by Stuart Clark
Lemaître laughed at the casual blasphemy. Shapley looked over his shoulder. His large eyes widened at the sight of the clerical collar. ‘You must be Georges Lemaître.’
The American vowel sounds still grated. Lemaître had corrected the mispronunciations of the immigration officers and then of the customs officers. Eventually, however, he realised he was fighting a losing battle. He decided to let it go and said, ‘How do you do?’
Shapley grinned. ‘ “How do you do?” – wow, you are from England.’
Lemaître decided to let that go as well.
The two men shook hands, rather awkwardly as they were both still lying on the grass.
‘Eddington says you’re quite a mathematician,’ said Shapley.
‘I enjoy the certainty of algebra. I find it refreshing.’
Shapley returned his attention to the ants. ‘Look at this. They march faster in the warmer weather. I’ve been measuring them for nearly a full year now. I just need another six months to see if the trend repeats and then I can publish.’
The river of insects continued its back-and-forth looting of the dead tree.
‘I’m thinking of cutting a hole in the windowframe of my office and building a tank for them, so I can control the temperature.’
‘I didn’t know you were an entomologist as well.’
‘I just do this to relax. Sometimes after a night in the domes, I find it hard to concentrate the next day. So I come out here. Never takes long to find a column. I just pick out one ant at a time and time them crossing the gap. Put them all together and bingo! If only astronomy were that easy.’
The sun was beating down on Lemaître’s black clothing. He wiped a bead of sweat from his upper lip.
‘Let’s get you in the shade.’ Shapley reached for the thermometer. ‘Can get pretty hot here in the summer. Freezes your ass off in the winter, of course.’ He wound an elastic band around his rolled-up notebook and pushed himself up from the ground.
It was only when the professor stood up that Lemaître realised how short he was. The director dusted down his brown tweed suit and looked properly at the new arrival. ‘I must say, it’s something of a novelty for us to have a physicist here.’
‘I’m interested in learning more about astronomy because I think relativity can describe the whole universe, but to test it I need to know what the universe looks like out to its deepest realms.’
Shapley whistled. ‘ “Deepest realms.” I’ll be honest with you, Georges – you don’t mind me calling you Georges?
No? Good. – I don’t understand relativity too well. I’ve always thought that theories were passing things but good observations never fade.’
Lemaître considered his words. ‘What about theories supported by good observations?’
Shapley broke into a toothy grin. ‘Let me take you to see the computers.’
The main offices were located in a solidly-built whitewashed house, set apart from the huts and domes which, Shapley explained, housed the telescopes and other scientific instruments. Gardeners in wide sunhats tended the hedges that lined the paths between the buildings.
Inside, the dark wooden panelling swallowed the sunlight. Lemaître’s eyes adjusted to the gloom as Shapley led him through corridors and offices full of framed images, bookcases and floorto-ceiling wooden filing cabinets that required ladders to reach the top drawers.
‘Here is where it all happens,’ said Shapley, opening a door.
In the room beyond there were about a dozen women hunched over desks, peering through magnifying glasses at large photographic plates. Others sat at desks with ledgers, making comparisons.
‘Good afternoon, ladies.’ Shapley then introduced his guest. There was a chorus of greeting.
‘In here, the stars are the ants.’ Shapley pointed to one of the glass plates. It was splattered with dots; each tiny mote was a star.
‘Our computers here,’ he indicated the women, ‘are the engine of what we do. They catalogue the stars, measure the plates and identify the Cepheids for us.’
Lemaître had learned about the Cepheid variable stars from Eddington. They provided the key to measuring distances across space because they varied their brightness in a repetitive way, taking anything from a few days to a few months to complete a cycle.
The way to turn the pulsation into a distance had been invented here by one of the computers, Miss Henrietta Leavitt, and Shapley had used it to define the outline and limits of the Milky Way.
‘Is Miss Leavitt here?’ asked Lemaître. There was a shift in the atmosphere.
Shapley explained, ‘I’m afraid she passed away a few years ago, before reaching her retirement. We still miss her.’
‘May God rest her soul.’
‘Why don’t I show you the instrument that she used? Miss Cannon, is anyone using the blink comparator?’
A round-faced woman with pearls and a pile of greying hair looked up. ‘Not at the moment, Mr Shapley, but Miss Maury is due in there soon. Her plates are already loaded.’
The blink comparator sat in its own small room, on a desk that had been pushed against the window. The blind was down, but two holes had been cut into the slats to allow the summer sun to fall on to two plates suspended either side of a T-shaped piece of tubing that terminated in a telescope eyepiece.
‘You put two photographs of the same patch of sky in the machine, one on each side. Adjust them so they line up perfectly. Then the handle allows us to blink between the two views. The variable stars show up because they seem to flicker.’ As he spoke, Shapley flapped the tails of his jacket and sat in front of the contraption. He clicked the handle from side to side, squinting into the lens.
‘Here, you have a go; there’s plenty on the plate. Top left is good.’
Lemaître took his turn. There was a staggering number of stars. They appeared as black spots on the negative plates and, as promised, when he slipped the lever back and forth the variable stars appeared to flash.
‘Amazing,’ he breathed, ‘and this is just one plate?’
‘It takes thousands to cover the whole sky.’
‘And the computers work like this all day?’
‘That’s women for you: hard workers, focused, sharp, infinite patience. I couldn’t do it. Why the hell do we still exclude women so easily? We’ve got one girl here who’s really special. I’ve got her on to the Ph.D programme. First in the country I think – maybe the world.’ There was obvious pride in Shapley’s voice. ‘She’s English but couldn’t get a place there, so she came here. She was a Cambridge woman, Cecilia Payne. Heard of her? No? Shame. Anyway, seems like Eddington’s lectures inspired her.’
Lemaître leaned back in his seat. ‘Professor Shapley …’
‘Harlow, please. Let’s not be too formal here.’
‘As you wish. I’m interested in the spiral nebulae.’
‘Not another one convinced they’re beyond the Milky Way, are you?’
‘I don’t know what to think. That’s partly why I’m here. I’m intrigued. On the voyage over, I read papers from Slipher in Arizona about the terrific velocities they appear to have.’
‘You mean their redshifts.’
Lemaître had read the papers with a sense of growing excitement. Something was turning the light from these enigmatic objects red. The most obvious way to interpret the signals was that they were shooting off into space from the Milky Way and that their light was being stretched and turned red in the process. Yet the speeds Slipher was measuring were almost beyond belief – hundreds of miles every second.
Despite his scepticism, Lemaître’s mind kept returning to the maths of de Sitter’s universe, and the way that when you calculated the distance between any two points they looked as if they were receding from each other. The only trouble was that de Sitter’s solution relied on a universe devoid of matter. Could the same be true for the actual universe and real celestial objects?
‘I would caution you to take care,’ Shapley growled. ‘Ther
e are a great many things we don’t understand about the spiral nebulae. Any conclusion is just a matter of wishful thinking.’
‘You debated their nature with Curtis, I believe.’
‘I discussed it, I presented facts; he speculated.’
‘But you don’t believe they’re beyond our galaxy, do you?’ Shapely crossed his arms. ‘I don’t believe or disbelieve anything without proof. Let me give you another example. You’re a God-fearing man, but me, I don’t believe in God …’
‘I think religious faith is something you either have or do not have. You can’t learn it. My only perplexity is with those who are hostile to the very notion.’
‘Well then, we have some common ground, because it’s not that I believe God doesn’t exist, it’s that I have yet to see any evidence either way. I need proof. Prove to me that God exists and I’ll believe. Until that time, I remain agnostic.’
‘Yet you believe that the spiral nebulae are not individual galaxies.’
Shapley snorted. ‘It’s all down to their distances, and to gauge those we need to find Cepheids in them. But we don’t. We don’t see any stars in them at all. So I conclude that they’re gaseous objects.’
‘But the speeds?’
‘Prove nothing. And are only speeds if we trust the observations.’ Lemaitre fenced, ‘I thought you said observations never fade.’ Shapley raised an eyebrow. ‘Good observations never fade.’
Lemaître spent the summer and autumn getting to know the stars. He learned about celestial coordinates by working in the domes with the other observers. They taught him how to move the tall ’scopes into position, reading from the etched brass setting circles on the mountings. Even though the telescopes were twice the size of a man, the counterbalanced instruments could be pushed with just a single finger to find any star in the sky.
He became adept at loading the photographic plates into cameras to capture the stellar portraits, and he learned how to split starlight into a spectrum and then analyse the dark lines that appeared like fingerprints on the underlying rainbow of colours. Each line was the result of an interaction between the star’s atoms and the rays of light it emitted. Together, the pattern could be analysed to tell the composition, movement and temperature of the star. The astronomers seemed to take it all for granted, yet Lemaître would still shake his head in disbelief that such knowledge could be harvested from such distant realms.
By the time the winter constellations lifted themselves above the tree-lined horizon, Lemaître no longer saw the stars as points of light, he saw them as individuals.
He grew accustomed to the out-of-sync lifestyle whereby the observatory staff were sitting down to meat and two veg as the night observers were dipping bread into their boiled eggs.
As he was returning from breakfast one afternoon, a poster on the noticeboard caught his eye. Designed as a vaudeville advertisement, it was emblazoned with the title ‘The Observatory Pinafore’.
‘Will you be auditioning, Dr Lemaître? It will be so much fun.’ The accent was English and belonged to a slim young woman with a mischievous look in her eye.
He answered her with a booming laugh.
‘I sang Gilbert and Sullivan back in Cambridge. I’m rather looking forward to giving it another go. It’s a spoof to be directed by Professor Shapley himself. His wife’s going to be in it, too.’
‘Then I wish you the best of luck … I hear you attended Professor Eddington’s lectures at Cambridge. He was the one who taught me the value of astronomy when constraining physical theories.’
In truth, Lemaître had found another of the dons, Ernest Rutherford, the better lecturer. He had made the subject of splitting the atom come alive, whereas there was little panache to Eddington’s delivery beyond the occasional sardonic comment.
Miss Payne’s face lit up as she recounted her experience. ‘I found Professor Eddington such an inspiring lecturer. His telling of the eclipse trip quite captivated me. Reminded me of my school days. May I tell you a silly story?’
‘I’d like nothing more.’
‘When I was a schoolgirl, my teacher brought in a map of the world and covered up all the countries. She then taught us about foreign exploration. Whenever she would start on a new country she would uncover it from the map. Her stories were so exciting I used to dream of exploring the places that remained covered. I thought I had discovered what to do with my life. But, by the end of the year, she had uncovered everything. All the countries had been visited. I can still remember the disappointment. Then I started reading about science and fell in love with it. I became almost frantic one day with impatience. I was afraid all the things to be discovered would have been found before I grew up.’
Lemaître smiled. ‘I think the universe has an endless supply of surprises for us. It’s a shame you had to leave your home country to achieve your dream, though.’
‘As have you.’
‘Not quite. I have a place waiting for me in Louvain when my travels are finished next summer.’
‘Well, I don’t think it’s such a bad thing for me. This is a country of more possibilities than England, more equality in general. Astronomy in England still seems rather stuffy – apart from Professor Eddington, of course. But here, it’s alive. I don’t think I ever want to go home.’ She grew suddenly embarrassed.
‘Listen to me babbling! Are you sure we can’t persuade you to audition?’
‘Miss Payne,’ he said gently, ‘I look forward to watching, but the best contribution I can make will be as a receptive member of the audience.’
A month later, the smell of hot, spiced cider wafted around the observatory’s lecture hall. An audience gathered, toasting each other and the coming new year. The stage was a simple affair of heavy curtains and a potted plant, but for good measure someone had hung up a framed picture of Saturn. The planet’s rings were tilted to their best angle, as if it had been posing for the picture.
Lemaître found a seat next to a stout fellow he didn’t recognise. By the turn of the conversation he seemed to be an acquaintance of Shapley’s who lived in nearby Boston.
‘You are up for the evening specially?’ asked Lemaître.
The fellow’s ruby-coloured cheeks quivered in mirth. ‘I wouldn’t miss this grudge match for the world.’
Before Lemaître could ask for clarification, Shapley took to the stage and the audience fell silent.
Dressed in tails, he explained in his precise drawl that the spoof had been found in the observatory’s archives, written back in 1879 but never performed. Having reviewed the piece, he was struck by its relevance.
This drew another guffaw from Lemaître’s neighbour.
‘Some of us have sung operettas before and some of us are new to the game,’ continued Shapley. ‘What we lack in technique, we make up for with enthusiasm. Let the revels begin.’
The music started, played by a small troupe tucked into the side of the hall, and the computers sidestepped their way on to the stage in time with the music. Dressed in the high-necked blouses and long skirts of their nineteenth-century counterparts, they sang:
We work from morn ’till night, For computing is our duty, We’re faithful and polite,
And our record book’s a beauty,
The audience responded enthusiastically, laughing along with the music rather than humming. Lemaître himself filled the room with his laugh, particularly when ‘catechism’ was rhymed with ‘prism’.
Miss Payne played one Josephine F. McCormack, a peerless setting-circle reader and target of the villainous Dr Leonard Waldo’s attentions. With much fake moustache-twirling, Waldo tried to lure her away from Harvard to work at another observatory. The Harvard staff could not take this lying down, and set about embroiling Waldo in such plots that he failed in his attempt to poach Josephine.
Villain thwarted, Josephine restored, the performers took their applause.
‘You’ve gotta hand it to him, he’s a brave man,’ said Lemaître’s neighbour, elbowing him to
draw his attention.
‘I’m sorry, you have me at a disadvantage.’
‘You don’t sound like you’re from round here.’
‘I’m from Belgium.’
‘That explains it. You’ll not know of the rivalry between the east and the west coast astronomers, then.’
Lemaître shook his head.
As the audience began to get up, his guest eagerly filled him in. Shapley had previously worked at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where the largest telescope in the world was situated. When the war ended, a young astronomer by the name of Edwin Hubble arrived. A rivalry ensued that led Shapley to quit in favour of Harvard, where his promotion to director meant that he could build a department.
‘So, you see, Shapley loathes Hubble and vice-versa,’ the informant concluded, with a secretive tap on his bulbous nose to indicate the information’s confidentiality.
‘You think the production was a warning to Dr Hubble?’
‘No question about it. No poaching – that’s what he’s saying.’
Lemaître looked back at the stage, now empty. Somehow it was no longer as much fun as he had thought.
There was a pall over the observatory as if someone had died. It was never a raucous place at the best of times, but today it resembled a mausoleum. The staff tiptoed along the corridors, and Lemaître’s greetings were returned with subdued looks and hurried acknowledgements. Even the secretaries appeared to be trying to type softly.
Lemaître saw that Miss Payne’s door was open and sidled into her office. ‘What has happened?’
She pulled off her glasses and whispered, ‘It’s Professor Shapley.’
Lemaître’s momentary spike of concern subsided as she continued. ‘He’s heard from Hubble in California. The Mount Wilson team have found Cepheids in M31 and measured them.’
M31: the great spiral whorl in Andromeda. The pained look on her face told him the next bit.
‘So, Hubble’s done it: proved the spiral nebulae are outside the Milky Way?’
She nodded in the direction of Shapley’s office. ‘I was in there when he opened the letter. He’s not, er, very happy.’