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.
Let's come back. We're looking at two women who have been extraordinary in science and there are many who could be tendered and I'd like to allude to one more who is still alive; she's in her nineties, born in 1915, her name is Mildred Shapley Matthews, and she is one of the great editors of books like this, Protostars and Planets II, published by the University of Arizona Press and they have a whole series of maybe 40 volumes and she has been one of the champions, along with the founder Tom Gehrels, of the series, to put this together. Her father is Harlow Shapley, one of the world's most famous and greatest astronomers. When he was first at Harvard, and he was there for most of his life, as early as 1926 he put together a series of radio broadcasts. Radio was quite new in the twenties. And this book was published in 1926, The Universe of Stars , Radio Talks from the Harvard Observatory. Harlow Shapley was famous for wanting to bring the fruits of science into the homes of people, into the lives of people, to be able to understand that this is not a luxury, it is an essential dimension to our conscious humanity, and that since it has been achieved on such a refined, high level, to not have this in our lives is to recoil from reality and to almost inadvertently sink back regressively into something barbaric, extremely outspoken about this, all his life, and the fact that he raised his daughter Mildred to be one of the world's not only great astronomers but of making public the entire complex range of science, in this case astronomy, and biochemistry, astrophysics and so forth, his beautiful book, Ad Astra per Aspera, 'through rugged ways to the stars', that our sense of not humanity so much, but our sense of reality is that we belong actually in the cosmos. It is the full dimension of our home. In that the medium between ourselves and the cosmos in its enormity, the median the galaxy. That most human beings have been born on this planet and lived and died from time immemorial, and thought of the heavens as grand, all of the starts that we can see from this planet are in one arm of the Milky Way, and before electrification of the world and industrialisation, it was possible to see the Milky Way, to see this mysterious expanse, which in early China was the dragon of actuality, which to the ancient proto-Greeks was the great serpent that surrounds the oceans of the world, was the enormity of the flow of heaven's mystery. The first break in this was a startling revelation from a Dane named Tycho Brahe, who had set for himself the task of making accurate measurements of the movements of stars in the rotation through the night sky, and of the wandering stars, the planets, and in 1572 he noticed that night for the first time, looking at the big W of five stars in the constellation Cassiopeia, that there was a bright new star, enormously bright, and it is the first time that human eyes had beheld a supernova first-hand. It shone for two years. A supernova is a star that has exploded, generally called a nova but there are super orders of novae called supernovae and they are so bright, the light of a supernova in a distant galaxy will outshine the rest of that galaxy. It is in that explosive compression that all of the elements are born that are beyond iron on the periodic chart. Stars can, through their tremendous energy and size, bring hydrogen and helium with the slightest trace of lithium and bring it up the periodic table as far as iron, and that is as far as stars can do it in terms of their natural cycle. It is only when they exceed that natural cycle explosively that a super-compression happens, a super-complexity is available and the elements beyond iron to uranium are made. And it is only with a third, almost supra-magical quality that elements beyond uranium, now we're at 118, which means there are 26 elements made beyond Uranium and the periodic table is growing and filling out, and the structure is due to the fact that our conscious ecology has reached the science to being able to add magically and mystically to the range of nature on this planet, and obviously if we can do it, it has been done time after time, countless from time immemorial. The making of a supernova was so extraordinary in 1572 that it began to elicit and work upon the visionary creative imagination and one of the great mathematicians of the day, John Dee, before he became an astrologer and to some an occult genius outlaw, figured out the mathematics of navigation on a global scale for the first time, and in 1575, some three years after the supernova, published the first book on how to use navigation by celestial coordinates to travel freely on the entire globe. And this book was dedicated to the coronation of Elizabeth the First, Queen Elizabeth, and was presented to her at the same time that Thomas Tallis presented Spem in Alium, the forty-part motet, so that her coronation was the beginning of the first global empire. Rule Britannia, because Britannia rules the waves, Britains never will be slaves. They are free to go wherever they wish to go. We live in an age where the globalism is now a regressive empire tyranny, to limit ourselves to the globe and to go no further than just orbital, adjuncts to globalisation, is an imprisonment of the spirit, is a desiccation of our energy and [elan 11:04], and whether anyone would like to or not, we do not need their permission to go. The explosiveness is here, and the supernova has begun. We are going to consciously create further circumstances of dimension from any that have obtained before. As of now.
In 1926, when he published this series of the radio broadcast, the series was broadcasting station WEEI of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston. What's interesting is that in the series of radio broadcasts there are two women, Annie J Cannon and Cecilia H Payne. Annie's Classifying the Stars broadcast and New Stars and Variables broadcast, and Cecilia's The Stuff Stars are Made Of broadcast, and her Stellar Evolution broadcast. And all of this was published in 1926. It was about the time, in 1926, that here in Los Angeles and Mount Wilson that Edwin Hubble was understanding galaxies for the first time. The first textbook, the Harvard Books on Astronomy on Galaxies, by Harlow Shapley, in 1930. It was actually a first edition here November 19423, excuse me. The 1930 publication is on Star Clusters from the Harvard Observatory Monographs Number 2. Shapley's book on Galaxies was the textbook for decades and decades, and finally the revision of it had to be undertaken because the discoveries had simply dwarfed what was known in 1943. In 1972 the revision by P W Hodge was published by Harvard University. And after this, after 1972, it was apparent that the proliferation and speed of publication was going to outdistance the ability for there to be a textbook, and so the textbook of astronomy now is a series, growing, of about 40 volumes like this from the University of Arizona Press, edited by Mildred Shapley Matthews, still alive and still working.
Vera Rubin came onto the scene, born in 1928, and going into astronomy by the late forties was on the vanguard of this enormous tidal wave of capacity, of instruments and of discovery, and in her book Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, she has, 1995, lecture, it was the Russell Prize Lecture, delivered at Arizona in Tucson, and it's called A Century of Galaxy Spectroscopy. One of the things she says in here, and it's blunt:
One hundred years ago no one knew what a galaxy was [That's 1895], but 96 years ago Schemer reported the first successful spectrum of a galaxy in a two-page paper in Astrophysical Journal, "On the Spectrum of the Great Nebula in Andromeda".
The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the largest, it's a companion to our Milky Way. These two galaxies control the local group of galaxies, all of them smaller than these two giants. It extends, Andromeda is about 2.2 million light years away and it is designated from the old French Messier catalogue as M31, and Vera Rubin spent most of her life using M31, using Andromeda, as a touchstone for a lot of her work, though her work increasingly went to the motions of galaxies, the motions of groups of galaxies, the motions of groups in the cluster of galaxies, and into super-clusters of galaxies, and because of George Gamow's lead, what then is the motion of the universe, what kind of swirl is real in everything that is here? And in 1988 she led, as the chairperson, a world-level conference, Large-scale Motions in the Universe. The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, by Steven Hawking and his friend Ellis, published by Cambridge University Press, and it was published in 1973, so this comes 15 years later and is not the large scale structure, it is the large scale motion. Oddly enough this whole conference, though the book is published by Princeton University Press, who didn't take women as graduate students until the 1970s, did not admit women into graduate math until 1976, yet has tried to catch up and by 1988 published this. This book is extraordinary because it is a conference held in the Vatican, in Vatican City State. And the co-editor is G V Coyne, S.J. (society of Jesus). It is extraordinary that Vera Rubin, the C stands for Cooper, her maiden name was Cooper, Vera Cooper. Vera Cooper, born in the section outside of Philadelphia, lived all of her life in Washington DC, had the courage to go to Vatican City State and hold a conference on Large Scale Motions in the Universe, and bring with her several of the world's greatest experts at the time, P J Peebles who's at Princeton, and the son of John Bahcall, who did a lot of major things, and several women. Martha Haynes was there and several other women and we'll talk about them next week in more detail. What is interesting here is that the universe as a structure was always the question asked until recently, and it is Vera Rubin who provided the pivotal diamond of insight over decades of work, she published hundreds of short, technical papers, she's the one that constantly did what Galileo did and was 400 years ago condemned by Vatican city for almost heresy and kept house prisoner for the rest of his life, in a villa where they kept track of him, he could not publish nor speak nor write to anyone, and yet in 1988 they held a conference that would have blown out any scale of heresy ever conceived by the Roman Catholic church. What she has been doing is to constantly expand the way in which the recalibration of reality is making its way and not by fighting or arguing but by transforming and even deeper than a revolution, recalibrating what is real and must be addressed, and cannot be addressed in simple answers to questions that are limited, but there are questions now that reverberate and one patiently has to follow the reverbable resonance that expands and one has to expand one's, not just consciousness but one's entire diamond of insight, in order to encompass. And this is what has been happening. She has in this chapter a colour plate illustration, a beautiful surrealist painting by Remedios Varos, who is a favourite of my friend Will Alexander, one of the great cosmic poets of our time. The plate is entitled Phenomena of Weightlessness, 1963. 'An astronomy professor stands with feet placed in two different centres of gravity, while an earth-moon model leaves the horizontal plain and aligns with the inclined sense. This artist's image is a fine illustration for multi-spin galaxies.' Galaxies with multiple orbital planes or counter-rotating components, that there are very complex galaxies that do not just whirl, they whirl in completely opposite complex ecologies at the same time with tilts and reverberations so that they are a kaleidoscope of trillions of stars as a unit. What holds that together? That dark matter does not have a preference for an order of a kind. You do not have to rotate and spin in one order, in order to have this. It can be multi-multi-spin. And not only will that irreverent, irregular galaxy hold as a galaxy; it will participate in a cluster of galaxies, each one has its own individuality. We talked two weeks ago about Niels Bohr understanding that every single atom is unique. They are only alike in a probability range, they are all individual. Every atom of every element, every particle of every atom of every element is custom emerged, and doesn't just get made, but they're iterative, they're constantly coming in and out of existence, only so fast that they appear to be stable. There is not only know there there; there is no there anywhere. Our learning is a necessary reality to recalibrate not to a truth of structure, not a truism about a structure, but to mature ourselves from zero to infinity with comfort and ease, to be at home. One of the beautiful things about Vera Rubin is her ability to bring beauty into the life of the vanguard of cosmology.
'Scientists too seldom stress the enormity of our ignorance. Virtually everything we know about galaxies, we have learned in the last 100 years. [...] But what are the questions for future astronomers? What questions will astronomers be asking of the universe 100 years from now? A thousand years from now? Questions easy to list are the unsolved questions of the present. What is the age of the universe? What is the here-and-now rate of expansion of the universe? How much mass [... how much] dark matter? [...]
Then there are the questions we barely know enough to ask. A feeble list: Are there other universes? Will we ever communicate with them? How will our concept of the universe alter when gravitons are detected? As we peer into the universe, we are peering into our past, but our "eyes" are weak and we have not yet seen to great distances. No one promised that we would live in the era that would unravel the mysteries of the cosmos. The edge of the universe is [very much] beyond our grasp. Like Columbus, perhaps, like the Vikings, we have peered into a new world and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still more mysteries of the universe remain hidden. Their discovery awaits the adventurous scientists of the future. I like it this way.
One famous Dutch astronomer would not go to Vatican City State to the conference, but agreed to send a message from Leiden, Holland. The great J H Oort. Oort is the discovery that beyond the star system limits of even the Kuiper Belt, almost a half light-year out, is the Oort Cloud. Trillions and trillions of commit-sized parts of what is a sphere around our whole pancake of the star system, like a dark matter spherical halo around the galaxy, only there.
This is his message, February 25 1988.
If it is true that putting the right questions is already half the solution of a problem, the organising committee of the Vatican Study Week on Large Scale Motions in the Universe may have gone a long way towards the realisation of the aim of the symposium prior to the meeting itself. Those who have read the questions but, like myself, were not part of the small group attending, will be anxious to learn the answers which are described in the present book.
There were about thirty participants. There are maybe 30,000 astronomers for whom he is speaking.
Judging from previous experience with these study weeks, I am confident that the discussions will have been extremely fertile. The principle question I am left with myself is have we perhaps been unable to formulate the prime illuminating question?
More next week.