Meeting Vera Rubin
In July 2006, I visited the astronomer Vera Rubin as part of my research for 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense. Yesterday, when I learned of her death, I dug out a draft of my interview with her. There was a lot that didn’t make it into the final cut of the book, some of which I’ve collated here. It made me smile to read it: she was genuinely wonderful. I hope it makes you smile too.
When I first see Vera Rubin, she is cleaning her office at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. I have caught one of the most famous women in astronomy wiping down the side bench of her office with a blue dishcloth.
I knock at the door, and she looks up and smiles. There are still a couple of dirty cups sitting beside the kettle.
“Michael?” she says. “I was just cleaning up for you.”
There was really no need. This is a woman who made the front page of the Washington Post two decades before I was born. Now, three and a half decades after that, not a day goes by without people around the world discussing some of her subsequent work — work she did while I was still learning to walk. These days, making sense of Vera Rubin’s data is a multi-million dollar endeavour. There really was no need for her to be cleaning up for me.
Rubin turned 78 five days ago. She has the kind of face you couldn’t possibly dislike — everybody’s favourite grandmother. Her large glasses make her eyes look slightly owlish, but wide and kind. Her grey hair with its gentle perm adds to her mellow air. I imagine she bakes enormous apple pies on Sundays. I feel about six years old in her presence; I’m half expecting her to offer me a glass of milk.
Rubin obviously had a similar effect on an Associated Press reporter back on New Year’s Eve, 1950. His story begins, “A young mother, in her early 20s, startled the American Astronomical Society today.” The Washington Post ran it under the headline “Young mother figures center of creation by star motions, ” and described how Rubin’s work was “so daring…that most astronomers think her theories are not yet possible.”
That report, on the rotation of the universe, wasn’t Vera Rubin’s most daring move, though. Her most daring work was published in 1970. It suggests that either Isaac Newton’s 400 year-old law of gravity needs a revision, or that a quarter of the matter in the universe is weird, invisible stuff. Whichever way you look at it, Vera Rubin has made it clear that our universe certainly doesn’t make sense right now.
Rubin grew up with a love of staring into the sky — and a very useful determined streak. Her physics teacher advised her to steer clear of science. A college admissions officer advised her that, if she must do astronomy, perhaps she could just paint astronomical scenes. Even at the Carnegie Institution she has had to grasp her career by the horns in a male-oriented workplace. It’s getting better now, she says: you can actually hear women’s voices in the corridors. “If you listen,” she says, a mischevious smile playing on her lips, “it’s probably all you’ll hear.”
Rubin doesn’t spend as much time here as she used to. Her husband Bob is ill: he is at home, with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the immune cells, and needs 24 hour oxygen, and Rubin works shorter hours now so that she can look after him. It means she can’t go to exotic locations to do any observing through telescopes, but she has come to terms with it.
“It does hurt,” she says. “I even called Chile from the hospital once.” And then she laughs. “But he’s worth it.”
Maybe it’s the sunlight coming through the window and reflecting off her huge glasses, but it looked like her eyes twinkled for a moment.
They married in 1948. No doubt Vera Rubin had a twinkle in her eye back then, too: rumour has it that Bob Rubin was chosen because he was studying under the dashing Caltech physicist Richard Feynman — the real object of the young Vera’s attentions. I ask her if the rumours are true, and a coy look comes over her face.
“Almost,” she drawls with a sly smile. For a moment, she looks and sounds like a schoolgirl.
Feynman was a very romantic figure, she says: his wife had died, and he had worked on the H-bomb. Rubin smiles. “Yeah, he was pretty impressive. So, yeah, I found my husband a very interesting person.”
I can’t help feeling slightly sorry for Bob when Rubin confirms that the first question she asked him was, “is it true you’re one of Feynman’s students?”
“Is it,” I say, “like the groupie who makes do with the drummer because the lead guitarist is taken?” She looks at me, blank, for a moment.
I’ve gone too far: I feel like I’ve just walked off the edge of a cliff.
Then she laughs loudly.
“No, no. I wasn’t interested in marrying Feynman,” she says. “It was just…” her voice tails off, then, suddenly, she laughs again, and holds up a hand. “Enough. This’ll just get worse.”
She changes the subject, and suddenly we’re talking about astronomy again.
Vera Rubin has given up making dark matter predictions: she’s just going to wait and see. For her, the problem has been around for 40 years without resolution — and that doesn’t include all the time that Fritz Zwicky’s 1933 results were placed in a dark corner and wilfully ignored. How can she possibly have an opinion on how it will all turn out?
I press her again, but she won’t be drawn. She likes the idea of MOND, a modified gravity theory that tries to account for the observation without invoking new particles. But during her lifetime, Rubin says, astronomers have made many unfounded declarations, then had to take them back. The phrase “during my lifetime” seems to give her pause. Her eyes flick to the graph, Andromeda’s unexplained rotation curve, that sits proudly on her wall. It’s like a mirror to her; looking at the graph, a realisation seems to dawn across her face. She’s no longer a young mother just starting to figure out creation.
“It has been a long time,” she says. “I never thought we’d still be looking now — I’ve waited about as long as I can.”
She hesitates again, then says what she’s obviously been thinking. It sounds like her worst fear. Or is it just frustration?
“I may die not knowing the answer.”
