9 ms·

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

225 points by rmason 3y ago

rmason 3y ago
The woman who discovered what the universe is made of doesn't even get as much as a plaque, much less a statue. When she died in 1979 her obituary didn't even mention her greatest discovery. Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
- VHRanger 3y ago
  Even to this day, women doing astrophysics seem to be doing at a disadvantage because they have to spend a lot of time monitoring professional relationships for sexual harassment. This video from Dr. Angela Collier went viral a few years ago on the topic [1] I don't think it was easier 100 years ago. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DNRBa39Iig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DNRBa39Iig
  - dash2 3y ago
    How would you spend a lot of time monitoring relationships for sexual harassment?
    - VHRanger 3y ago
      I'm not subject to much sexual or physical harassment as I'm a somewhat physically imposing guy. But what she meant is that a lot of your mental bandwidth is taken in thinking about how you can and can't interact with certain people if there's a culture of tolerating abuse. You can see this in non sexual abuse cases, like nonproductive crunch leads people to watch what they say to PMs, etc.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- SenAnder 3y ago
  > And no one ever wonders how we know. The same can be said of plate tectonics, vaccines, the transistor, the cosmic microwave background radiation, the big bang, and the laws of thermodynamics.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  She has a volcano on Venus named after her[1]. That's quite a lot more awesome than a plaque. [1] https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/4623 https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/4623
sdfghswe 3y ago
TIL in 1925 it was thought that the Sun had no elemental difference from the Earth, and women were barred from becoming professors at Harvard. Basically dark ages.
- klik99 3y ago
  Not just that - also "She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948."
  - peterleiser 3y ago
    Wow! Almost 75 years after UC Berkeley: https://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/150-years-women-berkeley https://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/150-years-women-berkeley
  - jll29 3y ago
    I was equally shocked to read that. But in context, the 20th century was still in large parts dark ages for women regarding their rights. For instance, I just read they were only permitted to vote in parts of Switzerland from 1990! > The first federal vote in which women were able to participate was the 31 October 1971 election of the Federal Assembly. However it was not until a 1990 decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland that women gained full voting rights in the final Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    It's a kind of depressingly common stage in institutions becoming coeducational: many of them allowed women to take classes for years (townies, daughters of faculty, etc.) but didn't fully integrate them into the academic experience; they generally didn't formally matriculate and were often either granted no degrees or given a "lady's degree" without a graduation ceremony.
    - Ichthypresbyter 3y ago
      The famous story is Philippa Fawcett, who took the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams at a time when women weren't officially placed on the ranked list of successful candidates. Her official exam result was listed as "above the Senior Wrangler"- in other words, above the top male candidate. 15 years later Fawcett became one of the "steamboat ladies"- women who took advantage of a long-standing agreement (that still exists in a limited form today) between Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin that graduates of one university can receive the same degree from another one without further examination. When Dublin began to award degrees to women in 1904, they briefly opened this arrangement to women who had passed exams at Oxford or Cambridge that would have entitled them to degrees had they been men. Several hundred British Oxbridge alumnae travelled to Dublin to graduate, and the fees they paid financed the construction of a hall of residence for Dublin's female students.
lynguist 3y ago
Wow! There is a whole roster of woman scientists that were denied a Nobel Prize and this one seems to be the most appalling one! And I had never heard about her before. I knew about one other though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell The discoverer of the pulsar, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded to two others - her PhD supervisor and an astronomer. – I want to admit: when I clicked the link to the Wikipedia article of Cecilia Payne I expected some really minor quirky historical figure – not the literal discoverer of the sun’s composition.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pessimist 3y ago
  Hard to say its the most appalling. Two more appalling omissions are Lisa Meitner for nuclear fission, and Chien-Shiung Wu for parity violation, since effectively others were given the prize for the work and their contributions overlooked.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    I'd not heard of Chieng-Shiung Wu, so I have reading to do. Fwiw, it's _Lise_ Meitner.
    - viksit 3y ago
      thanks for the thread. fascinating reading - also just submitted a link about women who didn’t win the prize but deserved it.
  - Arete314159 3y ago
    If you want to be constantly irritated, read about Rosalind Franklin. (And yes, I know she died before the Nobels were announced, that's not the point.)
    - mongol 3y ago
xyzelement 3y ago
// she created an experiment on the efficacy of prayer by dividing her exams in two groups, praying for success only on one, the other one being a control group. She achieved the higher marks in the latter group In at least Judaism - and I would expect in other religions, prayer is necessarily partnered with intention[1] - ie what is in your heart matters, not just the words you're repeating. Presumably someone creating such an experiment does not engage in the prayer with sincere faith and thus can conclude nothing from the outcome. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanah
- burkaman 3y ago
  > Presumably someone creating such an experiment does not engage in the prayer with sincere faith and thus can conclude nothing from the outcome. Why do you say that?
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    On the simplest level, because the very idea of faith requires going beyond the point where you are able to operate on pure reason. For topics that can be understood using experimentation, faith is not required. "I believe in prayer" and "I am going to determine my religiosity based on the outcome of this experiment" are incompatible beliefs. Since we know the later is true, we can assume the former isn't.
    - angoragoats 3y ago
      > For topics that can be understood using experimentation, faith is not required. To put this another way, faith is the excuse people give to rationalize believing in things for which they have no verifiable evidence.
      - xyzelement 3y ago
        Faith is the (a) recognition that we're limited beings whose perception and thinking are ultimately inadequate to understand objective reality and (b) a set of beliefs you take on for dealing with that unknowable space. (a) is obviously true even if you're a complete atheist. EG, there's no reason to assume that evolution endowed us with ability to understand the objective reality anymore than it has endowed some deaf and blind deepwater creature that ability. Since we all engage in life despite the limitations of (a), we are all making assumptions about the nature of reality whether we call it faith or not. EG, in the absence of us being able to know for certain why/how/by whom the universe was created, religious people make one assumption (purposeful creation and the meaning of life that it implies) while atheists make another one (random accident and the meaninglessness it implies.) You can't "see" that accident anymore than you can "see" G-d, so the amount of faith required to believe one or the other (or any other variation) is the same. So yes, there's room for faith and we all operate on it. Back to the topic at hand, prayer is in the domain of religious faith, so it's meaningless for a non-religious person to test it out.
js2 3y ago
I first learned of her in Episode 8 of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_the_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_the_Sun
jihadjihad 3y ago
> [She] proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. I'm reminded of a college lecture one day in a class I took called Physics of Stars. The professor walked up to the whiteboard and wrote: Elemental composition of the universe: Hydrogen and helium 99% Oxygen ~1% Everything else <<1% That was well over a decade ago, and it blows my mind as much today as it did then.
- antognini 3y ago
  In astronomy we label everything in the "Everything else" bucket as "metals." So oxygen and carbon are considered metals in astronomy. Our periodic table is quite a bit simpler.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  I'm surprised there's so much oxygen ... why is that? Why isn't there more Lithium (atomic number 3) than Oxygen (8)?
  - Monory 3y ago
    I got interested in that after your comment, and apparently there are two main reasons for that. 1. Oxygen is being produced in stars by so-called CNO cycle [0], which is how stars heavier than our sun mostly do their fusion. More intriguing question is why there's more oxygen than carbon or nitrogen (which, as implied by the name of the process, are also created), but that's a different topic. 2. Additionally, oxygen-16 is a particularly stable isotope, as its nucleus has “doubly magic” [1] amount of constituents, so it doesn't get destroyed in other processes. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(physics)
  - bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
    I would imagine that oxygen is at some sort of happy medium of being easy enough to create through fusion but hard enough to fuse into other things that it is unexpectedly common.
andy_ppp 3y ago
“Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth.” Why did people think the Sun was producing light, there must have been an explanation? Hard to believe that only 100 years ago we knew so little about cosmology.
- perihelions 3y ago
  They had a very plausible explanation: gravitational binding energy. It's the wrong one for the sun, but it's the correct one for non-fusing brown dwarfs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin%E2%80%93Helmholtz_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin%E2%80%93Helmholtz_mecha... ("Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism")
- viewtransform 3y ago
  Around 1863 they were debating whether the Sun was burning coal or meteorite impacts could generate enough heat for the sun to glow. Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863) (scientificamerican.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23074435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23074435
  - jackmott42 3y ago
    The time period from around 1600->1900 is so fascinating, in that there are some things we had correctly figured out that are just amazing, and other things where we were so far off it seems embarrassing in retrospect. It must have been a fun time for curious people, quite a lot you could discover without huge teams and huge sums of money and equipment.
throw4847285 3y ago
Another point for Imre Lakatos. It's a much less glamorous view of science, but it fits the data better.
zzzzzzzza 3y ago
wish this had a better title relating to "her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium"
- spiralx 3y ago
  You say that, but her name all on its own was enough for me to click on the link, because the name gives clues towards being related to physics or the Cold War or something intriguing.
perihelions 3y ago
Kind of entertaining, in hindsight, to the read the reasoning of the Compton & Russell paper [0] cited in Payne-Gaposchkin's thesis [1] as the explanation of the "spurious" hydrogen abundance: - "This would demand an absurdly great abundance of hydrogen relative to magnesium (itself an abundant element)[...] It appears necessary, therefore, that the effective value of q_2 for the two-quantum state of hydrogen is increased in some special way, by a very large factor..." [0] https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/114086a0 https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/114086a0 ("A Possible Explanation of the Behaviour of the Hydrogen Lines in Giant Stars (1924)") [1] https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1925PhDT.........1P/0000056.000.html https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1925PhDT.........1...
lvh 3y ago
Latacora's primary infrastructure auditing tool is called payne, after Cecilia. It takes "snapshots" of infrastructure: e.g. an entire AWS resource graph, and then makes that available via fast queries. It figures out what your cloud is made of by looking at API responses (which kind of are like emission spectra I guess?) :)
raphlinus 3y ago
I knew her son Peter[1] fairly well through the Berkeley Quaker meeting, though did not learn about her illustrious science contributions until after he died. [1]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2014/10/29/in-remembrance-peter-john-arthur-gaposchkin https://www.berkeleyside.org/2014/10/29/in-remembrance-peter...
richardfontana 3y ago
I find it slightly amusing that composer Gustav Holst, mainly known for his suite _The Planets_, encouraged her to study music, but she ultimately pursued astronomy instead.
seri4l 3y ago
I'm surprised to read that "the scientific wisdom of the time (...) held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth", because I distinctly remember looking up why helium was named after Helios (the Greek name for the Sun). It turns out that it was discovered by analyzing the spectrum of the Sun, only years later being isolated from Earth minerals.

225 points by rmason 3y ago

The woman who discovered what the universe is made of doesn't even get as much as a plaque, much less a statue. When she died in 1979 her obituary didn't even mention her greatest discovery. Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.

VHRanger 3y ago
Even to this day, women doing astrophysics seem to be doing at a disadvantage because they have to spend a lot of time monitoring professional relationships for sexual harassment. This video from Dr. Angela Collier went viral a few years ago on the topic [1] I don't think it was easier 100 years ago. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DNRBa39Iig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DNRBa39Iig
- dash2 3y ago
  How would you spend a lot of time monitoring relationships for sexual harassment?
  - VHRanger 3y ago
    I'm not subject to much sexual or physical harassment as I'm a somewhat physically imposing guy. But what she meant is that a lot of your mental bandwidth is taken in thinking about how you can and can't interact with certain people if there's a culture of tolerating abuse. You can see this in non sexual abuse cases, like nonproductive crunch leads people to watch what they say to PMs, etc.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SenAnder 3y ago
> And no one ever wonders how we know. The same can be said of plate tectonics, vaccines, the transistor, the cosmic microwave background radiation, the big bang, and the laws of thermodynamics.
seanhunter 3y ago
She has a volcano on Venus named after her[1]. That's quite a lot more awesome than a plaque. [1] https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/4623 https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/4623

sdfghswe 3y ago

TIL in 1925 it was thought that the Sun had no elemental difference from the Earth, and women were barred from becoming professors at Harvard. Basically dark ages.

klik99 3y ago
Not just that - also "She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948."
- peterleiser 3y ago
  Wow! Almost 75 years after UC Berkeley: https://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/150-years-women-berkeley https://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/150-years-women-berkeley
- jll29 3y ago
  I was equally shocked to read that. But in context, the 20th century was still in large parts dark ages for women regarding their rights. For instance, I just read they were only permitted to vote in parts of Switzerland from 1990! > The first federal vote in which women were able to participate was the 31 October 1971 election of the Federal Assembly. However it was not until a 1990 decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland that women gained full voting rights in the final Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden.
- bandrami 3y ago
  It's a kind of depressingly common stage in institutions becoming coeducational: many of them allowed women to take classes for years (townies, daughters of faculty, etc.) but didn't fully integrate them into the academic experience; they generally didn't formally matriculate and were often either granted no degrees or given a "lady's degree" without a graduation ceremony.
  - Ichthypresbyter 3y ago
    The famous story is Philippa Fawcett, who took the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams at a time when women weren't officially placed on the ranked list of successful candidates. Her official exam result was listed as "above the Senior Wrangler"- in other words, above the top male candidate. 15 years later Fawcett became one of the "steamboat ladies"- women who took advantage of a long-standing agreement (that still exists in a limited form today) between Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin that graduates of one university can receive the same degree from another one without further examination. When Dublin began to award degrees to women in 1904, they briefly opened this arrangement to women who had passed exams at Oxford or Cambridge that would have entitled them to degrees had they been men. Several hundred British Oxbridge alumnae travelled to Dublin to graduate, and the fees they paid financed the construction of a hall of residence for Dublin's female students.

lynguist 3y ago

Wow! There is a whole roster of woman scientists that were denied a Nobel Prize and this one seems to be the most appalling one! And I had never heard about her before. I knew about one other though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell The discoverer of the pulsar, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded to two others - her PhD supervisor and an astronomer. – I want to admit: when I clicked the link to the Wikipedia article of Cecilia Payne I expected some really minor quirky historical figure – not the literal discoverer of the sun’s composition.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pessimist 3y ago
Hard to say its the most appalling. Two more appalling omissions are Lisa Meitner for nuclear fission, and Chien-Shiung Wu for parity violation, since effectively others were given the prize for the work and their contributions overlooked.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  I'd not heard of Chieng-Shiung Wu, so I have reading to do. Fwiw, it's _Lise_ Meitner.
  - viksit 3y ago
    thanks for the thread. fascinating reading - also just submitted a link about women who didn’t win the prize but deserved it.
- Arete314159 3y ago
  If you want to be constantly irritated, read about Rosalind Franklin. (And yes, I know she died before the Nobels were announced, that's not the point.)
  - mongol 3y ago

xyzelement 3y ago

// she created an experiment on the efficacy of prayer by dividing her exams in two groups, praying for success only on one, the other one being a control group. She achieved the higher marks in the latter group In at least Judaism - and I would expect in other religions, prayer is necessarily partnered with intention[1] - ie what is in your heart matters, not just the words you're repeating. Presumably someone creating such an experiment does not engage in the prayer with sincere faith and thus can conclude nothing from the outcome. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanah

burkaman 3y ago
> Presumably someone creating such an experiment does not engage in the prayer with sincere faith and thus can conclude nothing from the outcome. Why do you say that?
- xyzelement 3y ago
  On the simplest level, because the very idea of faith requires going beyond the point where you are able to operate on pure reason. For topics that can be understood using experimentation, faith is not required. "I believe in prayer" and "I am going to determine my religiosity based on the outcome of this experiment" are incompatible beliefs. Since we know the later is true, we can assume the former isn't.
  - angoragoats 3y ago
    > For topics that can be understood using experimentation, faith is not required. To put this another way, faith is the excuse people give to rationalize believing in things for which they have no verifiable evidence.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      Faith is the (a) recognition that we're limited beings whose perception and thinking are ultimately inadequate to understand objective reality and (b) a set of beliefs you take on for dealing with that unknowable space. (a) is obviously true even if you're a complete atheist. EG, there's no reason to assume that evolution endowed us with ability to understand the objective reality anymore than it has endowed some deaf and blind deepwater creature that ability. Since we all engage in life despite the limitations of (a), we are all making assumptions about the nature of reality whether we call it faith or not. EG, in the absence of us being able to know for certain why/how/by whom the universe was created, religious people make one assumption (purposeful creation and the meaning of life that it implies) while atheists make another one (random accident and the meaninglessness it implies.) You can't "see" that accident anymore than you can "see" G-d, so the amount of faith required to believe one or the other (or any other variation) is the same. So yes, there's room for faith and we all operate on it. Back to the topic at hand, prayer is in the domain of religious faith, so it's meaningless for a non-religious person to test it out.

js2 3y ago

I first learned of her in Episode 8 of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_the_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_the_Sun

jihadjihad 3y ago

> [She] proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. I'm reminded of a college lecture one day in a class I took called Physics of Stars. The professor walked up to the whiteboard and wrote: Elemental composition of the universe: Hydrogen and helium 99% Oxygen ~1% Everything else <<1% That was well over a decade ago, and it blows my mind as much today as it did then.

antognini 3y ago
In astronomy we label everything in the "Everything else" bucket as "metals." So oxygen and carbon are considered metals in astronomy. Our periodic table is quite a bit simpler.
The_Colonel 3y ago
I'm surprised there's so much oxygen ... why is that? Why isn't there more Lithium (atomic number 3) than Oxygen (8)?
- Monory 3y ago
  I got interested in that after your comment, and apparently there are two main reasons for that. 1. Oxygen is being produced in stars by so-called CNO cycle [0], which is how stars heavier than our sun mostly do their fusion. More intriguing question is why there's more oxygen than carbon or nitrogen (which, as implied by the name of the process, are also created), but that's a different topic. 2. Additionally, oxygen-16 is a particularly stable isotope, as its nucleus has “doubly magic” [1] amount of constituents, so it doesn't get destroyed in other processes. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(physics)
- bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
  I would imagine that oxygen is at some sort of happy medium of being easy enough to create through fusion but hard enough to fuse into other things that it is unexpectedly common.

andy_ppp 3y ago

“Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth.” Why did people think the Sun was producing light, there must have been an explanation? Hard to believe that only 100 years ago we knew so little about cosmology.

perihelions 3y ago
They had a very plausible explanation: gravitational binding energy. It's the wrong one for the sun, but it's the correct one for non-fusing brown dwarfs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin%E2%80%93Helmholtz_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin%E2%80%93Helmholtz_mecha... ("Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism")
viewtransform 3y ago
Around 1863 they were debating whether the Sun was burning coal or meteorite impacts could generate enough heat for the sun to glow. Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863) (scientificamerican.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23074435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23074435
- jackmott42 3y ago
  The time period from around 1600->1900 is so fascinating, in that there are some things we had correctly figured out that are just amazing, and other things where we were so far off it seems embarrassing in retrospect. It must have been a fun time for curious people, quite a lot you could discover without huge teams and huge sums of money and equipment.

throw4847285 3y ago

Another point for Imre Lakatos. It's a much less glamorous view of science, but it fits the data better.

zzzzzzzza 3y ago

wish this had a better title relating to "her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium"

spiralx 3y ago
You say that, but her name all on its own was enough for me to click on the link, because the name gives clues towards being related to physics or the Cold War or something intriguing.

perihelions 3y ago

Kind of entertaining, in hindsight, to the read the reasoning of the Compton & Russell paper [0] cited in Payne-Gaposchkin's thesis [1] as the explanation of the "spurious" hydrogen abundance: - "This would demand an absurdly great abundance of hydrogen relative to magnesium (itself an abundant element)[...] It appears necessary, therefore, that the effective value of q_2 for the two-quantum state of hydrogen is increased in some special way, by a very large factor..." [0] https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/114086a0 https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/114086a0 ("A Possible Explanation of the Behaviour of the Hydrogen Lines in Giant Stars (1924)") [1] https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1925PhDT.........1P/0000056.000.html https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1925PhDT.........1...

lvh 3y ago

Latacora's primary infrastructure auditing tool is called payne, after Cecilia. It takes "snapshots" of infrastructure: e.g. an entire AWS resource graph, and then makes that available via fast queries. It figures out what your cloud is made of by looking at API responses (which kind of are like emission spectra I guess?) :)

raphlinus 3y ago

I knew her son Peter[1] fairly well through the Berkeley Quaker meeting, though did not learn about her illustrious science contributions until after he died. [1]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2014/10/29/in-remembrance-peter-john-arthur-gaposchkin https://www.berkeleyside.org/2014/10/29/in-remembrance-peter...

richardfontana 3y ago

I find it slightly amusing that composer Gustav Holst, mainly known for his suite _The Planets_, encouraged her to study music, but she ultimately pursued astronomy instead.

seri4l 3y ago

I'm surprised to read that "the scientific wisdom of the time (...) held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth", because I distinctly remember looking up why helium was named after Helios (the Greek name for the Sun). It turns out that it was discovered by analyzing the spectrum of the Sun, only years later being isolated from Earth minerals.