The Glass Universe

by Dava Sobel

  • • •

  THE ANNIE JUMP CANNON PRIZE, awarded every three years by the executive council of the American Astronomical Society, increased gradually in cash value over time. In 1937 it went to Charlotte Moore Sitterly, who was Henry Norris Russell’s personal computer. With each new winner, Miss Cannon gave a new craftswoman the chance to create her own decorative universe in jewelry. The 1940 prize recognized Julie Vinter Hansen of the Copenhagen University’s Østervold Observatory, an expert on calculating orbits for comets and asteroids. Although Miss Vinter Hansen was working in the United States at the time of the award presentation, she could not leave Berkeley to attend the banquet, being held once again in Philadelphia. As soon as the check and accompanying token reached her by mail in January 1941, she wrote to thank Miss Cannon: “The ‘medal’ has now arrived and to my pleasant surprise it is no medal at all. I love this feminine touch that it has taken the form of a pin that can be worn every day. I think it is very beautiful and it has been on my dress ever since it came, also yesterday when I was radio-interviewed in Oakland and had an occasion to tell how grateful I am to this country and its astronomers, an occasion that was so much more welcome to me, as I missed the opportunity to express what is in my heart by not being able to go to Philadelphia.”

  In the next breath Miss Vinter Hansen asked, “Why do you not come out to California and its wonderful climate this winter? I know the astronomers would be delighted to welcome you.” Miss Cannon declined, too taken up with activities to consider the trip. “Last Saturday I gave a broadcast by short wave on ‘The Story of Starlight,’” she told her Oxford pen pal Daisy Turner, the widow of Herbert Hall Turner, on January 21. “Dr. Shapley was sick in bed with flu, and heard it horizontally, he said. He spoke a good word for it, which pleased me greatly. There is something uncanny about speaking to such a hypothetical audience. . . . Do you recall the Bond Club? It still goes on, and I am heading a course in astronomical reading for a group meeting me in a fortnight. . . . I am just as busy as a bee with many interesting things outside. My dear neighbor Ruth Munn was just in talking about the Cambridge Historical Society meeting to be held in her home next week. She wants me to wear my best evening gown.”

  The 1941 IAU general assembly, originally planned for Zurich in August, had already been canceled owing to the alarming escalation of aggression in Europe. “Oh I do hope Oxford will not be harmed,” Miss Cannon worried to Mrs. Turner. “It is all so merciless, horrible and unbelievable.” Not to dwell on war, Miss Cannon turned to other news of mutual friends and mundane events. “We are having cold weather, but crystal clear, brilliant sunshine, invigorating air. It is bracing, and I feel ‘fit.’” She closed with “Love again and again, A.J.C.”

  She continued to work and feel well until mid-March, when her health took a turn. After a few weeks the illness grew serious enough to send her to the Cambridge Hospital, where she died on Easter Sunday.

  “On the thirteenth of April, 1941,” Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin reported in Science, “the world lost a great scientist and a great woman, astronomy lost a distinguished contributor and countless human beings lost a beloved friend by the death of Miss Annie J. Cannon.”

  Cecilia could remember the day, not so long ago, when she and Sergei invited the whole staff out to Lexington, to what would have been a garden party if not for the torrents of rain, and how Annie had breezed in, full of cheer, wearing a bright, flowered dress, and hoping that her outfit might “do something to counteract the weather.” Although Miss Cannon was well into her eighth decade at the end of her life, it could still be said that she had died young.

  “During the past year,” Shapley rued in his 1941 annual report, “the observatory suffered a heavy loss through the death of Miss Annie Jump Cannon. In her seventy-seventh year Miss Cannon was still engaged in classifying the spectra of the stars, work in which she was a pioneer and which she had carried on for more than forty years. During that interval the spectra of about half a million stars passed under her scrutiny. In addition to the results published in the Henry Draper Catalogue and the Henry Draper Extension, she had classified approximately one hundred thousand stars, unpublished at the time of her death.

  “To commemorate the life and work of this gentlewoman, whose kindly advice, enthusiasm, and perseverance charmed and encouraged all who met her, the Observatory has planned a series of memorials. A memorial volume of the Annals, to contain the one hundred thousand unpublished spectra, will soon be issued. The expense of this volume has already been met through the generosity of her friend Professor James R. Jewett, Emeritus Professor of Arabic in Harvard University. Two endowed fellowships in the Observatory are contemplated as a further memorial; they would continue to offer the inspiration of Miss Cannon’s example to young men and women interested in undertaking the career of astronomical research. One would be available to students from Wellesley College, Miss Cannon’s alma mater, and would be awarded with preference to students from Delaware, her native state. The office in which Miss Cannon worked has been set aside as a Memorial Room and will soon be redecorated in an appropriate manner. The type of work that she did will be carried on in this room and in the others that she used.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Lifetimes of Stars

  CECILIA AND SERGEI GAPOSCHKIN had the observatory almost to themselves throughout the war years of the 1940s. Often they brought their children to work, letting them sled down the steep slope of Observatory Hill or play hide-and-seek in the dusty catacomb under the Great Refractor. The couple had a third child now, Peter, born April 5, 1940. They also owned, in addition to their house on Shade Street in Lexington, a small farm near Townsend, where a neighbor helped them raise pigs and poultry for local markets. As naturalized U.S. citizens, they considered their farm labor a patriotic duty, and they delivered their meat and eggs by horse and buggy to conserve their allotment of rationed gasoline. In 1942, when Japanese Americans on the West Coast were forced to enter internment camps, the Gaposchkins took in the family of Reverend Casper Horikoshi, whose son and daughter were playmates of Edward and Katherine.

  To increase their own and others’ understanding of the global crisis, the Gaposchkins set up a discussion group called the Forum for International Problems. It met one evening every other week in the observatory library, with Shapley’s hearty approval. Speakers came from all departments of the university as well as the Boston and Cambridge communities. In her role as chairman, Mrs. Gaposchkin tried not to take sides, particularly, she said, when participants “urged their arguments with intemperate zeal.” At times she feared the disputes on the platform would lead to physical violence.

  From Cambridge to Oak Ridge to Bloemfontein, young men dispersed to the branches of the armed forces. Staff members were stunned, Shapley noted, to discover how well their training and practice in astronomy had fitted them for “effective cooperation in the war effort.” After all, sailors needed to steer by the stars, and an astronomer’s lenses, mirrors, and photographic techniques lent themselves readily to strategic purposes. The director informed President Conant in autumn 1942 that twenty-five of his subordinates were engaged in eleven distinct types of military research, some of which were too confidential for comment. Mrs. Shapley was working for the navy, calculating ballistics trajectories. Frances Wright, one of the younger generation of computers, devoted herself practically full-time to teaching celestial navigation, as did Bart Bok. Shapley was often called away on matters pertaining to refugee scholars, such as “committee meetings in New York to raise money to rescue people from Hitler’s grasp.” President Conant assumed the chairmanship of the new National Defense Research Council, with responsibility for projects pertaining to nuclear fission, and disappeared occasionally from his Harvard office to visit undisclosed locations in the Midwest and Southwest.

  Although half the telescopes at Oak Ridge shut down for lack of graduate students to operate them, the Boyden Station in Bloemfontei
n remained at peak activity. The new 60-inch reflector saw constant use, as did the old 8-inch Bache, the 13-inch Boyden, and the big Bruce photographic telescope. July and August 1942 brought a spell of unusually fine winter weather to South Africa, allowing the Parases to break all their previous records of work accomplished. They had to stockpile most of the plates on-site, however, until ocean transport again became safe.

  With no war-related assignments, the Gaposchkins stuck to their studies of variable stars. From the twenty thousand variables discovered over the preceding fifty years of nightly all-sky photography, they chose two thousand that had shone brighter than tenth magnitude at least once. Then they followed these target stars through plates dating back to 1899, and established the light curve for each one, to classify the type of variation it displayed. They also checked back on some “new stars” to see what had become of them since their eruptions as novae. The star called U Scorpii, for example, which first called attention to itself as Nova Scorpii in 1863, had flared again, they found, in 1906 and 1936—outbursts that made U Scorpii the first known “recurrent nova.” The plate collection had kept the 1906 news a secret for decades; the 1936 event had also gone unnoticed till now. Like an oracle, the great glass storehouse teemed with knowledge, but divulged it only when petitioners posed a specific question.

  In their long collaboration, husband and wife divided the kingdom of the variables roughly in half. Cecilia specialized in the Cepheids and other “intrinsic variables,” which alternately brightened and dimmed on their own, while Sergei looked at stars that repeatedly hid some or all of their light behind a partner. He had a “nose” for picking out surprising star pairs. For example, he showed that the giant star VV Cephei not only varied its light in typical Cepheid fashion, but also was partially eclipsed every twenty years by a small companion. No one else had noticed that extra bit of variation in its pattern. Shapley applauded Sergei “for being so surprisingly lucky, or instinctively guided, that he can pull down such unusual eclipsing stars.” Gaposchkin, by his own description, did not so much pull them down as “go fishing for stars” in the ocean of glass plates.

  • • •

  AT THE 1943 WINTER MEETING of the American Astronomical Society, held in Cincinnati, the executive council moved to award the fourth Annie Jump Cannon Prize to Miss Cannon’s old friend and coworker Antonia Maury. The seventy-seven-year-old Miss Maury, a party to the discovery of spectroscopic binaries in 1889, had nurtured her interest in those stars through all the intervening years. She had also followed her pet variable, the strange Beta Lyrae, through hundreds of Harvard spectrograms taken over decades. She saw her account of “The Spectral Changes of Beta Lyrae” published in the Harvard Annals in 1933, two years before her retirement, but even now she continued visiting the observatory to review any new plates that included Beta Lyrae, whose behavior remained an enigma.

  Miss Maury’s aunt Antonia Draper Dixon died in 1923, leaving her niece the diamond ring that had once belonged to Anna Palmer Draper. The family property at Hastings-on-Hudson became a trusteeship of the American Scenic Historic Preservation Society. Miss Maury, who lived in the old observatory cottage built for her grandfather, wanted to turn part of the ten-acre tract into a botanical garden. She invited neighborhood children to wander freely about the grounds of “Draper Park,” or accompany her on walks to learn the names of all the plants, birds, insects, and rocks that she had come to love in her own childhood. With guidance from Shapley, she purchased a secondhand Alvan Clark 6-inch telescope—not just for her personal use, but as an attraction for local residents, whom she would also treat to free public lectures in her areas of expertise. Members of the Hastings Amateur Astronomy Association laid a cement platform for the telescope in 1932, and a committee from the mayor’s office raised funds for a shed to protect it. But the shed was never finished, and Miss Maury’s grand design failed to materialize.

  Recently Miss Maury had taken up the cause of the Western redwood forests. The wartime demand for lumber was feeding these trees to sawmills with no thought of their conservation, and she meant to alter the situation if possible. She spoke of it to Mrs. Gaposchkin, whom she regarded as the daughter she wished were hers, and who shared her appreciation of botany. Mostly they spoke of stars and spectra, but of enough other things besides to make Mrs. Gaposchkin describe Miss Maury as “a dreamer and a poet, always vehemently denouncing injustice, forever battling for a good (often a lost) cause.”

  Miss Maury’s original stellar classification scheme received new recognition in 1943, when astronomers at the Yerkes Observatory proposed refinements to the Henry Draper Catalogue. The new “MKK” system, so named for William Morgan, Philip Keenan, and Edith Kellman, preserved Miss Cannon’s letter categories in the accustomed order, and also the numbered subscripts, zero to nine, which graded intermediate spectral identities. The major innovation of the MKK system was the addition of Roman numerals I through V to designate each star’s luminosity, or intrinsic brightness—the very quality that Miss Maury had attempted to characterize by her a, b, and c divisions. Morgan himself expressed the highest respect for Miss Maury, whom he considered an even more skilled stellar classifier than the late Miss Cannon.

  The memorial Annals volume to be dedicated to Miss Cannon stalled during the war for lack of funds and personnel. By 1944 the number of observatory staff engaged in full-time war-related work had risen from twenty-five to thirty-two. Meanwhile good weather continued to smile on Bloemfontein, where the quantity of glass plates in storage tested the available space. Shapley yearned to see the fruits of the latest two years’ labors in the Southern Hemisphere. Given the fairly reliable delivery of mail and supplies from England to Africa, and a sudden drop in insurance rates for international shipments, he asked Dr. Paraskevopoulos to send home some of the plates. About 1,500 photographs, or one-tenth of the accumulation, joined other cargo loaded aboard the Robin Goodfellow, bound from Cape Town to New York. On July 25, 1944, the ship was torpedoed in the South Atlantic, and sank, with the loss of all hands.

  • • •

  EVERYTHING LOOKED DIFFERENT after the war—after the usual atrocities typical of armed conflict had been overshadowed by the summary annihilation of several hundred thousand human beings by a new class of weapon. People began to speak of science as “having known sin.”

  Even as Shapley anticipated the return of the observatory’s former good fortune, he recoiled from what he had seen. “Should we plan to construct large new buildings in urban areas in this age of atomic bombs?” he asked in his 1946 report to President Conant. “Should the staff of the Observatory, with its experience and specialized knowledge, help in the creation of international scientific institutions as a part of its contribution to international sanity? Should our experts in ballistics, rocket problems, optics, turn hopefully away from the wartime applications of science? Should we now work out a plan for burying our best photographs, records, and publications in such a way that they might be discovered and utilized in some later millennium when less social stupidity prevails among the higher animals?”

  Such comments, paired with the director’s liberal politics and aid to displaced foreign scientists, drew suspicion from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Shapley was subpoenaed by the committee in November 1946 to appear at a closed hearing in Washington, but he suffered no penalties as a result of that encounter. Later, when Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him of ties to Communist organizations, Shapley accused the senator of “telling six lies in four sentences, which is probably the indoor record for mendacity.”

  If the war had taught astronomers their fitness for national defense, it also taught the government the value of supporting certain areas of basic research in astronomy. The Sun, for example, was now known to affect the stratum of Earth’s atmosphere where radio transmissions traveled. A high-altitude station to monitor the Sun’s behavior that the Harvard Observatory set up in 1941 near Climax, Colorado, became th
e darling of the Office of Naval Research. During the war, when large-scale military operations depended on radio communication, attacks had been scheduled on the Sun’s timetable. Advances in the new field of solar-terrestrial relations offered direct benefits to postwar commercial shipping and aviation. At the Climax site, a peacetime Harvard project to photograph meteors was yielding much-desired information on atmospheric temperature, density, and drag.

  Government agencies saw no gain, however, in probing the variable stars, or the structure of the Milky Way and its place among the other galaxies. Shapley thus ran into difficulties resuscitating his own chosen areas of interest. He urgently needed to hire new computers, but the low salaries for those positions looked even lower after the war, when inflation drove up prices and new industries paid higher wages. Realizing the need for nonmilitary agencies to bolster basic research, Shapley helped establish the National Science Foundation in the United States, and also took part in the creation of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

  In 1946 the Harvard administration reacted to Shapley’s leftist political activities by restructuring the observatory hierarchy. Shapley retained the title of director but ceded control to a new Observatory Council, which included Bart Bok, Donald Menzel, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and Fred Whipple, a meteor and comet expert on staff since 1931. Bok was promoted to full professor and associate director, with supervision of Oak Ridge. Menzel was named chairman of the astronomy department and associate director for solar work. Mrs. Gaposchkin retained her title of Phillips Astronomer.