Exuberance: The Passion for Life (24 page)

Watchers of planets and stars have always been among the most awestruck and greatly curious. The Scottish scientist Mary Somerville, the first woman to publish experimental results in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, wrote in 1831 that
“
the heavens afford the most sublime subject of study which can be derived from science: the magnitude and splendour of the objects, the inconceivable rapidity with which they move, and the enormous distances between them, impress the mind with some notion of the energy that maintains them in the motions with a durability to which we can see no limits.” But, she went on to note, the magnificence of the natural world is met by the discovering powers of man. “Equally conspicuous,” she continued, “is the goodness of the great First Cause in having endowed man with faculties by which he can not only appreciate the magnificence of his works, but trace, with precision, the operation of his laws.”

For most scientists the excitement of discovery, whether in sky or field, goes back to the early days of childhood and emerges time and again to lure their minds onward. These moments of intellectual joy are what the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner and others refer to as
crystallizing experiences, moments when a young person first falls in love with a particular idea or way of thinking. Intense and early passions often exert their influence over a lifetime, calling to mind C. S. Lewis’s declaration that anyone who has experienced joy will try to re-create the circumstances of it. Just as those who have known the euphoria of love, cocaine, or mania, or felt the rush of victory in sports, will attempt to recapture the high, so, too, will those who have felt the delight of discovery.

This was certainly true for Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (née Payne), one of the great astronomers of the twentieth century. Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979) is credited with essential contributions to astronomy, including the discovery that most objects in the universe are composed primarily of hydrogen. Her dissertation work on the relative abundance of elements in stars, published later as the book
Stellar Atmospheres
, is a classic in astronomy, “
an essential step in the scientific demonstration of a philosophical concept: that natural bodies, the stars, the Sun and the Earth are made up of
the same stuff.” Her second book,
The Stars of High Luminosity
, was also a pioneering study, exemplifying, as one colleague put it, “
the bravery and adventure of a mind exploring the unknown.”

Payne-Gaposchkin’s
fervor for science showed itself early. When she was five years old, she saw a meteor and decided on the spot to become an astronomer; she also resolved to begin quickly, “in case there should be no research left” when she grew up. Brought up in England, with a
heritage “dominated by women,” she was initiated into science as a young girl and sent flying with enthusiasm into a life of science: “
The Bee Orchis was growing in the long grass of the orchard, an insect turned into a blossom nestled in a purple star. Instantly I knew it for what it was. My Mother had told me of the Riviera—trapdoor spiders and mimosa and orchids, and I was dazzled by a flash of recognition. For the first time I knew the leaping of the heart, the sudden enlightenment, that were to become my passion. I think my life as a scientist began at that moment. I must have been about eight years old. More than 70 years have passed since then, and the long garnering and sifting has been spurred by the hope of such another revelation. I have not hoped in vain. These moments are rare, and they come without warning, on ‘days to be marked with a white stone.’ They are the ineffable reward of him who scans the face of Nature.”

Other interests also drew Payne-Gaposchkin—she retained lifelong passions for literature, music, theater, and travel—but even as a young schoolgirl she knew that her first love was science: “
When I won a coveted prize at the end of the year,” she writes in her autobiography, “I was asked what book I would choose to receive. It was considered proper to select Milton, or Shakespeare, or some writer of similar prestige. I said I wanted a textbook on fungi.”

In her boarding school, a place whose primary task, she said, was to prepare young women for English society, she taught herself
mathematics and science and spurned religious services in order to pursue her individual studies of chemistry and nature. She created a spiritual and intellectual world for herself: “
I had, in a sense, converted the laboratory into a chapel. On the top floor of the school (a town house, high and narrow) was a room set aside for the little science teaching conceded to the upper classes. The chemicals were ranged in bottles round the walls. I used to steal up there by myself (indeed I still do it in dreams) and sit conducting a little worship service of my own, adoring the chemical elements. Here were the warp and woof of the world, a world that was to later expand into a Universe.… I had yet to realize that the heavenly bodies were within my reach. But the chemical elements were the stuff of the world. Nature was as great and impressive to me as it had seemed when I [had as a child] vowed myself to its service. It overshadowed everything.”

Throughout her professional life, Payne-Gaposchkin’s exuberance for science was critical to overcoming the obstacles put in her way because she was a woman in an academic world dominated by men. As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, she was forced to sit by herself in the front row of the lecture halls (only a few years earlier, women had been required to be chaperoned during lectures), and women were not allowed to receive university degrees. Enthusiasm kept her going. She entered Cambridge in 1919, a time when the study of physics was “pure delight.” The Cavendish Laboratory, she said, “
was peopled with legendary figures. The great J. J. Thomson [discoverer of the electron]… Aston with his mass spectograph, C.T.R. Wilson with his cloud chamber … and, looming over all, was the figure of Ernest Rutherford.” After hearing a lecture in Trinity College by Professor Arthur Stanley Eddington about the eclipse expedition he had led to Brazil in 1918, she was so excited that “
when I returned to my room I found that I could write down the lecture word for
Word.… For three nights, I think, I did not sleep. My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.” (Many people who knew Payne-Gaposchkin over the years were to remark that she often worked to the point of dangerous exhaustion; her mother once observed that her daughter “
lived largely on her enthusiasms.”) But, she said, Eddington “
had opened the doors of the heavens to me.”

Later, after hearing a lecture in London by Harlow Shapley, the newly appointed director of the Harvard College Observatory, she intrepidly asked him—the man, she said, “
who walked with the stars”—if she could study with him. He agreed, and in 1923 she went to America, where, “
in the heady atmosphere of New England,” she recalled later, “nothing seemed impossible.” She wrote her dissertation (which has been described as “
the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy”) in six weeks, “
in a kind of ecstasy,” and received the first doctorate in astronomy to be awarded from the Harvard College Observatory.

Because she was a woman, Payne-Gaposchkin remained ineligible for academic appointments at virtually all universities. The discrimination at Harvard was particularly blatant. President Abbott Lawrence Lowell did not believe that women should have academic appointments and therefore, rather than being appointed as an instructor or a professor, she was paid as a technical assistant to Shapley. “
Being a woman has been a great disadvantage,” she wrote in her autobiography,
The dyer’s hand
. “It is a tale of low salary, lack of status, slow advancement.… I simply went on plodding, rewarded by the beauty of the scenery, towards an unexpected goal.” (“Plodding,” it should be noted, would be the last word anyone would use to describe her or her work.)

Her passion for science kept her going, despite the obstacles and overt discrimination. “
Astronomers are incorrigible optimists,” she wrote in the introduction to her book
Stars in the Making
. “They
peer up through a turbulent ocean of atmosphere at the stars and galaxies, forever inaccessible. They speak of million-degree temperatures, of densities smaller than our lowest vacuum; they study light that left its source two hundred million years ago. From a fleeting glimpse they reconstruct a whole history.… The drama of cosmic evolution is played out upon a stage that stretches beyond the limits of our vision, at a pace so slow that the span of human history has witnessed no action.”

Change in the academic world, while glacial, was perhaps not impossibly slow from an astronomer’s perspective. And things did eventually change. In 1952, more than thirty years after beginning her undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, she was finally awarded her degree. Four years later, she became the first woman at Harvard to be promoted to full professor and the first to be appointed chair of a department. A minor planet was named for her, and in 1977 she became the first woman to give the Russell Prize Lecture to the American Astronomical Society. A lifetime of joy in scientific discovery came through in her remarks. The reward of a scientist, she said, “
is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience. It engenders what Thomas Huxley called the Divine Dipsomania.”

Discovery, however divine or intoxicating, is just one aspect of scientific exuberance, however. Science is also driven by curiosity and an enthusiastic restlessness, hastened forward by a drive to explore, a desire to put together the pieces of some pattern of nature. The diversity of scientific inquiry is spectacular, and it is often the most exuberant scientists, the ones who possess the greatest capacity to be easily excited, who pursue their enthusiasms and curiosities over a far-flung range of topics.

“
Martin had one characteristic without which there can be no science,” wrote Sinclair Lewis in
Arrowsmith
. He had a “wide-ranging,
sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unself-dramatizing curiosity, and it drove him on.” Martin Arrowsmith was far from alone in his driving curiosity. In scientists before and after, curiosity has compelled not only the intensity of the intellectual pursuit but often its multifariousness as well. Aristotle, for example, wrote not only about metaphysics, logic, politics, and ethics but also about botany, astronomy, psychology, and zoology. Newton studied alchemy as fervently as he did the optics of light and gravitation. Alexander von Humboldt’s interests included volcanoes, silver mining, turtle eggs, the movements of tides, botany, bats, missionaries, and Indians. Likewise, “Nature’s flaming apostle,” the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, took on nearly everything: glaciers, embryology, the anatomy of crickets, fossil fish, the mathematical characteristics of leaves, and the origins of life itself.

Edward Jenner studied not only cowpox but the night-flowering primrose, hibernation in hedgehogs, diseases of the eye and heart, and the habits of cuckoos and earthworms. (His discovery of a vaccination against smallpox brought forth a different order of exuberance, however: “
The joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities,” he wrote, “was so excessive that I sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.”) Charles Darwin, by the time he was eight years old, had a “
passion for collecting” and a love of natural history. “
I had strong and diversified tastes,” he said, “much zeal for whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject or thing.” During the voyage of the
Beagle
he worked “
to the utmost” from, as he put it, “the mere pleasure of investigation.” His love of natural science, he wrote in his autobiography, “
has been steady and ardent.” Charles Lindbergh, although primarily known as an aviator, had a wide-ranging and questioning scientific mind. Among the many fields he studied were biology, cytology, rocket science, surgery,
and physics; he also actively pursued research in organ perfusion, artificial hearts, archaeology, conservation, and animal hibernation.

One of the pleasures of working around scientists is the joy that so many of them take in seemingly small yet important bits of the universe. The articles published in
Science
and
Nature
every week often ask the kinds of questions a child might ask: Are toads right-pawed? Where did the first star in the universe form? How do parrots signal one another? Why do fish not grow impossibly large? Recently, during a flight to California to give a talk in a lecture series at the University of California at Davis, I read through the list of titles of previous years’ lectures and found, to my delight, topics such as how bacteria think, the molecular analysis of flower development in snapdragons, ant navigation, why birds sing, and the ecophysiology of crayfish breathing. It is remarkable and quite wonderful that our species asks such questions. It is also inevitable.

We are part and parcel of the universe we inhabit: “hitched” to everything else, as John Muir would put it. “
We are not looking into the universe from outside,” writes the Harvard biologist George Wald. “We are looking at it from inside. Its history is our history; its stuff, our stuff … such a history, that begins with elementary particles, leads perhaps inevitably toward a strange and moving end: a creature that knows, a science-making animal, that turns back upon the process that generated him and attempts to understand it.”

Great scientists and explorers—the creatures who look at the stuff of the universe and wonder at their species’ ways and origins—tend to be enthusiastic, optimistic and energetic by temperament, although there are, of course, many exceptions. Exuberance serves science well: it helps to overcome the tedium and setbacks intrinsic to scientific work, overrides mental and physical weariness, and makes risk-taking both attractive and probable. Positive mood, because it facilitates creativity and problem-solving, is
likewise critical. Exuberance makes science fun, a type of adventure; and adventure, in turn, becomes a part of what scientists and explorers seek. Risk and the possibility of failure fade in comparison.