Science 5
Presented on: Saturday, November 3, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Science 5 and we're going to step into a very interesting situation. We're taking two women and today's presentation is women's harmonic science. Both women are now world-famous, both women were discouraged from going into science, or even going into university, and one of them is Barbara McClintock in genetics and the other is Vera C Rubin in astronomy. Both of them are interesting. I want to just start with an insight about Barbara McClintock. She was born in 1902 and was a small woman, about 102 pounds, and was largely raised by a combative mother. The father had died. Problems with money. Not so much that he had died, but he had gone off to war and she wanted to develop herself to go to college, to learn to read science, to do maths, and the family used to take vacations at the end of Long Island, on Long Island Beach and she used to like to go for walks alone and play with the other kids, run with her dog, and then she discovered, on her own, and this is the description from a children's book on Barbara McClintock:
Barbara especially loved her times alone. In the mornings she would get up early and walk their dog, Muddy, by the water. In the evenings when no one could see her, Barbara would go back to the beach by herself. Then she would do a special kind of running that she had made up. She would stand very tall [that's about 5'1"] with her back completely straight and looking ahead, run in a rhythmic way. It was as if she were floating or flying. She could run and run without getting tired. She felt a sense of bliss when she was running like that.
When she was older she read a book about Buddhism and found out that in Tibet some Buddhist monks called Running Llamas run the same way. The Tibetan name for this kind of running is Lun Gum, which means meditation on energy. The lamas or lungumpah, were said to have powers of concentration that they could run very quickly and for very long distances, hundreds of miles at a time. Barbara had discovered an age-old way to mediate, a way to be out of her body and think. This ability to separate from her body would be crucial to her work as a scientist later on.
She worked almost anonymously for 50 years. And towards the end of her life, she was finally recognised with a Nobel prize, a cheque for $190,000 and standing ovation from the Stockholm audience, who appreciated her courage and her tenacity.
The other woman we're taking, and this is what Barbara McClintock in her later years, she lived to be almost 90, looked like, she played a banjo in a jazz band, she could dance, she could sing, but she could take herself out of her body and eventually could extract herself out of her mind, and instead of working with a frame of reference, being taken out of the ritual phase of body, transposing the myth phase of experience, and even coming to be able to take oneself out of the symbols phase of mentality, of mind, the frame of reference completely transformed into a diamond of insight. The Sanskrit word for that diamond is vajra. The technique of cutting that diamond of insight, the cutting is called chedika, and one of the high dharma books is the Vajrachedika, the diamond sutra, which is a discipline of word by word that are matching at the beginning and the end, and as you step up at the beginning a word of phrase at a time, you step down at the end, equally a word or phrase at a time, and exactly in the middle of this honed cone of insight light, not a cone of physical light, not a cone of mental light, but a cone of insight light, is a single phrase that is unique in the Vajrachedika. The phrase is awaken the mind by not letting it rest on anything. Barbara McClintock was able to position herself in such a way that her diamond of insight came from vision and art, the personal art of her doing her work. She was a wisdom corn mother. She worked for 50 years with maize. It has 13 chromosomes. It was this plant that was her friend and she, for all of her 50 years' work, grew her own corn, and worked in corn patches, so that this little elfin high dharma woman patiently beginning with corn, because it was very easy to work with where she went to school finally at Cornell. Her mother refused to let her go to college. Barbara's two older sisters were refused permission. If you go to college it's very difficult for you to be attractive to get nice rich husbands. Barbara was not interested in a husband, she was interested in applying what she had learned and that was to free herself from all of the constraints of being little and being trapped in an argumentative home, and finally a week before admissions at Cornell University she was given permission to go to college, but told that she would have to wait until the next time for admissions. She went anyway.
At 14 she had left the argumentative house and on her own found a job, found a place to live, and only at the end of the summer came back home, so that she could finish high school and she could go on to college, and at 16 she showed up in Ithaca, New York, at Cornell, in the admissions office, the long line, she had no papers. She was in line and someone called out, because she was told 'You have no papers. This is an admissions line, you have to have your forms filled out and acceptance and so forth', but someone called out her name. The official at the table went over and mysteriously came back and said, 'Go ahead and go in. Sign up for your courses.'
She lived a kind of a blessed life where one comes to the verge of nothing further being able to happen in the frame of reference of this world, and the insight lightning of reality conveys instantly the gift of transform.
Vera Rubin is another case of a great woman who faced almost insurmountable odds. She was born in the Philadelphia area and her family lived in the Mount Airy, Northern Philadelphia section, a section of a lot of seminaries and colleges and the arboretum. But in order to get home from visiting relatives in West Philadelphia, they had to drive through Fairmont Park along the Wissahickon Creak, and when you got to Mount Airy Avenue you turned right and went further northeast, and Mount Airy Avenue eventually, in the country outside of Philadelphia, quite a long way, but suburban now, it turns into Eastern Road. But in driving back as a child in the back seat she constantly noticed that the moon kept her company, that through the trees and through the hills of the Whissahickon stream bed and always the moon was there with her, and she would ask, 'Why is the moon always here, alongside? When everything else is changing, it's always here for me.' She was about six or so years old. She said, she was a student, this is from a lecture she gave called Women's Work in 1986 when she was already world famous, 'I was an astronomy student at Vassar College on October 1st 1947, 100 years after the night that Maria Mitchell discovered a commit,' which was October 1st 1847. Maria Mitchell would come to be the first Director of the Physics and Astronomy Department at Vassar. Vassar itself had been set up as a women's college, just I think in the early 1860s, for the first time because women were not allowed to go into science. They were not shunned, they were not allowed to go into science, and one of the few scientific women was Caroline Herschel, who was the sister of William Herschel. They were both from England, but they came over to the United States, and one of the nice little poems that Vera has put into her book that we're using, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, for she was the person who most beautifully had solved the problem of dark matter, which was completely unsuspected and unknown in astronomy for ever, and she's the one that really brought it in. The poem is a contemporary poem to a nice little lecture she was giving on one of the mathematical geniuses of the world, who was also not to study because she was a woman, in Russia. And it is a biography of Sofia Kovalevskaya, and this is a review of that book. And at the end of the review she puts in this poem. The poem is a letter of Caroline Herschel to her brother who is away, and it has this peculiar tone that Vera Rubin exemplifies.
William is away, and I am minding the heavens. I have discovered eight new comets and three nebulae never before seen by man, and I am preparing an Index to Flamsteed's observations. [He was a famous lunar ... there's a crator on the moon called Flamsteed where Surveyor 1 landed in 1967.] Together with a catalogue of 560 stars omitted from the British Catalogue, plus a list of errata in that publication. [...]I have helped him with mirrors and lenses of our new telescope, the largest in existence. [It was about 40' long] Can you imagine the thrill of turning it to some new corner of the heavens to see something never before seen from earth? I actually like that he is busy with the Royal Society and his club, for when I finish my other work I can spend the night sweeping the heavens.
Women's work - cleaning up. Just as Caroline Herschel was able to do this, Maria Mitchell discovered the first comet since those days of Halley and Herschel, she was with her father on the roof of their house learning how to work with a telescope, and during a party while everyone was downstairs, she was alone with the telescope in the night, and she discovered a comet and immediately alerted her father and the guests, who immediately made arrangements with the Harvard Observatory, and immediately she was offered a chance to be involved in the founding of Vassar and be the first director of the Physics and Astronomy department there. And there is a bust of her, and this is what Vera Rubin writes:
Only recently have I realised that no note whatsoever was taken of the sentential of this discovery of the comet found by the first prominent female astronomer in the United States. Perhaps on that day one of my friends or I irreverently tied a bright scarf around the stern-looking bust of Maria Mitchell that sat in niche of the observatory building where she taught for many years, but she deserved more. But what I do remember of 1947 is that I wrote a postcard to Princeton University asking for a catalogue of the Graduate School. Sir Hugh Taylor, the eminent chemist and Dean of the Graduate School took the time to answer by writing back that as Princeton did not accept women in the graduate Physics and Astronomy program, he would not send a catalogue. Princeton did not accept women in graduate Physics until 1971, in graduate Astronomy until 1975 and in graduate Math programs until 1976.
She goes on to say that Benjamin Franklin's kite should be accompanied by Maria Mitchel's comet. For individuals to completely step out of the frame of reference that the world stamps us with and expects us to behave within that picture, and that in order to do science one has to step completely out of the frame of reference, to become free, completely in the diamond of insight, otherwise science does not occur. You can do visions, and have three corners of yourself in the frame of reference and one corner outside in the vision. You can, if you're enormously talented, balance two sides of a frame of reference with two sides of a diamond of insight with art, so that now you have myth and symbol, vision and art, and it's an equilibrium between the integral and the differential, between the frame of reference and the diamond of insight, but it is enormously precarious to go to history, because now you have only one corner, symbols, only one phase in the frame of reference, and three in differential consciousness: vision, art and history. If you don't really enter into the process of history, you slide back and you maintain yourself in myth, mythic experience. Mythic experience can contribute to art but it is not history and it does not engender science. Science is a form that comes out of the complexity of the accrual of resonances of vision, art and history, and science completes that as a diamond of insight, as one of the rarest of all the achievements. And in order to do science, one has to step out of the last remaining phase in the picture, your mentality, your symbolic order, your integral certainty that you know, and give yourself over completely so that history now has completely transformed experience into experiment. And that the basis of the experiment is in the field of vision, not in the rituals, not in the myth, not in the symbols, because if you continue to do it on the basis of symbols you do not do science; you instead pull everything back into a mental assessment and because this is the way the world usually works, it is the economic base of how it works and it is the political overview of how it should work, and so it's called a political economy and the strongest tyranny is to have the watered down pseudo-visions, the manufactured pseudo-art and the bogus history, so called, pulled back into a mental order. Because it is assumed that everything has been done, and this is the way it works. What does not occur is that the cosmos is not real, until you complete the diamond of insight with science.
When that occurs, instantly the vision, art, history, science, as the diamond of insight, instantly scintillates in such a way that it forms a complementarity with the square of attention, with the frame of reference, so that they are all transformed and the transform happens in a very interesting, parallel way to the way in which symbols and vision have a dosado of exchanging centres. The centre of vision being the field of consciousness in its process of remembering, which now goes into the symbolic order as the memory, and from the symbolic order of the mind, the imagination switches places and goes into the field, the differential conscious field of vision, and becomes creative imagining. And that's how art occurs, because the creative imagining surges with remembering and vision now is fertilised so that works of art can come out of that; works of art like spirit persons.
Once the diamond of insight and the frame of reference are brought into complementarity, the cosmos as the infinite harmonic form generates the field of nature spontaneously, and so nature is a joyous gift of the cosmos moving. It is the motion and movement of the cosmos that generates time, space, change, the field out of which iteratively existences can come and be, and that dynamic becomes synched energy forms that now are things, and are unified and are stable in that way. If you put the diamond of insight in the frame of reference in complementarity, you get the mandala. You get the eight point, eight sided mandala, you get the octave, which if laid on its side in its infinite flow, you get the infinity sign. And that infinity sign, 5000 years ago, was understood first by the royal king cobra, which in order to balance its enormous self to rear up, curls its body into a complex of infinity signs, and all the pharaohs of Egypt wore the crown that had the Uraeus, which is the symbol of the royal king cobra raised to be royal. Because it is only on the basis of an infinity complexity that royal, true royal nobility enters into the flow of nature and now the iterative existence that comes out of it is really noble, is what we call high dharma.
These two women were high dharma women, discovering on their own.
Vera Rubin writes, 'Women constitute only a tiny fraction of tenured professors...' This is much later on in her life. In the same chapter, Women's Work, written in 1986, 'Women constitute only a tiny fraction of tenured professors of astronomy. More important, astronomy departments such as Harvard and the Mount Wilson and Las Campanas observatories of my own Carnegie Institution of Washington [DC] have no women on their permanent staffs.' She wasn't in physics of astronomy. She was assigned, in 1965, to the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, and she has been there all these decades. 'I think this is in part because the field of astronomy is still dominated by a male establishment.' It is the big picture, it is the frame of reference, put there since the time of before Babylon.
I think a single member of a department search committee who is reluctant to add a woman to his staff can have an enormous influence for many years. Cases have occurred in which an application list of many has been narrowed down to three: two men and one woman ... in that order. Following no job offers to the top two, who declined the offer, the decision is then made to reopen the competition rather than to award the job to the third. Rarely does this happen when the top three candidates are male. Unfortunately as the job market becomes even tighter it is unlikely the number of women in tenured academic positions will increase. But to end on a happy note [because Vera Rubin is an extraordinary elfin queen child delight, like Barbara McClintock], in spite of these difficulties, women are becoming astronomers, and successful ones. They are asking important, imaginative questions about the universe and getting answers no less often than their male colleagues. Only for the past twenty years or so have they been permitted to apply for telescope time on all telescopes, time being allotted on the basis of the excellence of the proposal. Now about one third of telescope time of the National Facilities [at Kitt Peak in Arizona, outside of Tucson, and Cerro Tololo in Chile] is assigned to women. A cable that was sent to me in 1978 is a testament to that. "Dear Madam," it reads, "you might appreciate hearing that four women astronomers are observing on Cerro Tololo tonight on the four largest telescopes in the world." [And they're named, and Vera says:] I hope the sky was clear that night.
One of the peculiar things about Vera Rubin is that she always had a sense that there was a joyful companionability that the heavens offered as a gift to people like her and especially to women who had an unrecognised different way of helping the resonances become tuning forks. And one of the great interests for her ... she graduated with an MA from Cornell just like Barbara McClintock had gone to Cornell, from Vassar to Cornell, and then she went to Georgetown University in Washington DC, and the other university there, George Washington University, had a major thinker named George Gamov, who liked women and agreed to be her PhD supervisor, and over a series of three years Gamov, who was an enormously charming person, helped guide her and asked a brilliant question. He wanted to know has anyone done any work on collating the movements of galaxies, the ones that we know their positions and ascensions and so forth, and is there any kind of a noticeable pattern in the motion of galaxies in the universe? She was the one who began to formulate this as a charming series of problems and out of this would come the understanding, for the first time, that galaxies cannot hold themselves together if they were just in the normal mechanics, they would fly apart. And not only that but clusters of galaxies would not be able to stay together as clusters of galaxies. It is not possible in the dynamics of physics understood. And the fact that eventually it was understood that there are super-clusters of clusters of galaxies that are enormous, in dimensions where a billion light years is a yardstick, and they hold together. And it was Vera Rubin who allowed her sense of play to keep expanding and brought her diamond of insight into play in such a way that Gamow helped her finally have the courage to stand forth and devote her life to this. Gamow's popular book in the fifties was 1, 2, 3, Infinity and a marvellous book, this is the Mentor edition, similar to the one I read, it first came out in 1953, I remember this in Fred Hoyle's The Nature of the Universe, carrying around science fiction books and my bike, couldn't drive yet. His famous book in 1914 is Mr Tompkins in Wonderland and it is dedicated to Lewis Carroll and Niels Bohr. And he did two other Mr Tompkins, Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom and Mr Tomkins Learns the Facts of Life because he was involved with DNA as well as astronomy and physics, and James Watson's recent book is Genes, Girls and Gamow. I remember when I first met George Gamow in 1960, I was Head Porter at Sequoia National Park, and one sunny afternoon up drove this Red Porsche convertible with a beautiful blond in the passenger seat and a kind of largish jovial trickster in the front seat, Gamow. And in the back were piled these matching beautiful elk-skin suitcases and one of the letters to Vera Rubin by George Gamow, which we'll come back to after the break, shows that Gamow could not spell. He also could not do very simple math, but he was one of these diamond of insight geniuses who awoke, because he tried to escape the Russia of 1930, when Marxist Leninism was becoming Stalinism, he tried to row in a rubber boat across the Black Sea and of course they caught him and brought him back and incarcerated him, and it just enthused him to find a way to get out, and he was finally such a genius in physics, despite the math, he was invited to the 13th Solvay Conference in Brussels, and when he was out he was never put into a cage again. He said, 'I don't go to a lot of awards ceremonies because I don't like curtains of any kind, including iron curtains.'
Let's take a little break.