13 Things That Don't Make Sense Read Online Free Page B
Author: Michael Brooks
convinced that he never got the recognition he deserved. He had a tendency to refer to all his colleagues as “spherical
bastards”: bastards whichever way you looked at them. Small wonder, then, that his colleagues turned a blind eye to his discovery
of the Coma cluster’s missing mass.
But he was right. Something about the mass of galaxies just doesn’t add up—unless, that is, the universe is heavily sprinkled
with dark matter. In 1939, at the dedication of the McDonald Observatory in Texas, the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort added to
the evidence. Oort gave a lecture in which he showed the distribution of the mass in a certain elliptical galaxy had to be
very different from the distribution of the light. He published the data three years later, making this very point clear in
the abstract. Again, in a classic Kuhnian response, no one reacted. This spectacular ability to ignore such anomalous results
continued for decades until, for some reason, people finally listened to Vera Rubin.
Rubin, who is now in her late seventies, made her first big mark on cosmology at the age of twenty-two. The New Year’s Eve,
1950, edition of the Washington Post reported on a talk she gave at the American Astronomical Society, hailing her achievements under the headline “Young Mother
Figures Center of Creation by Star Motions.” The accompanying piece described how Rubin’s work was “so daring … that most
astronomers think her theories are not yet possible.” But her most daring work, the fight to get dark matter taken seriously,
was still to come.
Not that she even took herself seriously to start with. The story, she says, is a lesson in how dumb a scientist can be. In
1962 Rubin was teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Most of her students were from the U.S. Naval Observatory
down the road, and they were very good astronomers, she recalls. Together they were able to map out the rotation curve of a galaxy. This is a graph that shows how the velocity of the stars changes as you move out from the center of the galaxy.
As with that weighted string twirling around your head, the velocities should fall as you get farther out. For Rubin and her
naval researchers, though, they didn’t; once they got away from the center, the curve was flat. They presented the results
in a series of three papers, and Rubin made nothing of it.
Three years later, in 1965, she took a job at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. After a year in the cutthroat business
of looking for quasars, the most distant objects known, she wanted to do something a little less competitive, something she
could make her own. She decided to look at the outside of galaxies because no one had studied them—everyone concentrated on
the centers. Not only had Rubin completely forgotten about her work with the Naval Observatory students, she also didn’t believe
her own results as she was gathering them. She measured the speeds by looking at how the motion had changed the spectrum of
light coming from a star. Rubin was gathering about four spectra each night, gradually going farther and farther out from
the center of the galaxy. Even though she developed the spectra as she went along, and they all looked the same, the penny
didn’t drop.
“You always thought the next point would fall,” she says. “And it just didn’t.”
Eventually, though, she got it. By 1970 Rubin had mapped out the rotation curve for Andromeda; the star velocities remained
the same however far out she looked. With the velocities of the stars remaining high at the edge, centrifugal forces should
be throwing Andromeda’s outer stars off into deep space. By rights, Andromeda should be falling apart. Unless, that is, it
is surrounded by a halo of dark matter.
NO one knows what the dark matter actually is. When the Cambridge professor Malcolm Longair wrote his cosmology primer Our Evolving Universe , he listed some of the things it
bastards”: bastards whichever way you looked at them. Small wonder, then, that his colleagues turned a blind eye to his discovery
of the Coma cluster’s missing mass.
But he was right. Something about the mass of galaxies just doesn’t add up—unless, that is, the universe is heavily sprinkled
with dark matter. In 1939, at the dedication of the McDonald Observatory in Texas, the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort added to
the evidence. Oort gave a lecture in which he showed the distribution of the mass in a certain elliptical galaxy had to be
very different from the distribution of the light. He published the data three years later, making this very point clear in
the abstract. Again, in a classic Kuhnian response, no one reacted. This spectacular ability to ignore such anomalous results
continued for decades until, for some reason, people finally listened to Vera Rubin.
Rubin, who is now in her late seventies, made her first big mark on cosmology at the age of twenty-two. The New Year’s Eve,
1950, edition of the Washington Post reported on a talk she gave at the American Astronomical Society, hailing her achievements under the headline “Young Mother
Figures Center of Creation by Star Motions.” The accompanying piece described how Rubin’s work was “so daring … that most
astronomers think her theories are not yet possible.” But her most daring work, the fight to get dark matter taken seriously,
was still to come.
Not that she even took herself seriously to start with. The story, she says, is a lesson in how dumb a scientist can be. In
1962 Rubin was teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Most of her students were from the U.S. Naval Observatory
down the road, and they were very good astronomers, she recalls. Together they were able to map out the rotation curve of a galaxy. This is a graph that shows how the velocity of the stars changes as you move out from the center of the galaxy.
As with that weighted string twirling around your head, the velocities should fall as you get farther out. For Rubin and her
naval researchers, though, they didn’t; once they got away from the center, the curve was flat. They presented the results
in a series of three papers, and Rubin made nothing of it.
Three years later, in 1965, she took a job at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. After a year in the cutthroat business
of looking for quasars, the most distant objects known, she wanted to do something a little less competitive, something she
could make her own. She decided to look at the outside of galaxies because no one had studied them—everyone concentrated on
the centers. Not only had Rubin completely forgotten about her work with the Naval Observatory students, she also didn’t believe
her own results as she was gathering them. She measured the speeds by looking at how the motion had changed the spectrum of
light coming from a star. Rubin was gathering about four spectra each night, gradually going farther and farther out from
the center of the galaxy. Even though she developed the spectra as she went along, and they all looked the same, the penny
didn’t drop.
“You always thought the next point would fall,” she says. “And it just didn’t.”
Eventually, though, she got it. By 1970 Rubin had mapped out the rotation curve for Andromeda; the star velocities remained
the same however far out she looked. With the velocities of the stars remaining high at the edge, centrifugal forces should
be throwing Andromeda’s outer stars off into deep space. By rights, Andromeda should be falling apart. Unless, that is, it
is surrounded by a halo of dark matter.
NO one knows what the dark matter actually is. When the Cambridge professor Malcolm Longair wrote his cosmology primer Our Evolving Universe , he listed some of the things it
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