Grasping Mysteries Page 12

  Vera looks at the marble bust of a serious woman

  with her hair worn in ringlets.

  Scientists should know who came before them.

  It’s a hundred years since Maria Mitchell’s comet discovery.

  and there’s no notice even here,

  where she taught for twenty years.

  Maud Makemson picks up an old celestial globe

  from a table covered with star charts and stones.

  This was going to be thrown away,

  but I thought you might want it.

  The globe, its surface wrinkled with age,

  feels heavy in Vera’s hands. She’s uncertain

  what this history has to do with her, but grateful

  for her professor’s vision of her as an astronomer.

  She thinks she loves Bob but needs to tell him

  she’s not ready to stop asking questions about galaxies.

  On her way out of the observatory, Vera winds her scarf

  around the marble bust of Maria Mitchell.

  Maybe Professor Makemson is right.

  Women pioneers in science and math deserve more respect.

  Back Roads

  One weekend walking past woods, Vera tells Bob,

  Princeton won’t take women, but I applied to Harvard

  for graduate school. They have good telescopes.

  He nods. You should go to the best university.

  If Bob hadn’t wanted her to go to wherever

  she chose, she might not have said that she could learn

  anywhere, might not have applied to Cornell.

  His proposal isn’t like a math problem

  for which she has to consider a series of what-ifs.

  Vera doesn’t hesitate before saying yes.

  The Wedding

  After the crack of purposely shattered glass,

  cries of Mazel tov, and wishes for many children,

  Vera and Bob Rubin hold hands as darkness comes,

  vow to keep room for both science and religion.

  Stars within galaxies change, and galaxies

  within clusters change, and clusters of galaxies

  change within the universe. The sky is one wide road.

  The Motion of Galaxies

  ITHACA, NEW YORK, 1949

  The head of the astronomy department greets Vera, saying,

  There aren’t many jobs in astronomy. Don’t expect to get one.

  She’d hoped for a warmer welcome, but other professors

  support her studies of movements in 109 spiral galaxies.

  She charts star speeds and directions,

  measures how each shrinks or grows,

  writes equations that sprawl and tangle

  into brief certainty, then back to wonder:

  Does the universe rotate

  the way planets move around the sun?

  While she works toward a master’s degree in astronomy,

  Bob continues studying for a PhD in physics.

  In the evenings, at the kitchen table,

  on the sofa, or in bed, they talk

  about raccoons prowling the neighborhood,

  the age of the milk in the refrigerator, and the cosmos.

  As Vera cleans her glasses, spreads papers

  under a green-shaded lamp, Bob teases her about the way

  she tilts her head when a problem confounds her.

  After just over a year of marriage, Vera’s skin feels tender.

  She’s tired. She counts back weeks,

  then the months ahead, eager to complete her paper

  about the rotation of galaxies before giving birth.

  Hers

  The head of the astronomy department reads Vera’s thesis,

  says, Some of your research looks sloppy, but

  it might be discussed at the American Astronomical Society.

  Professor Shaw glances at Vera’s arcing belly.

  I’ll read it and use my name, since I’m a member.

  If you think people will be interested, I’ll go,

  Vera says. And read my paper under my own name.

  What One Young Mother Finds

  Vera and Bob don’t own a car, but her parents offer

  to drive them from Ithaca with their three-week-old boy,

  who’s gorgeous and complicated as a galaxy.

  Vera loves the way the baby seems knowable

  in the moment but holds secrets inside.

  Thick snow blows over the sedan her father

  sometimes pulls over to scrape ice off the windshield.

  The heater clatters and clangs. As the car skids,

  Vera tightens her grip on the baby on her lap.

  Your father escaped from anti-Semitic thugs in Poland,

  Mom says. He can get his family through a New York blizzard.

  They arrive safely at the conference center.

  Her mother minds the baby while Vera speaks

  from the podium. After some applause, she hurries out

  to see how her boy is faring.

  The next day her speech is reported

  on the front page of the Washington Post:

  YOUNG MOTHER FINDS CENTER OF CREATION.

  The Promise

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Vera and Bob move to the city where she grew up.

  Bob takes a job doing math and physics research.

  By the time their firstborn wobbles while learning

  to walk, they expect another baby.

  Vera brings David to play with her old friend Jane’s

  two small children. After they help them stack blocks,

  arranging a home for a toy bear

  and a hangar for tiny airplanes,

  Vera quietly asks Jane, Do you ever get bored?

  Who could ask for more than healthy children?

  Seeing Vera’s forehead wrinkle, she adds,

  I didn’t like college as much as you did.

  Math was a lot harder than what we did in high school.

  I got lost in some of my first classes, Vera says.

  But you weren’t there to say, “Keep going.” No one was.

  More than one teacher said,

  “Didn’t you learn this in high school?”

  making it sound like I’d never catch up.

  Ow! A child trips over a toy truck, wails.

  Back home, Vera settles David for a nap,

  makes tea, shoves aside clean but unfolded diapers,

  a windup duck, a toy tractor. She picks up

  the Astrophysical Journal and flips through pages

  to an article about the structure of galaxies.

  Her face is tear-blotched when Bob comes home.

  He asks, Didn’t you have a good time with Jane?

  Yes. No. Bob, I’m not an astronomer. I need a PhD.

  He lifts her dark hair, kisses her neck, says, I took the job

  in Washington knowing there are universities nearby.

  The Window

  After the Rubins’ second child is born,

  Vera’s mother cares for David and baby Judy

  while Vera takes classes at Georgetown University.

  She earns a PhD, then teaches physics and math part-time.

  One night she walks past the kitchen

  where Bob washes dishes

  and the room they’ve made ready for the third baby.

  She sits on her daughter’s bed and reads her a book

  about a lost puppy. After saying, The end,

  she asks, Want me to open the window?

  Yes, Mommy. Can I touch the stars?

  Nobody can, but you can reach. Vera kisses Judy

  and her stuffed rabbit. Then, at the kitchen table,

  she moves aside books and cereal boxes with mazes

  on the back, tends to calculations until two in the morning.

  The work is hard, but it would be harder to set it aside.

  Invisible Light

  Ten years after Ve
ra gave birth to her first child,

  she has her fourth and last baby. The children sleep,

  wake, and wonder in a big old house with floors covered

  with broken crayons, balsa-wood airplanes,

  magnets, experiments, and Tinkertoy skyscrapers.

  After David, Judy, Karl, and Allan are all in school,

  Vera is hired to do research

  at the Carnegie Institution of Science,

  which has new equipment that widens horizons.

  Kent Ford built a spectroscope that splits visible light

  into a spectrum of colors.

  It can show evidence of light people can’t see,

  such as radio or gamma waves, or waves that can warm food,

  let doctors see through muscle to bones, or tan skin.

  Vera and Kent first study newly discovered quasars,

  which are dazzling, wildly energetic, and enormous.

  They might contain black holes, also powerful and huge.

  Quasars, which are brighter and farther away

  than most galaxies,

  are a popular subject among astronomers, who usually spend

  more time with math and data than observing.

  Since Vera’s children need her at home,

  she’ll spend even less time at telescopes than most.

  She looks for a focus that scientists will care about,

  but not so much they’re likely to compete,

  or ask a lot of questions before she’s certain of answers,

  and make her feel like she should rush.

  Vera decides to focus on her old interest:

  the way stars move in spiral galaxies,

  which bulge in the middle with arcing arms.

  Her mother takes care of the children when she and Kent

  travel to use big telescopes on mountains in Arizona.

  Far-off galaxies are easier to see

  where there’s less atmosphere and light pollution.

  Vera’s feet and hands are often cold in observatories,

  which aren’t heated, since telescopes are kept

  at the outdoor temperature so they don’t distort.

  She points the telescope toward stars in Andromeda, M31,

  the galaxy nearest to the Milky Way, the galaxy we live in.

  Kent attaches the spectrograph, which bends light

  the way a prism or a drop of water splinters

  into a purple, blue, yellow, and red spectrum.

  They take photographs of trails

  that sketch shine long after a star’s life is over.

  Small measurements may lead to big discoveries.

  Patterns

  Back home, Vera slides photographic plates

  under a microscope. She works on calculations

  from the thousands of thin lines on the photographs

  that stand for a galaxy.

  Curving and flat lines show what stars are made of, their size,

  temperature, and how far and fast they move.

  Starlight moving closer to earth has shorter wavelengths,

  shifts to the blue end of the spectrum.

  Light that moves away shifts to the red end.

  Like a telescope, math pulls in what’s grand,

  pares in search of what’s crucial. She’s meticulous.

  Minuscule errors matter the way a slight change

  in the angle of a wrist can widely shift the arc of a ball struck

  by a bat or hockey stick, or tossed into a hoop.

  She measures spaces between the strips of colors

  to calculate the speed of stars

  and the distances between them,

  looks for patterns between a star’s speed

  and its distance from the galaxy’s center.

  Each answer stirs new questions.

  Summer

  The family camps out west, where the children

  scramble up boulders, shout, play king of the mountain.

  At night, stars show off above the soft flicker of campfires.

  Vera wants her children to know science is beautiful

  both on paper and seen in the sky.

  Much can be found in the places where few look.

  Inheritance

  Come inside, Allan, Vera calls to her youngest child,

  who crouches by the steps, breaking open

  chunks of granite and quartz. She says, It’s getting dark.

  I don’t want you to hammer off a finger.

  She walks through the living room, where David

  practices the violin. Karl builds a model of a triceratops.

  A math book is wedged between sofa cushions. She pulls

  it out and flips through. Pictures of pale, freckled boys

  with clipped hair are shown measuring boards

  and counting nails for a tree house

  or mapping ways to outer space.

  Girls wearing crisp dresses work on cookie recipes.

  Vera heads to Judy’s bedroom after hearing her scream.

  She finds her daughter hunched over her desk.

  Judy pushed aside poems she’s written

  to make room for an open book under the green lamp.

  I hate math. I can’t do this!

  Vera looks over her equation. You meant to get it right.

  I don’t even care. Math isn’t good for anything.

  You use math when you write poems or sew.

  The sewing machine is broken. Mom, go away.

  Vera leaves the door open. She pushes aside

  books on the dining room table, copies

  of the Astrophysical Journal she should sort, saving

  those she hasn’t read yet or that have articles she wrote.

  She hears Bob and Judy by the broken sewing machine

  they’re taking apart on the kitchen table. She taught

  Judy how to lay down a tissue pattern, measure,

  with her mouth full of pins. Bob shows her

  how gears mesh together, what moves the needle

  up and down, what catches and nudges along the cloth.

  Paper Skirt

  CALTECH, CALIFORNIA, 1965

  Vera applies to use the world’s biggest telescope.

  Palomar Observatory stands on a southern California

  mountain whose peak reaches over fog, but not so high

  that stars are likely to be hidden in clouds.

  Desert, woods, and fern meadows surround the white dome.

  Vera receives a typed letter saying: Due to limited facilities,

  it’s not possible for the observatory to accept applications

  from women. Penciled in before not possible is usually.

  Vera takes that penciled-in word to mean Yes.

  She flies across the country, finds the observatory bathroom

  has a picture of a man’s silhouette on the door.

  She cuts out a paper skirt, tapes it on top.

  Now there’s a ladies’ room. That wasn’t so hard.

  Belief

  Vera spends more time searching than with certainty.

  Stuck on a problem, she plays a few songs on the piano,

  takes a walk, comes back and finds an equation

  no longer stubborn, but ready to reveal secrets.

  Still trying to understand how galaxies orbit,

  Vera sketches. Moving her wrist and gaze together,

  she turns what she sees into lines.

  She knows that planets closest to the sun move faster

  than planets farther from the sun and its gravitational force.

  She’s been taught that stars within galaxies also move fastest

  near the center, dense and brilliant with stars,

  and more slowly on the outskirts.

  But flat spectral lines suggest the outermost stars

  move at the same speed as stars close to the core.

  The rotation curve is flat, she tells Kent,

  This means
the stars on the outer curve

  don’t slow down because of their distance from the core,

  the way most astronomers have long assumed.

  Doubt paves a path to discovery.

  Could something be wrong with her eyes or mind?

  Was she daydreaming, distracted, or tired?

  She goes back over stacked pages of math,

  looking for a mistake deep in

  that might have set everything else astray.

  Not one digit is off. She checks the spectroscope

  and cameras for flaws in the mechanics

  and lenses but finds nothing wrong. She breathes

  deeply into the courage to believe what she sees.

  Whether on the outskirts of the Andromeda galaxy

  or near the center, stars move at the same speed.

  The Backyard

  JULY 20, 1969

  The Rubins’ living room smells of butter and popcorn.

  The black-and-white television flickers with smoky images

  of three astronauts arriving near the moon.

  An electric fan hums in the heat. Models of rockets

  built by their youngest son are propped among geology books

  their oldest brought back from college and college catalogs

  ordered by Judy, who will apply for admission in the fall.

  As the television shows the lunar module land on the moon,

  the whole family cheers and hugs. Then Karl dozes off.

  Bob tells eight-year-old Allan, It’s going to be a while

  before the astronauts step out onto the moon.

  You might want to catch some sleep.

  Allan shakes his head.

  His oldest brother stacks, then tips over

  books to show how continents shifted. David says,

  It happened long ago, before people were around.

  Then how do you know it happened? Allan asks.

  There’s a long valley along undersea mountains

  where the break might have been. Now almost all

  scientists believe in continental shift, but hardly any

  did when Mom and Dad were your age.

  Vera talks about the thousands of workers

  who helped get three people into space.

  Allan slides off the sofa, says, I want to go outside.

  I know we can’t see the astronauts up there,

  but I want to look.