Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: the woman who defied the experts

The life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin still has powerful echoes, both uncomfortable and inspiring, for us today.

That is the claim of the Irish dramatist Stella Feehily, whose play The Lightest Element recently premiered at London’s Hampstead Theatre.

When she was growing up, Ms Feehily told Times Higher Education, she loved Carl Sagan’s 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which was reworked by Neil deGrasse Tyson as Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey in 2014. Episode 8 of the latter, “Sisters of the Sun”, featured the story of the “Harvard Computers”, the women at the Harvard Observatory who mapped and catalogued the stars. “Though under the radar at the time, they were key players in shaping our modern understanding of the stars,” she said. It was from this that Ms Feehily first learned about Professor Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-79).

Initially, her curiosity was piqued by finding out about “a great British woman I had never heard of, though she had discovered hydrogen was one of the basic building blocks of matter, something so huge that we now just take it for granted”.

Although Professor Payne-Gaposchkin’s exceptional talent was obvious at the University of Cambridge, it was not then possible for women to gain degrees, so she had to go to Harvard to pursue her studies. Her PhD supervisor, Henry Norris Russell, refused to accept her central claims about the dominance of hydrogen and helium in the universe and forced her to rewrite her thesis. He later came round to her point of view and published his conclusions with only minimal acknowledgement of her work. To the end of his life, noted Ms Feehily, he “never admitted that he had told her she was wrong”.

For many years, Professor Payne-Gaposchkin had a kind of unofficial teaching role at Harvard paid for out of the equipment budget. Yet eventually she became the first female professor appointed through regular faculty promotion and then the first female chair of any department. Ms Feehily was fascinated by “the stoicism and resilience” (and willingness to suppress her strong feelings of resentment) that she needed – and female scientists arguably still need – to succeed in a highly sexist environment.

Yet she also faced other significant obstacles, with a Russian husband during the anti-communist “witch-hunt” generally known as McCarthyism.

“There was a lot of investigation of professors at Harvard,” Ms Feehily explained. Professor Payne-Gaposchkin’s husband, Sergei, “was called in by a travelling wing of the House Un-American Activities Committee when it came to Boston” because the couple “had sent food and blankets to Russia as part of the war effort”.

They had also been involved in the International Forum at Harvard, where even “people with extreme opinions were given a debating platform”. This was at a time, as a character points out in the play, when a passing mention of “violation of civil rights”, “racial or religious discrimination” and sometimes even the word “peace” could be used as evidence of communist sympathies and, thus, grounds for persecution.

All this is skated over briefly in Donovan Moore’s 2020 biography, What Stars Are Made of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and Ms Feehily claimed that she is “the first to go into it in depth”. On a research trip to Harvard, she “got a chance to see the declassified FBI files of the director and the man who had facilitated Cecilia’s PhD. There are various letters from informants saying ‘We will be following the Gaposchkins. They are visiting the Russian Embassy’ and so on.

“Zdeněk Kopal, a Czech astronomer who was at Harvard and then head of astronomy at Manchester, talks in his memoir about how the FBI tapped him up to ask about his connection with the Gaposchkins. I found enough information to show that they would have had a torrid time – it must have been quite terrifying,” she said.

An atmosphere of paranoia and betrayal clearly makes for good drama. But Ms Feehily also sees powerful parallels with the way people can now get “cancelled” for an ancient incautious tweet and the fears of some American conservatives, for example, about “a liberal elite manipulating higher education, the news media and the government”.

Fortunately, there are other, more optimistic lessons to be drawn from Professor Payne-Gaposchkin’s career, notably about the constant need for fresh perspectives and the way that “ideas flourish with diversity”.

“We now take it for granted that stars are giant globes of hydrogen and helium,” said Ms Feehily, so “it’s hard to get one’s head round the idea that all the eminent astronomers were once caught up in a form of groupthink. They had spotted the hydrogen anomaly but were desperately trying to make each other’s papers work out.

“It had to be an outsider who came in and said, ‘Hang on! Not quite!’”

The Lightest Element is playing at London’s Hampstead Theatre until 12 October.