Customer Reviews

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections

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I saw the previous review and had to write a real review for those interested in this book. The book has effectively four introductory essays by Virginia Trimble, Jesse Greenstein, Peggy Kidwell, and Katherine Haramundanis. Each of these essays are well worth reading on their own and they place Cecilia Payne, later Payne-Gaposchkin by marriage, in context. I will refer to her as "CPG" from now on.

The part of the book written by CPG, "The Dyer's Hand" is a memoir of growing up in England, being a woman scientist at Cambridge, and moving to Harvard to become an astronomer when being a woman still made the directors of the Harvard Observatory immediate think of placing you in the pool of woman calculators -- underpaid and not considered on the scientific level of the men. CPG helped change that. She applied the then new ideas of Saha to the analysis of the sun's spectrum and realized that the sun was made up of a huge amount of hydrogen compared to helium and the other elements. Up to the publication of her thesis in the 1920's no one really understood that stars were mostly hydrogen and helium. Earlier observations had been incorrectly interpreted as showing that the sun had the same abundances of the elements as the earth. CPG helped force astronomers to revise their stellar models -- the first step to truly understanding the stars and the composition of the universe.

Her working life spanned roughly 50 years and she devoted her life to astronomy even though it was not until the 1950's that Harvard woke up and gave her a job title other than "assistant" to the director of the observatory. She helped create our understanding of how stars work. She was a gifted writer. This is an amazing life and the autobiography is necessary reading.