In 1925, Payne was the first person to be awarded a PhD in astronomy at Radcliffe College, at the time the women’s branch of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her thesis on stellar atmospheres is her greatest contribution: she related the line patterns in the observed spectra of stars to their physical conditions. She also discovered that hydrogen is the main component of stars, followed by helium. Her discoveries and expertise were eventually recognized with prizes and honours, culminating in a life-achievement lectureship from the American Astronomical Society.
The brilliance of Payne’s thesis was acknowledged by the most prominent US astronomers of the early twentieth century: her supervisor, Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory; and Henry Norris Russell at Princeton University in New Jersey. But both disagreed that hydrogen is the main component of stars. She based her theory on painstaking analysis of the large cache of stellar spectra in the Harvard collection. It was informed by the predictions of Indian physicist Meghnad Saha’s theory of ionization, which relates the observed spectrum of a stellar atmosphere (assuming it is a gas in thermal equilibrium) to its temperature, pressure and composition.
Her conclusion went against a view widely espoused by prominent astronomers, including Arthur Eddington: that stars are made up of essentially the same elements as Earth (silicon, carbon, iron and so on). In response to this criticism, and because she was anxious to get her results published, Payne downplayed her finding as a possible error. Russell was later credited with the discovery, having reached the same result by different means. Payne’s role stayed hidden from the wider scientific consciousness for several decades.
It doesn't sound like she was very likeable at a personal level, though:
I met Payne in the mid-1970s. I remember her as a stern, chain-smoking presence stalking the halls of the observatory: she scolded me for being late for a meeting (recently arrived from Italy, I regarded being precisely on time as impolite). After reading Moore’s well-researched book, I realized that she was a complex figure with whom I can empathize despite being two generations younger and from a different background. A committed scientist and mentor to a new generation, she successfully juggled career and family with a love of the arts and world travel.I expect Graeme (who has argued, from God's knows what line of reasoning, that planets grow up to be stars, to argue in comments that Arthur Eddington was right all along.)
Her autobiography (published privately as The Dyer’s Hand in 1979, and publicly as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in 1984), is worth a read for its personal view of her multifaceted life and her interaction with observatory colleagues, including the female ‘computers’ who processed astronomical data. I also recommend for its immediacy her 1968 interview for the American Institute of Physics oral-history programme, conducted by Harvard astronomer and historian Owen Gingerich (see go.nature.com/37nm0vr). It captures her essential briskness and rare ability to talk in complex and nuanced sentences.
"She also discovered that hydrogen is the main component of stars, followed by helium. "
ReplyDeleteShe discovered no such thing. She was completely full of shit. To this day no-one has found even on scintilla of evidence for this lie. They oligarchy merely pounced on her idiocy as a convenience. They adopted her insane and irrational model, the same month they detonated the hydrogen bomb. This is the same misinformation campaign as that to do with alleged thermo-nuclear bombs. She's just the patsy and she wasn't even very clever.
Yes Arthur Eddington was right all along. For fucksakes this is the second most embarrassing piece of utter trash in all of contemporary "science"
ReplyDeleteWhat floats to the fucking top? If its oil and water in a bath the oil floats to the top. So you don't fucking immediately assume the bath is all oil.
Get a hold of yourselves. What floats? For fucksakes. Obviously the lightest gasses float to the top of any fucking atmosphere. The stupidity of this is just beyond belief.
The consequences of the idiocy of believing that a body is constituted by those elements that are light enough to float to the top .......... The consequences of idiocy that an 8 year old ought to see through are massive.
ReplyDeleteJust by way of a couple of examples. You then have to believe that when a solar system is forming, all the rocks have to segregate in one area, and most of the hydrogen has to segregate elsewhere. What fucking insane view of gravity could cause all that? Then you have to believe in the self-compression of hydrogen. Its hard enough to fucking compress hydrogen at the best of times. But if you are asking hydrogen to self-segregate and then self-compress, you have to be a lunatic.
But there you go. When the oligarchy needs to lock in some bullshit, they then have to force an whole lot of far-reaching consequential lies to round it all out. So they have to abuse people who are getting things right and give prizes to people who fuck things up.
If you don't think there is an ethnic component to all this you would have to be tripping.
Its just so evil that this money elite will exert their will even on this area of science. Science ought to be sacred. But no these clowns want to control it to the greatest extent possible.
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