Cecilia Payne Finds Out What Stars are Made Of
One or twice a year, the story of English-born astrophysicist Cecilia Payne (1900-1979) appears on my Facebook feed. I am enthralle– and enraged–by the story every time. And then I promptly forget her name. A fact that is both frustrating and somewhat embarrassing since this is the kind of story that I firmly believe needs to be known more widely. I hope that by sharing her story with you I can not only spread her story a little further, but anchor it firmly in my brain.
When Cecilia Payne entered Cambridge University in 1919, she knew she wanted to study a science, but did not yet know which one. That changed when she heard a lecture by astronomer Arthur Eddington. Stars were her future.
She quickly realized that she could not have a professional career in astronomy in England. She couldn’t even get a doctorate. In 1923, she came to the United States where she became a graduate fellow at the Harvard College Observatory, which was involved in a long study of the patterns of light emitted by stars, technically known as stellar spectra.* One of the goals of this study was to understand what elements the stars were made of by comparing their spectral lines with those of known chemical elements. Astronomers had already identified heavy elements such as calcium and iron and assumed they were major components of the stars.
Payne applied principles from the new science of quantum physics, which she had studied at Cambridge, to the study of stellar spectra. In her doctoral thesis, the first awarded for work at the Harvard Observatory, she demonstrated that the sun and other stars were composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements—a discovery that overturned previous assumptions. She added a butt-covering caveat to her thesis stating that the abundance of of hydrogen and helium were “almost certainly not real.” She was, after all, a 25-year-old woman in a field in which most women doing scientific work were described as “computers” not scientists.
Like many newly minted PhDs, Payne revised her thesis and published it as a book. Stellar Atmospheres was well received. It was soon accepted that her results were in fact quite real, and that they profoundly changed what we know about the universe. In 1960, astronomer Otto Struve, no slouch himself in the study of stellar spectra and a founder of radio astronomy, referred to her work as “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.”
Payne worked at the Harvard Observatory for many years, doing the work of a faculty member with the lower-paid and less-respected title of “technical assistant” to Harlow Shapley, the Observatory’s director. During this period, she published several important books based on her research. In 1956, she was finally made a full professor—the first woman to hold that title at Harvard—and chair of the Astronomy Department.
In 1976, the American Astronomical Society recognized her work as one of the most creative astronomers of the twentieth century, with the Henry Norris Russel Lectureship, which honors a lifetime of excellence in astronomical research.
*It should be pointed out that a group of 80 women did much of the laboratory work related to this project. Hired as “computers” and often ridiculed as “Pickering’s harem,” they literally mapped the heavens. Among other things, they catalogued which stars could be photographed by attaching a spectroscope to a telescope, which records the range (spectrum) of colors which make up starlight. (This is very simplified and possibly even inaccurate.) Once pictures were taken, they classified the spectra displayed in the photographs. They were paid 25 to 35 cents an hour, less that they would have made at a clerical job, and worked six days a week, seven hours a day.
Dava Sobel’s book about this, The Glass Universe, is now high on my TBR list.
Some of the women of the Harvard Observatory, ca. 1910, with the man who hired them, Edward Pickering.
Annie Jump Cannon, one of the women employed by the observatory, had already created a classification system that sorted the spectra of several hundred thousand stars into seven groups based on differences in the spectral features before Payne arrived.** Her system is still in use today.
**In other words, Payne’s work depended on the scientific work of another unheralded woman. Cannon was finally given the title of Curator of Astronomical Photographs.
The Pragmatic Sanction of 1713–aka as Girls Can Rule, Too
Back in December, when I was trying to make sense of the tangled succession of the Hapsburg dynasty and Holy Roman Empire, I came across a reference to the Pragmatic Sanction, issued by Emperor Charles VI in 1713. It caught my attention for reasons that will become clear to you in just a moment.
Charles VI, ca 1720/1730
In European political history, the term “pragmatic sanction” refers to a princely decree that deals in a pragmatic way with a situation that cannot be solved by applying the usual rules. The term “the Pragmatic Sanction,” with capital letters and no qualifiers, always refers to the decree issued on April 19, 1713 by the Emperor Charles VI, head of the Hapsburg house, ruler of Austria and all its possessions, and Holy Roman Emperor. The purpose of the edict was to ensure that one of his daughters could inherit the Hapsburg lands, undivided.
Pragmatic is the key word. Charles had no interest in expanding women’s rights.* His only concern was protecting the Austrian succession. At the time that he issued the edict, Charles was the only surviving male member of the House of Hapsburg. Salic law, which previously controlled the Hapsburg succession, precluded inheritance through the female line.** The failure of the male line could lead to a succession dispute and the and the potential dismemberment of the Austrian empire. (The title of Holy Roman Emperor was not part of the discussion because it was an elected office that did not automatically go with the Hapsburg heir.)
The Hapsburgs had already made an attempt to circumvent Salic law during the rule of Charles’ father, Emperor Leopold (1640-1705). In 1703, neither Charles nor his older brother Joseph had sons. The family made an agreement regarding the succession that allowed the throne to pass through the female line if all male lines had become extinct.*** In practical terms, this meant that if Joseph, who had two daughters at the time, died without sons he would be succeeded by Charles. If Charles, in turn, died without a son, Joseph’s oldest surviving daughter would become the ruler of Hapsburg Austria.
Joseph succeeded his father in 1705. Charles succeeded Joseph in 1711, with his niece, Maria Josepha, as his presumptive heir. Two years later, Charles announced the Pragmatic Sanction, which privileged his own daughters over those of Joseph.****
At the time it was an entirely theoretical amendment because Charles and his wife, Elsbeth Christina of Brunswick-Wolfenbütel, had no children. That soon changed. In 1716, the couple had a son, who died a few months later. Three daughters followed: Maria Theresa, in 1717, Maria Anna in 1718, and Maria Amalia in 1724.
Maria Theresa, ca 1730 –not yet the empress
In 1740, Charles VI was succeeded by his daughter, Maria Theresa, who was then 23. Despite the edict, and the carefully negotiated agreements to it, Charles Albert of Bavaria and Frederick the Great of Prussia immediately contested her succession. The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa part of her land, but not her throne. She ruled for forty years until her death in 1780. Just to keep things tidy, her husband Francis I was elected Holy Roman Emperor.
***
A couple of personal tidbits about the Empress Maria Theresa, who was possibly the most powerful of the Hapsburg rulers of Austria:
- She married for love, not for political power. Her husband, Francis Stephen, was a prince of Lorraine in France—a minor principality by any standard and certainly less powerful than the Hapsburg Empire. Like England’s Queen Victoria, she wore mourning for the rest of her life after his death in 1765.
- She was pregnant at her coronation. She would go on to have sixteen children, the best known of which was the future queen of France, Marie Antoinette.
I have no doubt that we’ll be coming back to her in the future. She is too important and I know so little about her.
*Though it is worth pointing out that the Hapsburgs had already embraced the concept of female rulers on a smaller scale. They regularly appointed unmarried women of their royal house as regents over provinces in their widespread empire. Charles VI appointed his sister, the Archduchess Maria Elisabeth, as regent over the Austrian Netherlands in 1724, a position she held until her death in 1741. (It does make me wonder why Leopold’s original end-run on Salic Law did not name Maria Elisabeth as Charles’s successor ahead of her nieces.)
**Just so you don’t have to look it up: the Salic Law was a medieval law code which was originally issued by Clovis, the first Frankish king, in the fifth century and became the foundation for law in French and German principalities well into the Napoleonic period. One of its most influential clauses, which stated that daughters could not inherit land, was used to prevent women, or anyone descended from a previous ruler through a woman, from succeeding to the throne. After all, if Maria couldn’t inherit her father’s farm, why should the Archduchess Maria be able to inherit her father’s kingdom?
***Extinct appears to be the technical legal term for this, but it always makes me think of dinosaurs.
****Just because Charles announced the change didn’t mean it happened with no political wrangling. Even an emperor couldn’t enforce an edict about his succession without other people on board. In the case of the Pragmatic Sanction, Charles VI had to convince 1) his nieces and their future spouses 2) the various diets and parliaments of the affected Hapsburg lands and 3) the great powers of Europe. It was 1725 before all the affected parties agreed.
Bronislava Nijinska, of the Ballets Russes and Other Dance Companies
I became fascinated by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in my senior year in college thanks to a class run by the music department.* I had already been familiar with some of the music, and a few of the names. That class introduced me to the company as a convergence of modernisms in the hands of great artists, including designer Léon Bakst, poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso (!), composers Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky, dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and Diaghilev himself, who elevated the role of impresario to an art form in itself. One artist was left out of the line-up: Nijinski’s sister, Bronislava Nijinska, who was also a dancer with the company and an important choreographer in her own right.
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- Nijinska in Petrouchka
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- Nijinska as “the Humming bird Princess”
It was another decade or more before I heard the name Bronislava Nijinska. Nijinska studied ballet in Saint Petersburg alongside her brother. Like her brother, she was a dancer in the Ballet Russe and she created a number of roles in ballets for the company. She choreographed several important works for the Ballets Russes, including Le Spectre de la Rose (featuring her brother), Les Noces (“The Wedding”) and Les Biches (literally “The Does”, also known as “The House Party”). (All of which we had studied in that college course, with no mention of the choreographer, though we did discuss Nijinski’s role in Le Spectre de la Rose.)
Nijinska in rehearsal, ca 1933
In 1925, she formed her own company, Théâtre Chorégraphic. She also created more than 60 ballets, not only for her own company but on commission for a number of other prominent dance companies of the period, including Anna Pavlova’s company. In 1938, she moved to Los Angeles, where she opened a school. She continued to work as a guest choreographer almost until her death in 1972.
Nijinska in rehearsal, 1968
Her works were experimental in form, and occasionally shocking in theme. (Les Biches explicitly explores the sexual mores of the 1920s.) She used, and expanded, modernist elements in dance, such as rhythmic complexity, innovative movements outside the vocabulary of classical ballet, and increasing abstraction.
She was never forgotten. But Nijinska’s long, productive career has been consistently overshadowed by that of her brother, who succumbed to mental illness at 29 and created only four ballets, including the astonishing The Rite of Spring, in which Nijinska danced the central role. In part, she was relegated to the shadows because only three of her works survive in full—a result of the fact the companies she worked for did not last so her works fell out of the dance repertory. The only work that has consistently been revived is Les Noces, despite his large cast (forty dancers) challenging style, and complex Stravinsky score.
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- Los Noces, in rehearsal, 1923
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- Los Noces, in revival, 1989
But perhaps the style of her work has also played a role. She used the female body in unconventional ways, both as a choreographer and as a dancer. Strong unconventional female voice consigned in the corners of history–who would have thought?
* Ballet caught my imagination long before I became a history bugg. One of my earliest memories is seeing a a dancer on television and knowing that was something I wanted to do.* I started taking lessons as soon as I was old enough, and because I was a budding history bugg I also started reading about the great dancers of the past. My interest in dance history continued long after an in-class accident ended my ability to continue with ballet.