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Since 1851, New York Times obituaries are dominated by white men. With Overlooked we add stories of remarkable people whose death was not reported in The Times.
In 1967, a prominent astronomer traveled to Dallas to give a lecture. Before being able to speak, however, a young woman named Beatrice Tinsley stood up and told the audience that everything they were going to hear was fake.
Thus began a quarrel that changed the cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe. On one side, Allan Sandage, arguably the world 's most important astronomer, who was convinced that he was looking for the fate of the universe – namely that' s the only one in the world. he was condemned to collapse a distant day, one hundred billion
On the other side, there was a 26-year-old graduate student who said that Sandage had misinterpreted the light of distant galaxies and, with she, the fate of the universe
. outraged, but history would tell that Tinsley won this argument.
In the years to come, before cancer fell on March 23, 1981, at the age of 40, Tinsley would become the world's leading expert in the aging and evolution of galaxies – the gigantic glowi In his work, which the Princeton astronomer, James Gunn, described as a "true paradigm shift," galaxies have gone from being considered as isolated spots of starlight to dynamic and changing centers. energy and energy. radiation, influencing and being influenced by the cosmos around them.
Tinsley was the ignition candle of a new generation of astronomers and physicists who used new methods and data to tear the story out of the universe to their elders. Friends and colleagues have recalled her as passionate about her ideas and the universe and also as a feminist hero for the tiny but growing group of women in astronomy – one who has had to pay a hefty personal price, in the form to abandon her family, to follow her stars
Asteroids, mountains, lectures and awards have since been named for her, but a lifetime of glass ceilings and rejections has left Tinsley feeling often misunderstood.
"She has never lost the feeling of fighting the world" Richard Larson, a Yale astronomer who has become a collaborator and a close friend.
Beatrice Muriel Hill was born in Chester, England, on January 27, 1941, and raised in New Zealand, among the three daughters of Jean and Edward. Hill. His father was a politician became mayor of New Plymouth New Zealand
"Beetle", as called his friends and family, lacked respect for authority, which affected his attitudes towards science and religion. As she grew up, her two loves were music and mathematics.
At the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, she fell in love with physics, learning, as a biographer puts it. In 1961, she married another physicist and classmate, Brian Tinsley. A year later, she went out with a master's degree, but could not find work in Canterbury because her husband worked there.
When her husband was recruited from the Dallas Southwest Center for Advanced Studies – now the University of Texas at Dallas – she followed, but found the situation stultifying. She has already caused a minor scandal by refusing to host a faculty tea when it was her turn. In 1964, she enrolled as a student at the University of Texas at Austin, the only woman in the program, who was doing 400 miles a week.
Simulating the effects of the evolution of billions of stars on the general appearance of galaxies that she crossed swords with Allan Sandage.
The fate of the universe was the big question in cosmology. Would the universe continue to expand forever? Or will the combined gravity of galaxies eventually bring everything together, like a handful of rocks thrown back onto Earth?
Sandage and others sought to answer this question by looking at how the universe had spread in the deep past. He concluded that he was slowing down and that he would retreat one day into a Big Crunch. It was a prediction as important as any scientist could do it.
But the answer depended on the presumption that some galaxies – egg-shaped agglomerations called giant elliptical, which he used as markers of cosmic distances – were Tinsley's works suggest, however that these galaxies were not so constant – that they could darken with age as the stars evolved
. , would undermine Sandage's method and could topple the answer of the destiny of the universe to that of eternal expansion, the existence being a one-way journey into the eternal night.
Her dissertation was published – Sandage ignored it – and she Ph.D. in 1968. At the same time, she and her husband adopted a boy, Alan, and later a daughter, Teresa . While in Dallas, where she raised children, she became involved with Planned Parenthood and Zero Population Growth.
Meanwhile, by dint of scientific lectures and visits to Mount Wilson, Palomar and the University of Maryland, Tinsley continues his vision. In 1972, she and three younger colleagues – James Gunn and J. Richard Gott of Princeton and David Schramm of the University of Texas at the time – attempted to summarize what they thought was evidence more and more numerous that the universe Schramm, who died in 1997, said in an interview in 1986.
"Beatrice was the glue," recalled Gunn, who said: "We were a kind young Turks who wanted to upset the establishment. " that she had done most of the writing for paper, entitled "An Unbound Universe"? The paper had an impertinent tone, far from the austere formality that had characterized the astronomical declarations before.
"Disclaimer of thrusti," began the paper citing the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. "Because the mind wants to discover by reasoning what exists in the infinity of the space that is found beyond the walls of this world, "he continued." This is my first point. In all dimensions, from this side or the other, upwards or downwards through the universe, there is no end.
In other words, the universe would expand forever, there would be no Big Crunch, no second act for the Big Bang. was rejected by the journal Nature, it was published in The Astrophysical Journal in 1974.
A year later, Sandage came to a similar conclusion, namely that the universe was not slowing enough to break up. to collapse again.There for the idea (a sentimental favorite of many astronomers) of a cyclical universe ranging from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch, like a beating heart. " happened only once, "wrote Sandage.
Tinsley was delighted." It may be a "bad science" to like the universe to be open because that it feels better, but there is in me a great pleasure to this possibility, "she writes in a letter to her father." I think I am bound to the idea of eternal expansion – com me life in a sense – more than spatial infinity. "
(Other observations a quarter of a century later, using distant explosive stars instead of galaxies as shows that the l & # 39; Expansion of the universe was actually accelerating, under the influence of what astronomers call black energy. Tinsley was right with "revenge," Larson said.
That same year, 1975, Tinsley received the Annie Jump Cannon Award, awarded by the American Association of Women's University for outstanding postdoctoral research
. Despite her growing notoriety, she did not find work in Texas. She complained to her father that she felt "rejected and undervalued intellectually".
Reluctantly, she expanded her search and took a job at Yale, attracted by the chance to work with Larson. She divorced Brian Tinsley, whom she had moved away from, and abandoned babysitting, starting at Christmas, Larson said.
It was a choice that she ended up agonizing later. When her cancer appeared, Larson said that she wondered if it was the reward of nature because she was a bad mother.
Larson said that she had tried to compensate for her absence by inviting the children to regularly visit New Haven and take them on vacation.
But it hurts, said his daughter, Teresa Tinsley, who now lives in Dallas. (Tinsley's son, Alan, lives in Phoenix.)
"He was given an ultimatum which, in my opinion, was unfair: choose a family or a career," Teresa Tinsley wrote in an email. "But it was like that at the time – women were supposed to be housewives, I'm proud that she stood firm and followed her career."
She added: " She followed her dream – a dream created when she was a very young woman, her dream of being a scientist. "
At Yale, Tinsley was the first female astronomy professor. Her position, as she wrote to her father, gave her "a sense of hope and power over the future that has escaped me for years."
In 1977, she organized and hosted a symposium bringing together world experts on the evolution of stars and galaxies. The transcribed acts, which she and Larson published, have become a classic reference for scholars.
But she did not have long to appreciate her recognition. A year later, she discovered that a ball on her leg was a melanoma.
In 1979, she brought Teresa, who was then 11 years old, to New Haven for all the time remaining. Her daughter remembered playing after school in the corridors of the astronomy department, and her mother helped her with her homework at the Yale Infirmary. Towards the end, Tinsley wrote a poem:
Let me be like Bach, creating fugues
until the feather does not move anymore.
Leave all my themes in – old light
Change and Human Value –
Always Let Their Melodies,
Evolve and Merge with Growing Unity,
Still Without erase
Never without a final agreement …
Until my mind no longer hears anymore.
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