reading
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Born in the wrong generation
To be twenty when the war began
And the men began to die
Europe a place of danger
And the red-haired man?
Picking edelweiss on an alp?
And marrying late, late for then,
Of all people to my father
Of all people to be born
But me, and have a life
And leave
Do I want to write it all down?
...
29 April
Who would have thought
I’d be the first to go
Of all of us
The first departure
First death
And ten years to contemplate
The going
Why me to face all this?
Can’t I just go back
To the mountains
To the lakes & rivers
But first, I want to restring
All your beads
The ones that snapped and spilled
In trains
And found their way home
To jam jars
Monday 3 May
In the garden of greens and shade
Of a May fresh from April
One foot already in June,
Impatient to explore each last possibility
Of green from the blue lavender,
To the quintessential cherry
To the yellowing, drying fritillaries
Whose day came back in March.
Impatient to say all these greens
Before the flowers begin to chatter,
To become loud with colour,
To let themselves go lewdly and loudly
Into scarlets, purples, & indigos.
From Stones to Stars
Every year of my childhood, on the day in June that school let out, my sister and I were bundled into the family camper van, and the long voyage westward began: our summer holiday and my father’s season of field work. For three months we would roam around northern Canada exploring the shores of a huge prehistoric lake, Lake Agassiz, which drained into Hudson’s Bay 8,000 years ago, leaving behind Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba as the biggest of its remnants. Often we didn’t arrive back in Montreal until mid-September, returning to school a week or two late with apologetic notes from our parents.
It was certainly on these voyages that my scientific education began. Almost more than an education, it was a natural process of assimilation, like a child learning to speak her native tongue. My father’s field work, at least the part I knew most about, was to trace the evolution of Lake Agassiz’s shores. We would criss-cross the prairies and spruce forests of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, looking for prehistoric beaches: ridges of sand and gravel overgrown with grasses, sweet clover, black spruce. When we found one we would stop and my father would fill a small sample bag with limestone pebbles. I could help with this, as picking up stones came naturally. Even as a five- or six-year-old, my eye was trained to distinguish a limestone pebble from a sandstone one or a piece of chert. I would poke the pebbles through a square grid cut by my father in the bottom of a plastic box, to standardise their size, and then judge their roundness on a scale from one to ten. Number one was rough and jagged. Ten was as perfect as a marble. From the average roundness of pebbles on a particular beach, my father could deduce how long the waves had washed against that shore. It was a long time before I realised that to most people, beaches were where you went to swim.
I was also put to use as scale in photographs, standing atop ancient end moraines, beside exposed varves in banks of clay, in front of synclines and anticlines, or once, when our travels took us as far west as the Canadian Rockies, knee deep in mud at the mouth of a living, breathing glacier. In Sudbury, Ontario, where pollution from nickel mining had stripped the land of all vegetation, and the surface-of-the-moon landscape was ideal for studying erosion, I was sent to scout out examples of the concentric crescent shaped cracks in outcrops of bedrock that showed that a glacier had passed there, and in which direction it was moving. (The marks were the same as you got by dragging your spoon across the smooth flat surface of a bowl of jelly – one of the few occasions where playing with food was tolerated in the name of science.)
I also collected pebbles of my own, as many as were allowed, the quota being set by my father’s fear of overloading the van’s suspension. They were not limestone but mottled granite, shiny black obsidian, flint, fossils, pumice. I also collected birch bark and birds’ nests, shells and small animal bones. Back home I labelled things and set up exhibitions in the playroom, some of which became part of show-and-tell projects at school, and have been respectfully preserved to this day.
The experimenting didn’t end with the summer. In autumn, with the first hard frosts, parts of our little city garden became off bounds, as my father measured and photographed the needle ice pushing up the soil between my mother’s dying flowers. There was a year when we traced the path of the sun through the seasons by making a kind of sundial. My father taped a small square of cardboard with a hole punched in it to a window which looked south across the city towards the St Lawrence river. Once a week at noon we made a pencil mark where the sunlight streaming through the hole struck the wall opposite. As the months passed an arc began to take shape as the noon sun first dipped low in the sky, and then, as spring came, began to climb higher again.
One winter, when the snow came, my father and I collected snowflakes on a black velvet cloth. With a thin glass rod we picked them up and transferred them to microscope slides where a drop of some clear liquid (from a bottle labelled ‘poisonous’ that lived alongside soil samples in my mother’s freezer) preserved their exact shapes, to look at under a microscope. I loved their beauty and complexity. And the shapes, my father explained, told you about the temperature high above, where the snowflakes crystallised, and about what they encountered as they floated downwards.
With all this, geology never seemed to me so much a career, as something to do on weekends and summer holidays with my father, and it never really occurred to me to actually study it. As a child and as a young adult I had three or four interests and corresponding heroes of my own. One was Jane Goodall: I longed to go to Africa to live among the chimpanzees. One was Louis Leakey and the million-year-old fossil hominids he and his family were unearthing in Kenya’s Rift Valley. During the summers I would be Leakey, excavating in the Canadian north for ancient bones (and finding flint tools which, if not millions of years old, were in a few cases at least thousands). A third fascination was the Galapagos Islands and their exotic fauna, introduced to me by Jacques Cousteau. It was never the facts that interested me so much as the possibilities they opened up to the imagination. What I did to entertain myself during the long summer days in the back of the camper van, crossing forests and prairies, was to write poems.
My childhood coincided with the most ground-breaking years of space exploration. I clearly remember the sight, in the summer of my ninth year, of astronauts climbing down their ladder to the surface of the moon. Our big square bakelite television was specially moved for the occasion from the playroom to the dining room, where the reception was better. But the excitement surrounding the event was more my mother’s than my own. I didn’t really understand that going to the moon was difficult or new. It all seemed mechanical and remote, and the moon itself, colourless and a bit bleak.
The night sky, on the other hand, was a place where one’s imagination could expand infinitely. The skies of northern Canada were dazzling, and lying on my back I used to hope that if I stared hard enough at one star, so that the others seemed to fade from view, then whatever beings lived there might transmit images of themselves and their world. Even the little square of starless sky outside my city bedroom window was a fertile field, and as an eight- or nine-year-old I used to lie awake after bedtime wondering what it meant for the Universe to be infinite, and what migh
t be out there.
Science was also, of course, part of my formal education, though my memories of this are less pleasurable. Rarely was school science an opportunity for real exploration. One occasion, when I was about eight, was a simple experiment where we were asked to mix together earth, water, and salt, and then separate them. We had available a coffee-filter and a candle flame, but no one told us that we first had to filter out the dirt, and then evaporate the water over the candle. Finding this solution all by myself was exhilarating. For the most part school science was textbook learning: memorising names and arrangements of human organs or plant parts. Experiments were essentially like following recipes, trying to make the results come out the way you knew they were supposed to. The subject may have been science, but the process wasn’t.
When I finished high school, I went away to college in the United States, a possibility introduced by my New England mother and Yale educated father. (As a small child I had never quite understood the distinction between Yale and jail, and the fact that my father had spent time there in the years before I was born was perplexing.) On the encouragement of a close family friend and alumna of the college, I chose Smith. I went with the idea of majoring in Biology or English, but quickly decided that I could write without having to major in English. Genetics had been a late high school fascination, so alongside the Galapagos Islands and chimpanzees, Biology seemed a good choice. In the end, I never took a single course in that department. One evening in my second semester a friend and housemate Neville (also a geologist’s daughter) came back describing her Astronomy 101 class, and I knew instantly that I was missing something. The very next term I signed up.
The Smith Astronomy Department was run by three faculty members: Mr White, who taught most of my classes; Ms Seitter, who spent half of each year in Germany; and Mrs J., who helped out in the labs. (The J. stood for an unpronounceable Polish name.) Ms Seitter and Mrs J. together had a kind of old world, big-bosomed warmth, and a ready sense of celebration. They would gather us around them for afternoon discussions with endless cups of coffee and special cookies Ms Seitter brought back with her from Germany. They would rout us out of our little student office late at night, squeeze us all into Ms Seitter’s white VW bug and take us downtown for ice cream. Between the three of them, and the new kinds of questions I had never even thought before to ask, astronomy soon became the obvious choice of major.
I still remember clearly the week we learned about the Hertzsprung- Russell diagram. We were given a list of brightnesses and colours for stars in a globular cluster: one of about two hundred spherical swarms of stars, all the same age, that drift around in the halo of our Galaxy. Our task was to plot the brightnesses against the colours. As if by magic, a pattern emerged. Rather than a scatter plot, all the stars swept out a sinuous path on the graph paper. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram which we had ‘discovered’ is perhaps the most important diagnostic tool used by astronomers to assess the evolutionary state of a system of resolved stars, and remains at the heart of my research today.
I also remember the nights on the roof of the science centre, learning how to find objects with the little telescope. The clearest nights were always the coldest ones, and the pleasure of looking at planets and nearby nebulae was tempered by freezing fingers and toes. And scuffling across the carpeted floor of the telescope dome would cause a build-up of static electricity which discharged as a painful spark when you set your eye against the brass eyepiece. There were better moments too, and one which stands out is a trip to the bigger sixteen-inch telescope at nearby Whately, during which I saw for the first time our sister galaxy, Andromeda. It gave an almost vertiginous feeling to see this delicate wisp of milky spiral light floating in what seemed a bottomless well of empty space.
I spent my junior year abroad at St Andrews University in Scotland. In a letter he sent me towards the end of my stay, Mr White suggested that I look into applying to work as a research student at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh the summer after. I did so, and it was perhaps one of the most influential experiences in my ultimate choice of astronomy as a career. I was set to work in the plate library up on Blackford Hill, overlooking the sparkling blue water of the Firth of Forth, scanning the Universe, searching for elliptical galaxies with dust lanes.
Every inch of the northern hemisphere sky was photographed in the 1950s and 1960s using the Schmidt telescope at Mt Palomar in California. The plates, 935 of them altogether, were about fourteen inches on a side, and an eighth of an inch thick. They were kept in thick brown envelopes, stacked vertically in grey metal cabinets. One by one, I lifted them out by their edges, nervous of breaking them, and slipped them into a frame on top of a big light table. Then I scanned them by eye, back and forth in one-inch strips, looking for a particular kind of galaxy: smooth and elliptical in shape, but bisected by an opaque lane of dust. The plates are negatives, so the dust lanes showed up white against the black of starlight. When I finished with the northern hemisphere I moved onto the south, which was still being photographed at the time with a telescope in Australia, on nerve-wrackingly thin glass plates that had to bend to be positioned at the telescope’s prime focus.
The galaxies in question were peculiar in that ellipticals were supposed to be ancient systems: just stars, no gas or dust that might indicate recent star formation. Identifying a sample of these for future studies would help reveal how galaxies formed. In all I found forty of them, and was second author on an article published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the main UK astronomy journal. Despite the rarity of these galaxies, scanning the plates never got boring. It was like lying on my back staring at the night sky. My mind could wander over all the questions of space and infinity and origins that I had always loved to think about. And the galaxies, in all their different forms, the wisps, the bars, the spirals, the smooth ellipses, each one different from the next, reminded me of nothing so much as the snowflakes my father and I had caught and preserved on glass those winter afternoons.
Physics was a problem. To pursue astronomy, I would have to study physics. Mathematics was fine. It had always been enjoyable and, (or because), I had always been blessed with good teachers. But physics had always seemed dull: batteries, light bulbs, billiard balls, rigid laws, the power to predict where a cannon ball might land, to manipulate the world. I got no joy from these powers. And to make matters worse, the technique frequently used to spice things up was to build up a certain common sense expectation about an experiment, and surprise the students with a counterintuitive outcome. I learned not to trust my intuition.
By my final year at Smith I knew I wanted to go on to the next step in an astronomy career, a Ph.D. I also wanted to return to Britain, partly because I had found an affinity with its culture, and partly to escape the barrage of exams that form part of a North American Ph.D. programme. But I wouldn’t be accepted in a British Ph.D. programme in astronomy without a bit more background in physics, so I set off for the University of British Columbia to do a Master’s degree in physics.
It was a daunting experience. My meagre Smith background in physics had at least been acquired in a supportive environment. Of the two hundred or so students in my freshman physics class, all were women. At UBC I repeatedly found myself in classes and seminars where I was the only woman. Often it felt like walking into the men’s bathroom by mistake. The course work was overwhelming because my background was woefully inadequate. It was a struggle just to stay afloat. I remember months of rain and early morning lectures in statistical mechanics where, week after week we laboured at solving a complicated differential equation in order to understand why a bubble floating around a room will tend to want to attach itself to a wall, and from there slip over to where two walls meet, and finally slide up into a corner, which it will never leave. There were, however, two pleasures: quantum mechanics, which presented intriguing paradoxes, and general relativity, which let the imagination wander the same way the dark space outside my bedroom window h
ad, probably because it was itself something geometrical, a language for exploring space.
In the second year, my scholarship was withdrawn because my grades didn’t measure up, and the head of the department called me into his office and suggested that not everyone was cut out for this kind of thing, and perhaps I should reassess my goals. I continued, supporting myself as a lab assistant, and was lucky enough to find a friend, an ex-St Andrews student studying quantum gravity, who helped me along and bolstered my confidence. Also, I had by then applied to the Ph.D. program at Cambridge University, and had a letter from the director offering me a place. The best strategy seemed to be to move on as quickly as possible, leaving the demoralising atmosphere of UBC behind.
The subject of my Master’s thesis was dynamical friction. Much as friction will cause a book pushed across a table to slow down, so gravity can exert a drag on celestial bodies. The Earth will eventually spiral closer and closer to the Sun for this reason. In the mathematical expression for this effect there is a term which, as you consider the pull of more and more distant objects, becomes infinite. I was supposed to think about what this really meant. I didn’t get very far with understanding this infinity, but did manage to produce a coherent discussion of various ways of formulating dynamical friction based on different kinds of physics. It wasn’t an original piece of research, but it was a useful exercise in learning to survey the scientific literature and bring different approaches to bear on a single problem. Two years after my arrival, almost to the day, I went to my supervisor with my Master’s thesis in one hand, and a plane ticket to London in the other. The thesis was accepted, though somewhat grudgingly, and that autumn I began my Ph.D. in Cambridge.
The first few months in Cambridge were a mixture of excitement and nervousness at being in a place so full of history and prestige, and a sense of confusion over reconciling my rather abstract interest in quantum mechanics and general relativity with the reality that my background had prepared me for a more pragmatic kind of research. On a late autumn afternoon Mike Fall, who was to become my thesis supervisor, spread out on his desk in front of me photographs of dense star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud, our nearest neighbour galaxy. This galaxy, he explained, contained a unique population of clusters: rich in stars like the ancient clusters in the halo of our own Galaxy, but some of them very young. Why was the Large Magellanic Cloud still forming massive clusters where our own Galaxy had ceased to billions of years ago? What could we learn from these objects about the way rich star clusters form? The questions seemed interesting and I set out to learn more.
A Responsibility to Awe Page 10