What Stars Are Made Of by Donovan Moore

Author:Donovan Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Adelaide Ames

The newspaper may have pumped up Adelaide’s role a bit; “collaboration” surely was not the way the director would have described it. And Adelaide knew her place. “I collect only the facts,” she once said. “The theories are Dr. Shapley’s.”19

Both in their early twenties; both working in an intense hothouse of research with an older, quirky group of people on the periphery of the campus; both struggling to make ends meet—little wonder that Cecilia and Adelaide immediately gravitated toward each other. “She was young, lovely, intensely vital,” Cecilia recalled. “In my first year at Harvard we had been inseparable; they used to call us ‘the Heavenly Twins.’ ”20

Shapley got away with offering small salaries because he managed to create in himself another form of currency. Sometimes the alternative currency would be deducted; if a computer or assistant were not at her desk when he came out of his office and walked around, he would leave a note. Sometimes it would be added; he would regularly pause in his daily stroll to remind the staff how important their particular job was. Acknowledging his reliance on women workers, Shapley, according to Cecilia, “measured his projects in ‘girl-hours.’ ”21

“Everyone adored him—the older women and young girls who were soon added to the team,” Cecilia remembered. “Adelaide and I called him ‘the Dear Director,’ and soon he was affectionately known as ‘the D.D.’ ” The two of them used to say jokingly that “he had found a Dear Little Observatory, and intended to leave it a Great Institution.”22

The “D.D.,” however, might just as easily have stood for Dear Dictator. It was Shapley’s shop, and as for Cecilia, “he never forgot, or let me forget, that he was the Director of the Observatory.” With her new-found independence, she was feeling more and more like a woman, and she found Harlow to be boyishly charming, “running upstairs two steps at a time, pushing his soft sandy hair off his forehead.” He could also be “vain and vindictive,” however, and he “kept his distance”; even after knowing Cecilia for more than fifty years, he never called her by her first name. Still, “in those days I worshipped Dr. Shapley,” Cecilia recalled later, describing herself as a twenty-five-year-old. “I would have gladly died for him, I think.”23

The small compensation—the stipend plus the boss’s motive-driven words of encouragement—hardly mattered, because the opportunity was priceless. This was it—the chance to be more than a schoolteacher. “I had the run of the Harvard plates, I could use the Harvard telescopes (a dubious boon, this, in the climate of Cambridge), and I had the library at my fingertips.”24

From Newton to Einstein to Eddington to Saha, there were so many theories; but no one had yet discovered what the stars were made of. To Cecilia the search was thrilling. “The history of science is a history of delight in first-seens, first-postulateds, first-came-upons,” writes Kay Redfield Jamison in her book Exuberance. “It is a history of high pleasure in the hunt and exultation in the netting.

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