Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin

by DanielRibeiro • 13 years ago

38 55 13 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

selimthegrim• 13 years ago

There is a nice bit about her in Chandrasekhar's APS history interviews

http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4552.html

MaysonL• 13 years ago

And she inspired Joan Feynman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman

throwit1979• 13 years ago

This was the more striking part of all this for me. I've read a lot of (Dick) Feynman biographical material, read his layperson books, his lecture series, etc.

Until today I had no idea he even had a sister, let alone that she also went into physics.

zb• 13 years ago

Really? Have you read What Do You Care What Other People Think? Because she's mentioned fairly prominently in the chapter about how he faced down a rent-a-mob accusing him of sexism ('Feynman Sexist Pig!').

(To be clear, Feynman actually was sexist, but not in the way that the rent-a-mob was complaining about.)

gesman• 13 years ago

Wikipedia's creative begging for donations is annoying. IMHO.

rodgerd• 13 years ago

"She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948."

How much talent has been wasted down the centuries due to nonsense like this?

DanielRibeiro• 13 years ago

There many people indignated by this: https://twitter.com/marcuschown/status/366132278381903874/ph...

Tichy18• 13 years ago

Yeah I think comparing her to Galileo, Newton and Einstein is a little over the top.

That is so typical feminism, trying to frame things as if bad things happened to her just because she was a woman. If I remember correctly, Einstein was also not believed by the physics authorities of his time at first - he didn't even get a job in academics, remember? Galileo was almost burnt on the stake for his research. Professors trying to steal their students work also happens all the time. There is a debate that Newton might have stolen calculus from Leibniz.

Not saying these things are OK, but they didn't happen because Cecilia was a woman.

If she is not as famous as other physicists, perhaps it is because her work simply didn't inspire the imagination of people as much. Marie Curie is famous, and she is a woman.

Also her name might simply be harder to remember than other names. Life is a bitch. To be honest, my brain just goes "Cecilia prubschichdjadfw-whatever" when I read her name. That's not fair, but it is not because she is a woman, it's just that her name is longwinded and foreign.

Maybe Marie Curie is only famous because Kraftwerk made a song about her, and Einstein is only famous because there is that iconic picture where he sticks out his tongue. I don't think many people adore physicists because they understand the actual physics. Everybody can write down e=mc^2 and probably even know that they wrote down something significant. If you want Cecilia DJSjug-whatever to be famous, make a better story. Make a song about her, create an iconic formula, whatever. Don't complain that she is a female victim. In fact she seems to have been quite successful anyway.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

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