about, but like her whole story I really
delighted in She grew up in a society that just
did not prioritize education for girls and that regarded women's
academic ambitions as suspect. But her determination and her creativity
at getting around that just was so delightful to me.
(02:24):
So that's what we're going to talk about today. So
Cecilia Payne was born in Wendover, England, on May tenth,
nineteen hundred. Her father, Edward was a barrister and a historian,
and her mother, Emma, was an artist. Cecilia was the
oldest of Edward and Emma's children, with a younger brother,
Humphrey and a sister, Leonora. From a very early age,
Cecilia was curious and imaginative, with a keen memory and
(02:48):
sharp observation. Their home was full of music, art and literature,
and they had a large library. They were a pretty
comfortable middle class family. They had enough money to afford
house hold help, and that allowed Emma to keep working
as an art copyist even when her children were still
really small. But that changed after Edward's sudden death when
(03:09):
Cecilia was four. Edward had married Emma somewhat later in life,
and he died the day after Christmas nineteen oh four,
at the age of sixty.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
His body was.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Found in a river where he had apparently drowned. He
had been experiencing some heart trouble and some dizziness, which
may have contributed to his death, but it's just not
clear exactly what happened.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Although Emma received a widow stipend after Edward's death, it
really didn't match what his income had been, and money
was a lot tighter. Even so, Emma tried to make
sure that her children were immersed in culture. She would
scrape together enough to travel and attend concerts and go
to museums. The children's upbringing also wasn't always conventional. When
(03:52):
Cecilia asked for a bedtime story, her mother read her
The Odyssey. When Emma decided Cecilia was too old for stories,
Cecilia started by telling herself stories at bedtime, before moving
on to making up bedtime stories for her younger sister,
ohth Cecilia was really bright and driven to learn. When
she started school, she had some struggles the teachers at
(04:13):
the little school across the street from their home, which
she was attending. They encouraged her, but Cecilia was also
left handed, and they taught her to write with her
right hand. This really deeply frustrated her, so she taught
herself to be more ambidextrous and to do things like
right upside down, using techniques and exercises from a pamphlet
(04:34):
that her great grandfather had written that pamphlet was called
painting with both Hands. I know so many people who
were natural lefties that were forced to write right handed,
and it was never delightful for anybody.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
No. I my preschool teachers kept telling me to put
the pencil in the hand that felt most comfortable in
and I was like, I don't know what you're talking about,
so I just imitated what the other children were doing,
And like I to this day don't know if I
really should have learned to write with my left hand.
And that's why my penmanship has been terrible my entire life,
(05:08):
or maybe my penmanship is just terrible for my entire life.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
You know, everybody scribbling. My dad was a lefty that
was pushed to right handedness, and his penmanship has always
been a little bit fraught, looking like it always looks stressed. Yeah.
But when Cecilia was eight, she was out in the
family's orchard when she spotted a bee orchid growing in
the grass. She recognized it not because she had seen
(05:33):
one before, but because her mother had described one to
her once. And when she convinced her mother that yes,
there really was a bee orchid growing out in the orchard,
Emma had the gardener transplant it to a better location,
and after this experience, Cecilia decided that the one thing
she wanted to do was study nature and science. It
(05:54):
was a few years before she could really do that though.
When Cecilia was twelve, the family moved from Wendo, which
was a little more rural surrounded by woods and hills,
to the Bayswater neighborhood of London. They moved there for
the sake of her brother Humphrey's education, to give him
access to a better public school. Cecilia was enrolled in
a parochial school called Saint Mary's. That school was really
(06:17):
not a good fit for Cecilia, though. A big part
of her school day was religious instruction, which really did
not interest her so much so that she would pretend
to feint to try to get out of going to chapel.
She also tried to get a bookbinder to make her
an addition of Plato in a Bible cover so that
she could read classical philosophy during her religion classes. Unfortunately,
(06:39):
that brilliant plan was sorted because the bookbinder said no
to it. Yeah, apparently the bookbinder was appalled by that
very suggestion. On top of all of that.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Girls who've truly wanted to learn and who excelled at
school were viewed with a lot of suspicion. When Cecilia,
who was in the youngest class, came in second out
of the entire school school in a year end exam,
she wasn't praised for her performance. The other students were
scolded for allowing her to beat them. Classes for girls
(07:09):
were also mostly focused on reading and writing, not on
the subjects that Cecilia felt a real passion for.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Cecilia turned to the family library to try to make
up for what she saw as huge holes in her education.
And while she did love theater, opera, music, and literature,
which were all represented there, which she really wanted to study,
with science and there were almost no books on science
on the family shelves. She finally found one book on botany,
(07:36):
but it was in German and French, which she did
not speak, so she got a dictionary from school and
laboriously translated that book into English. She turned to this
kind of resourcefulness again and again during her education, including
for example, transcribing an entire textbook from the library by
hand before she started at Cambridge because she could not
(07:57):
afford to buy a copy of her own.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Eventually, the tea that Saint Mary's started to get really
tired of Cecilia's persistence at demanding to study science and
to be more challenged in her schoolwork. In addition to
trying to teach herself outside of school, she was essentially
badgering her teachers into tutoring her in other subjects than
the ones that the school offered. Finally, somebody told her
(08:19):
that the only way she might be able to study
science was as part of training to become a school teacher,
so she volunteered to teach Sunday school classes to try
to prepare herself. Although she focused her Sunday school teaching
a lot more on science than on the Bible.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Today's lesson dandeliance what Cecilia spent years as Saint Mary's
butting up against all kinds of barriers to the education
that she wanted for herself, and that, of course, was
frustrating and exasperating for everyone involved. Teachers and administrators saw
her behavior as inappropriate and disruptive, and when she was
(08:56):
seventeen and had just a year left to go, she
was expelled. However, it does seem that the headmistress of
Saint Mary's, wrote a letter encouraging Saint Paul's Girls' School,
which had been established by the Worshipful Company of Mercers,
to allow her to enroll there for her last year.
Saint Paul's was far more focused on the academic success
(09:17):
of its students than Saint Mary's had been, and once
she got there, Cecilia was finally encouraged in her pursuit
of science, and she excelled in other courses there as well,
including polishing her skills in public speaking and studying music,
which was actually being taught by Gustav Holst, who was
not a famous composer. Yet when Holst finished his orchestral
(09:38):
suite that's known as the Planets, Cecilia was actually one
of the students who got to hear a performance of it.
That is the coolest. Later on, Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin wrote
in her autobiography that the first time she walked through
the door at Saint Paul's, she thought, quote, I shall
never be lonely again. Now I can think about science.
She finally had the freedom to really pursue her ami ambitions,
(10:00):
and one of those ambitions was to go to Cambridge,
which we'll talk about after a sponsor break.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Although Cecilia Payne really thrived in the year that she
spent at Saint Paul's, she still had a huge amount
of catching up to do if she wanted to go
to the University of Cambridge. It wasn't just the challenge
of getting into school there. She could only afford to
go if she got a scholarship and aside from her
self taught knowledge of botany from that book, she translated
(10:37):
herself out of the dictionary. She was way behind in
all the sciences and in math, but she devoted herself
to catching up, and in the end, not only did
she get into Cambridge, but she also scored well enough
on a competitive exam to earn the only scholarship that
was big enough to cover all of her expenses in full.
Cecilia started at Newnham College, which is a women's college
(11:00):
at Cambridge, in nineteen nineteen. Getting into Cambridge, though, did
not mean that she had left behind the kind of
sexism that was such a big part of her earlier education.
Newnham is a women's college, and it had strict rules
for students' behavior, from standards of dress to curfews to
a ban on male visitors. There were also specific rules
(11:22):
for Newnham students when they attended lectures or other functions
at other Cambridge colleges, and even though all the students
at Cambridge were meeting the same academic requirements regardless of
their gender, only men were actually awarded degrees. There were
also expectations about which courses women should take. There wasn't
really a barrier to studying the natural sciences in general,
(11:46):
but from the first part of their time at Cambridge,
women's studying the natural sciences were expected to focus on botany.
Botany was like the women's science. Students selected two other
subjects to go along with that primary focus, and the
companion courses for botany were typically zoology and chemistry. So
(12:06):
if a woman wanted to study science at Cambridge during
this time, it was just generally understood that she would
start out studying botany, zoology and chemistry.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Well, of course, because ladies like flowers and animals. Correct
In spite of Cecilia's childhood experience with the bee orchid
and her self taught study of botany by this point,
she was really a lot more interested in chemistry and
physics at the same time, trying to make either of
those her primary course of study seemed incredibly risky, given
(12:40):
how shaky her earlier instruction in these subjects had been,
and in the math that was required, which she was
also behind on, and in the uphill battle she would
face as a young woman pursuing either of these subjects.
So she initially chose to study botany and chemistry as expected,
but she added physics to that rather than zoology. But
(13:02):
on December second of nineteen nineteen, Cecilia Payne had an
experience that completely shifted her focus, much like the discovery
of that bee orchid had when she was a child.
This time it was a lecture by Arthur Stanley Eddington.
Eddington had been part of an expedition to view the
total solar eclipse that took place on May nineteenth of
(13:22):
nineteen nineteen, and that expedition was to measure how the
Sun's gravity affected light from stars. We talked about that
expedition in our twenty seventeen episode on historical eclipses. The
data gathered during this eclipse supported Einstein's theory of general relativity,
and Cecilia was absolutely captivated by this lecture, She later
(13:44):
wrote quote, the result was a complete transformation of my
world picture. When I returned to my room, I found
that I could write down the lecture word for word.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
At about the same time, Cecilia was also starting to
question her choice of studying botany. Most of the material
she was hearing and lectures was already familiar to her,
but at the same time she was so inexperienced at
the more practical side that she made mistakes that caused
her to doubt herself. After Eddington's lecture, she really wished
(14:13):
she could change her focus to astronomy, but that was
flatly impossible. Astronomy was classified under math, not under natural science,
and students could not jump into a totally different course
of study that way. So she changed her main focus
from botany to physics, and since students were allowed to
(14:34):
attend lectures outside their particular field of study, she also
went to astronomy lectures and spent as much time at
Cambridge Observatory as she could with the help of astronomer L. J.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Comery. She also repaired the clock at Newnham's small observatory
and started spending her evenings there making observations and recording data.
At one point, she ran into Arthur Eddington again at
Cambridge Observatory and told him that she wanted to to
be an astronomer. When he realized how set she was
on this idea and how much study she had already
(15:06):
done on her own, he recommended some journals that she
could use to continue her studies, and also told her
that she could use the Cambridge Observatory library. As all
of this had been happening, debate had been ongoing about
how women's education should work at Cambridge, and on October
twenty fourth, nineteen twenty one, the Cambridge Council of the
(15:26):
Senate voted that women would be granted titular degrees from
the university. This was better than the previous setup, which
was that women who completed all the requirements of the
degree were awarded nothing, but it also meant that women
were to be given the title of the degree, but
not the degree itself. This sparked outrage, mainly from men
(15:47):
who objected to women being acknowledged at all. In early
nineteen twenty three, Cecilia Payne was getting toward the end
of her study at Cambridge, and she had spent those
years dividing her time, adding as much as astronomy as
she could to her study of physics and natural sciences.
She had learned from luminaries like Nils Bohr, who was
awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with Adams in
(16:10):
nineteen twenty two. She also studied computing, including joining the
computing section at the British Astronomical Association, and she had
been elected to the Royal Astronomical Society while still a
student as well. She had done all this while facing
derision and resentment, not just from her male peers, but
also in some cases from the faculty. At lectures women
(16:33):
were required to sit in the front row by themselves.
She described how at the start of his lectures, Ernest
Rutherford would very pointedly begin ladies and gentlemen. She'd also
come to understand that she just had no future as
an astronomer if she stayed in England because of her sex.
The only path that was really open to her was
(16:54):
still becoming a school teacher. LJ.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Comra offered to take her to a lecture that Harlow She,
who was director of the Harvard College Observatory, was giving
in London. Comray could introduce the two of them, and
then maybe that would open a door for Cecilia to
continue her education in the United States, where she might
have more opportunities than she did in the UK. This worked,
(17:17):
Payne told Shapley directly that she wanted to come to
Harvard to work for him. Shapley encouraged this idea, casually
suggesting that she might replace Annie jump Cannon, Harvard Observatory's
curator of astronomical photographs when she retired. This was more
of a reflection on the rules that women filled at
Harvard rather than an actual job offer. Yeah, it was
(17:38):
sort of like offhanded, Hey, maybe you could be Annie's replacement,
because obviously a woman does that job, and a woman
would do that job.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Just as going to Cambridge had required Cecilia to gain
admission and also to get a scholarship, going to Harvard
also required her to secure some funding, otherwise she just
would not have the money to do it. On February
twenty sixth, nineteen twenty three, she wrote to Shapley about
trying to get a fellowship. She also got recommendations from
Arthur Eddington, L. J. Comer, and her old headmistress at
(18:11):
Saint Paul's. It really seems like she got a recommendation
from every conceivable person that could give her one. She
also applied for as many scholarships and fellowships as she
could to try to scrape together enough money to afford
her passage across the ocean, to buy appropriate clothing, and
to pay for her living expenses while she was there.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
And once again she was successful. As she prepared to
leave England, astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne suggests that if he
were in her place, he would take advantage of the
wealth of data available at Harvard to verify an equation
that astrophysicist Mignod Saha had developed in nineteen twenty. This
equation expressed the relationship between a star's pressure and temperature
(18:54):
and the ionization of the elements in the star. We'll
get so what she did with that?
Speaker 1 (18:59):
After one month sponsor break, Cethlia Payne left Cambridge, England,
for Cambridge, Massachusetts in September of nineteen twenty three. Her
fellowship at Harvard College Observatory gave her the freedom to
(19:20):
choose the focus of her research, and, as E. A.
Milne had suggested, she started studying photographic plates of the
spectra of stars to try to confirm SAHA's equation to
make sense of what she was doing all the way
back in sixteen sixty six, Isaac Newton used a prism
to separate sunlight into a continuous series of colors, using
(19:42):
the word spectrum to describe what he saw. Later, William
Wallaston and Joseph Fraunhoffer each observed that if you looked
at the sun's spectrum in fine enough detail, there were
dark lines within that spectrum. These became known as Fraunhoffer
lines or absorption lines, but Fraunhoffer did not have an
explanation for what those lines were or why they were there. Then,
(20:04):
in eighteen fifty five, Robert Bunsen built on earlier designs
to develop the Bunsen burner. The Bunsen burner produced an
almost colorless flame, and that made it useful for studying
the light that was produced by heating or burning different elements.
Not long after, Gustav Kershoff suggested that they could use
a prism to separate this light into its spectrum. That
(20:26):
would make it easier to distinguish the fine differences in
flames that have really similar colors. This was an early
version of the spectroscope. Through this work, Kershoff discovered that
each element had its own unique set of spectral lines
when it was heated, almost like a fingerprint. We talked
a little bit about this when we talked about the
discovery of helium. Emission lines come from the wavelengths of
(20:51):
light that elements emit when they're excited, and absorption lines
appear when wavelengths of light are absorbed in between when
they're produced and when we observe them. Today, we know
that the presence of these lines relates to the structure
of the atom and what happens when adams are excited
to different levels of energy. But at the end of
the nineteenth century, physicists and astronomers knew that these spectra existed,
(21:14):
but they didn't quite know what they meant. At Harvard
College Observatory, astronomers started using these spectra to classify stars.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Wilhelmina P. S.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Fleming, who had been the housekeeper of observatory director Edward C. Pickering,
developed a classification system that was primarily based on the
strength of the hydrogen lines in these spectra. Ani Jump
Cannon later simplified and refined this system into one that
still exists today. The types BAFG, K, and M often
(21:47):
put into the mnemonic obia fine girl Kiss Me that
was purportedly coined by Henry Norris Russell. There are also
a few other classifications that can be added into that mnemonic,
and some other attempts at mnemonics that are less gendered,
relying on the idea that, like, you want a woman
to kiss you, maybe whether she's really up for that
(22:09):
or not.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
That includes only.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Bad astronomers forget generally known mnemonics.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
But as was the case with Fraunhofer's discovery of absorption spectrum,
canon didn't really have a sense of why stars fit
into these categories or what those categories meant. She was cataloging,
not analyzing or interpreting. But the Observatory did have more
than two hundred thousand photographic plates documenting star spectra organized
(22:36):
into these categories, thanks to the work of Williamina Fleming,
Anti Jump Cannon, and other women at Harvard Observatory.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
I have Anti jump Cannon on my list for a
future episode, just in case folks are like I wish
you had an episode on anti jump Cannon. After getting
to Harvard Cecilia Payne got to work examining these.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Plates through a jeweler's loop. She worked with an intense
and unshakeable focus, some times going days without sleep, chainsmoking
the whole time, rarely remembering to empty the ashtray. A
lot of accounts of her office talk about the overflowing astray. Eventually,
she realized that she was seeing four different ionizations of
(23:15):
silicon represented in the spectra on the plates. This ultimately
led her to the discovery that the variations she was
seeing among these spectra were coming from different levels of
ionization of the elements that were involved based on the
stars temperature, not on actual differences in the amounts of
elements that were present there. Through all of this work
(23:38):
folded into SAHA's equation. Pain gradually came to understand that
all the stars had roughly the same proportions of eighteen
different elements, with hydrogen and helium being most abundant. However,
this was totally contrary to the theories of the day.
Most astronomers and physicists at the time were working from
the principle of uniformity, that all the planets stars were
(24:00):
made of the same elements that Earth was in about
the same proportions, and while there were a few elements
that did have similar proportions to what was found on Earth,
she discovered that helium was one thousand times more abundant
than expected, and hydrogen, which we now know is the
most prevalent element in the universe, was a million times
more abundant. So pain had always been ambitious, but she.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Also realized that it was possible that she had not
just discovered something that would completely rewrite our understanding of
the stars, that maybe she had just made a mistake,
like it's a shorter walk to I made a mistake
than I have just discovered something that fundamentally changes our
understanding of how the universe works. So she painstakingly went
(24:44):
through her work over and over trying to figure out
where she had made an error, and she could not
find one because she had not made one.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
She was right. At this point, Harlow Shapley was trying
to transform Harvard Observatory into a department of astronomy. At heart,
he convinced Paine to use her findings to write a
thesis which would allow her to earn the first PhD
in astronomy ever to be awarded at Harvard University. At first,
Paine doubted that this would be worth her time, but
(25:14):
she ultimately agreed. However, some of.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
The people who were involved with reviewing and approving the
thesis doubted her conclusions. In particular, Henry Norris Russell, whose
work hinged on the principle of uniformity, demanded that she
allow for the possibility that she was just mistaken. Her
thesis included the caveat quote the outstanding discrepancies between the
(25:37):
astrophysical and terrestrial abundances are displayed for hydrogen and helium.
The enormous abundance derived for these elements in the stellar
atmospheres is almost certainly not real. Russell would not have
accepted Pain's thesis without this concession, so if she hadn't
included it, she wouldn't have had a thesis at all
(25:57):
or been awarded a PhD. So including this couching was
a pragmatic decision. This wasn't something that she brooded over,
but it was something she regretted. She would later say
quote as a warning to the young, if you are
sure of your facts, you should defend your position, even
with its downplaying of the most revolutionary for findings in
(26:19):
nineteen sixty two, Atto, Struva and Delta Zieberg's called this thesis,
which was published under the title Stellar Atmospheres, a Contribution
to the observational study of high temperature in the reversing
layers of stars. They called it quote undoubtedly the most
brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy. It was also
(26:39):
the first monograph ever to be published by the Harvard Observatory.
Cecilia Paine was awarded a PhD from Radcliffe College in
nineteen twenty five, as Harvard itself did not yet award
degrees to women. Harlow Shapley had thought her work was
so obviously profound and worthy that after she took her
final oral exam for her PhD, he didn't tell her
(27:00):
she had passed. She only found out after astronomer Margaret
Harwood found her weeping inconsolably in her office, thinking that
she must have failed. I want to time travel and
hug her. I'dn't want a time travel and yell at
Harlow Shapley. Well, I feel like though his thing wasn't
even he was just thoughtless.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Yeah, he was like, obviously you passed. How what?
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Anyway? Eventually the field of Astronomy did come to realize
that Payne's conclusions about the compositions of stars and the
abundance of hydrogen and helium in the universe were correct.
This included Henry Norris Russell, who acknowledged that fact in
nineteen twenty nine. The completion of her PhD meant that
Pain no longer had fellowship money to live off of,
(27:44):
so she started looking for a job. She got offers
from other observatories and universities, but she ultimately stayed at Harvard,
where she was hired as Harlow Shapley's assistant. This didn't
pay very much, and she had to pawn some of
her belongings to make ends meet in the gap between
when her fell u ship ended and when her job started,
but it was enough for her to move out of
(28:04):
the dorm and into her own apartment as long as
she had a roommate. Being Shapley's assistant also meant that
Pain no longer had the freedom to choose the research
that she wanted to do, and at first Shapley had
her keep working with photographic plates of stellar spectra, even
though there was more sophisticated technology becoming available by that point.
She was also expected to teach courses for the newly
(28:26):
established Department of Astronomy at Harvard, although since she wasn't
technically on the faculty, her name was not included in
the course catalog. Her students described her as very intense,
sometimes intimidating, and her lectures were both beautiful and memorable.
Even though she was not being paid or recognized accordingly,
(28:47):
Chapley was definitely aware of what an asset pain was.
In one letter, he described her as quote one of
the most outstanding astrophysicists of America of any and all sexes.
In nineteen twenty six, she also became the youngest person
to be listed in American Men of Science. She became
a US citizen in nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Then in nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
In nineteen thirty three, Cecilia Payne experienced a series of tragedies.
Her closest friend from Harvard was astronomer Adelaide Ames. The
two of them were so close that they had been
nicknamed the Heavenly Twins. Adelaide drowned after being swept from
a canoe during a sudden storm. In nineteen thirty two.
While at Cambridge, Cecilia had been similarly inseparable from her
(29:31):
friend Betty Leaf, and they had remained very close in
the years that had followed. Cecilia learned that Betty had
also drowned in nineteen thirty three. As she later wrote
in her autobiography, quote Adelaide and Betty all that I
was not beautiful, delicate, beloved were dead and I was alive.
I was absorbed in my work, shy and unattractive. What
(29:55):
was I giving? I made a silent resolve. I would
open my heart to the world. I would embrace life.
She decided to travel, making a trip to the Polkovo
Observatory outside Saint Petersburg. During that trip, she also went
to an astronomical conference in Guttengen, Germany, and there she
met Sergei Gaposhkin. Kaposhkin was from Russia. His parents and
(30:17):
most of his siblings had died during a Typhus outbreak,
and at the end of the Russian Civil War had
left him with no money and no documents that could
prove his identity. Eventually, he had made his way into Germany,
where he had earned a PhD in astronomy, but Hitler's
rise to power put him in a really impossible situation.
He was a Russian living in Germany without any papers.
(30:40):
Kapashkin traveled by a bicycle for four days to get
to Guttingen for this conference with the hope that one
of the other astronomers there could help him get out, and.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
The person who helped him was Cecilia Payne. She got
Harlow Shapley to offer him a position at Harvard and
to contact the American consul in Germany to try to
get gap Oshkin out of the country. After she got
back to the United States, Cecilia personally went to Washington,
d c. To try to get his visa expedited.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
In nineteen thirty four, three months after Sergei arrived in
the US, he and Cecilia got married. Most of her
colleagues were baffled. It did seem quite sudden, but in
a lot of ways their marriage really made sense. Both
of them were dedicated astronomers, and Sergei was also an artist.
At the time, it was expected for women to leave
(31:30):
the workforce after getting married, but serge was a refugee
and his temporary job at Harvard paid even less than
Cecilia's did. If they got married, that meant that he
would be dependent on her income to survive. There would
be no possible way for her to just leave the
workforce because she was a married woman.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Now. In other ways, it made less sense. Over time,
Sergei developed a reputation for being opinionated and hard to
work with, and he openly flirted with other women in
the observatory. He was a cape astronomer, but Cecilia was brilliant.
In some accounts, Harvard tolerated his rough edges just to
keep Cecilia there.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Between nineteen thirty five and nineteen forty, they had three children, Edward, Catherine,
and Peter, and Cecilia broke with convention yet again by
continuing to teach while she was pregnant. Since they couldn't
afford childcare, they pretty much bought the kids with them
to work. Cecilia and Sergei also started doing research together,
publishing a book on variable stars in nineteen thirty eight.
(32:30):
That same year, the American Astronomical Society awarded Cecilia Payne
Gaposhkin the first ever Anti Jump Cannon Prize, which still
exists today and recognizes outstanding postdoctoral research by a woman.
Also in nineteen thirty eight, Payn Gapashkin was finally named
to the Harvard faculty with the title of astronomer. In
the summer of nineteen thirty nine, serge and Cecilia traveled
(32:54):
to Paris for a conference in spite of the growing
tensions in Europe, but Sir Arthur Stanley Addington was also
going to be at this conference, and Cecilia wanted the
chance to see him again. This actually turned out to
be her last opportunity to do so.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
He died.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
In nineteen forty four. Germany invaded Poland just days before
Cecilia and Sergei arrived back in the US aboard a ship,
the French vessel called the SS Normandy.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Cecilia and Sergei continued to work at Harvard during and
after the war. Cecilia's name was finally included in the
course catalog starting in nineteen forty five. In nineteen fifty six,
she became the first woman to be a tenured professor
at Harvard, and soon after she was also the first
woman to share a department that wasn't specifically for women.
(33:40):
At this point, her salary was doubled, but her children
were still a fixture around the laboratory. The Harvard Observatory
Council formally warned Peter the Youngest to stop bothering the
staff in nineteen fifty eight. She was away when the
meeting happened when they had this discussion, and was outraged
about it. It's very embarrassing. And she was also like,
(34:02):
he's old enough for you to be talking directly to
him about these issues anyway. During her career as an astronomer,
Cecilia Pangaposhkin published more than one hundred and fifty papers
and several monographs, as well as multiple books on astronomy.
In addition to the one we mentioned earlier. This included
The Stars of High Luminosity in nineteen thirty and Variable
(34:23):
Stars in Galactic Structure in nineteen fifty four. In nineteen
seventy six, she was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Prize,
which is essentially a lifetime achievement award by the American
Astronomical Society and a nice irony considering his earlier appearance
in this story. Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin died of lung cancer
(34:44):
on December seventh, nineteen seventy nine. Her daughter published her autobiography,
The Dyer's Hand, along with other collected writings in nineteen
eighty four. Today there is a portrait of Cecilia Payne
Gaposhkin hanging in the faculty room in Harvard's University Hall.
It is in the style of vermir sixteen sixty eight
painting The Astronomer, and it was painted by Patricia Wattwood.
(35:06):
We will end with a quote from Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin
quote there is no joy more intense than that of
coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms
of currently accepted ideas. Nature has always had a trick
of surprising us, and she will continue to surprise us.
But she has never let us down yet. I love her.
I do too. She's marvelous and I'm so glad you
(35:26):
picked this one.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
I'm so glad that mysterious people asked for this a
couple of months ago, and now I can find no
record of it. Maybe maybe someone will write and explain
where they saw it, like what maybe what Facebook group
or twitters read or whatever it got brought up on
that got so many people excited about her story. Yeah.
I tried several different searches to try to try, like
(35:51):
try to find the emails. I tried just Cecilia. I
tried Gaposhkin, I tried her whole name. I remember specifically
somebody said, can you do an episod so on the
woman who discovered helium, And I was like, I don't
think that's quite right, quite what, but like and I
like just searching helium, I also didn't find. It was
just a whole big mystery.
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