Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: LII with an accent on ILE

 

"There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas."

When Cecilia Payne was five years old, she saw a meteor and was immediately seized, as she wrote at the end of her life, with "panic at the thought that everything might be found out before I was old enough to begin." The universe, to her, was a logical structure waiting to be understood, and she felt terror of arriving too late to participate in the understanding. She spent the next seventy-four years working to ensure she arrived in time.

The LII foundation appears most clearly in her characteristic method. Her 1925 doctoral thesis — described by astronomer Otto Struve as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy" —  was the application of Saha's ionization equations to the Harvard Observatory's archive of stellar spectra: a careful, systematic, logically rigorous derivation. The novel conclusion that stars were primarily composed of hydrogen and helium followed from a mix of intuitive insight and applying a proper framework to correct data. LII's Ti-Ne mix produces exactly such results.

Payne submitted her thesis claiming the sun was primarily hydrogen at twenty-five, as a woman with no institutional standing, against the consensus of the entire field including Henry Norris Russell, the most powerful astronomer in America and her external examiner, who wrote to her that her conclusion about hydrogen abundance was "clearly impossible." She softened the conclusion in the published version, qualified it heavily, retreated from the position she had derived correctly through months of rigorous work. She later identified this with characteristic precision as a failure of nerve: "I was to blame for not having pressed my point. I had given in to Authority when I believed I was right. If you are sure of your facts, you should defend your position." It took four years and Russell's own independent confirmation before the astronomical community accepted what she had proven in 1925.

The same Ti-drive toward correct classification organized her life's work after the thesis. Between 1938 and 1975, she and her husband Sergei made over three million brightness observations of variable stars, which makes sense as the LII's characteristic drive toward the complete, correctly organized system. She had loved taxonomy as a child: when given a school prize and asked to choose a book, she requested a textbook on fungi. The Ti-characteristic love of classification persisted from fungi through stellar spectra to variable star brightness curves across forty years.

The relationship with her mentor Harlow Shapley is colored by the ILE accent. She described looking on him "in those early days with uncritical adoration" This accent generated this kind of enthusiastic idealization of inspiring figures; Shapley's expansive vision of the Harvard Observatory as the center of astrophysics genuinely excited her, and she worked marathon sessions fueled by coffee and cigarettes to contribute to it. She even wrote to him: "You have turned me from a schoolgirl into a scientist, from a child into a woman".

BBC's Science Focus writes about her, showing her Alpha NT values:

"Shy as a young girl, and later intensely focused on her work, she was never a self-promoter. What drove her throughout her life was the simple thrill of discovery. And so, when young people, especially young women, would ask for advice, she had a ready answer. They are a scientist’s words to other scientists, but they speak to us all:

Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money. There are easier and better ways to reach them. Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you;for nothing else is probably what you will receive. Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other".