Recognizing Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s Pioneering Work

This article erases the contribution of Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin) who in her 1925 Ph.D. thesis at Harvard had already demonstrated that the sun is primarily made of hydrogen. Russell was initially highly skeptical of her result and, as a reviewer of her thesis, forced her to claim that it was likely incorrect. It took him four years to accept it in the work described here, which was then generally accepted. Though he credited Payne, her pioneering work was only widely acknowledged decades later (and apparently still not completely, judging by this article). Payne-Gaposchkin later went on to be the first woman tenured at Harvard, as well as their first female department chair.

I further note that the apparent discovery of planets (or at least brown dwarfs) outside the solar system in 1943 were definitively refuted (though not until the late 1970s), with the first brown dwarfs and planets not being confirmed until a half century later, in the mid-1990s. Russell’s philosophical comments illustrate the danger that every popularizer faces, of deciding when the evidence for an exciting result is strong enough to publicize it.