Famous woman astronomer gives her name to an HS2 tunnel boring machine!

Naming HS2 Tunnel Boring Machines

Thousands cast a vote for their favourite STEM pioneer in the naming of the two HS2 Tunnel Boring Machines to burrow a 10 mile long tunnel through the Chiltern hills. The eventual winners – Florence and Cecilia – were suggested by students at Meadow High School in Hillingdon and The Chalfonts Community College, Buckinghamshire, inspired by a medical pioneer, Florence Nightingale (very well known) and Cecilia, who was an incredible astronomer -

THE INCREDIBLE LIFE OF CECILIA PAYNE-GAPOSCHKIN

Quote from Cecilia -

Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money. There are easier and better ways to reach them. Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you; for nothing else is probably what you will receive. Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other.

Cecilia Payne was born in Wendover, Buckinghamshire in 1900

1919 - Cecilia went to Cambridge to read botany at Newnham College. She heard Arthur Eddington lecture on how he proved Einstein’s theory of general relativity - by observing that stars had ‘moved’ during a total eclipse of the sun. Eddington was a world renowned astronomer and a President of the Royal Astronomical Society. Cecilia was hooked on Astronomy (and on Eddington)!

BUT THERE WERE NO DEGREES AWARDED TO WOMEN AT CAMBRIDGE (UNTIL 1948)

So in 1923 Cecilia moved to Harvard where she had met a leading American astronomer - Harlow Shapley - Director of the Harvard College observatory.

Cecilia’s PhD project was to be ‘What are stars made of?’ under none other than the director of the Harvard College observatory himself, Harlow Shapley. Her work involved her re-examining thousands of spectral plates of stars that had been taken at the Harvard observatory over many years and studied by Annie Jump Cannon - who GCSE Astronomy students will know produced the Harvard classification system mnemonic Oh Be A Fine Girl/Guy Kiss Me. The hundreds of thousands of stars had been classified into 7 groups based on their spectra. However, up to Cecilia’s time, nobody had been able to quantitatively link the spectra to the quantity of each element present in the star. Cecilia Payne was studying the new science of quantum physics spectra which differed due to the different surface temperatures of the different stars - not to the different amounts of elements present. Cecilia calculated the surface temperatures of the 7 groups of stars. She also calculated the relative amounts of 18 elements and found most stars were the same, 98% hydrogen and helium.

Henry Russell (the leading US astronomer of the day) stated “CLEARLY IMPOSSIBLE” and forced Cecilia to add to her thesis “almost certainly not real” to protect her credibility at that time - otherwise she would not be awarded her doctorate.

Cecilia became the first person to receive a doctorate at the Harvard College observatory. Her thesis was published as a book ‘Stellar atmospheres’ and a few years later astronomer Otto Struve described her work as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in Astronomy.” For her work, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (she had married the Russian astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin in 1934) was awarded the following prestigious medals -

1934 Franklin Medal & 1936 Janssen Medal

In a citation:

"With Walter S. Adams, Russell applied Meghnad Saha’s theory of ionization to stellar atmospheres and determined elemental abundances, confirming Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery that the stars are composed mostly of hydrogen."

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin conducted research, lectured and tutored students - as would any Professor of the day. However, her title at Harvard was ‘technical assistant’ to Professor Shapley. This was about as good as it could get at this time for a woman. The prize that would be awarded to any astronomer today for such a magnificent finding would be a Nobel Prize.

In one of the greatest acts of hypocrisy in science, in 1976, the American Astronomical Society awarded Cecilia the prestigious Henry Norris Russell prize. Russell had called Payne’s thesis “clearly impossible”, but A FEW YEARS LATER HE CLAIMED THE DISCOVERY AS HIS OWN - NOT HIS FINEST HOUR!! Her words as she accepted the prize was typical for a giant in the field of Astronomy -

“The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something”

Dr Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin eventually became Professor in charge of the Department of Astronomy in 1956, the first woman professor at Harvard.

I’m not really quite sure how a giant in Astronomy could be chosen in the naming of a tunnel boring machine!