Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and the Making of Stars

What are stars made of? When a young astronomer upset standard explanations for the formation of the solar system, the establishment told her she was wrong – then stole her findings.

In December 1871 the Prince of Wales lay dangerously ill with typhoid, the disease that had killed his father. Taking advantage of modern technology, the Archbishop of Canterbury despatched telegraph messages around the country ordering special prayers to be read for his recovery. As if by miracle, the patient began to feel better on exactly the tenth anniversary of Prince Albert’s death – but when Queen Victoria staged a grand thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey the nation’s leading scientists declined to attend.

This episode crystallised longstanding antagonisms into hostilities that lasted decades. The first shot was fired by Sir Henry Thompson, an eminent surgeon who suggested conducting a five-year experiment in a hospital ward to determine whether an orchestrated programme of collective praying would reduce mortality rates. In what became known as the Prayer Gauge Debate, incensed Christians protested that prayer was a religious experience, not a mathematical instrument for measuring God’s power; conversely, scientists scoffed at the concept of divine intervention in a world ruled by unchanging laws. This confrontation was a tussle for power – not so much about arriving at a particular answer, but about determining who had the social authority to decide what the right answer should be. Responsibilities gradually separated into two distinct realms, the natural and the spiritual, each with its own rulers.

In 1912 Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin), a 12-year-old schoolgirl, decided to carry out her own heavenly research. She had still been in a pram when she saw her first meteorite flashing across the skies and announced that she would become an astronomer. Frustrated by the limited syllabus of her Catholic school, she divided her examinations into two groups, praying for success in one but not the other. After her highest marks fell in the control set that had not benefited from her pleas for divine inspiration, she concluded that ‘the only legitimate request to God is for courage’ and began treating the tiny attic laboratory as her private chapel where she could worship the beauty of nature. ‘Science is my religion’, she later told her mother. Braving the fury of her teachers, she insisted on studying scientific and mathematical topics until the principal lost patience, expelling her rebellious pupil with an extraordinarily inappropriate judgement: ‘You are prostituting your gifts.’

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