Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a tireless innovator who correctly theorized the substance of stars, was one of them. The roaring 20s were not only regarded as a decade of economic prosperity, but also of significant scientific discoveries and achievements. 1996 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0 521 48251 8 (hbk), 0 521 48390 5 (pbk).
Payne-Gaposchkin C 1978 Personal Memoire Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 16, 1.
He visited Britain and spoke at the centenary celebrations of the Royal Astronomical Society in May 1922. This included the beginnings of commercial aviation. Against advice from Ernst Öpik in Tartu, Estonia, and from the US consul in Tallinn, she insisted in going as far as Leningrad.
There is the implication in her autobiography that Shapley played Menzel and Cecilia off against each other and it was only when Menzel succeeded Shapley in 1952 that Cecilia and Menzel found good common understanding. In 1956, under the directorship of Donald Menzel, Payne became the first women to be promoted to full professor and department chair at Harvard. Despite the inferior status of women at the observatory, Payne flourished and in 1925 became the first student to graduate from Radcliffe College, the women’s branch of Harvard University at the time. This finding was highly criticized by reviewers, such as astronomer Henry Norris Russell, leading Payne to describe her results as a possible error.
Under the direction of Harlow Shapley and Dr E. J. Sheridan (whom Payne-Gaposchkin described as a mentorThe trail she blazed into the largely male-dominated scientific community was an inspiration to many. In her final undergraduate year of 1922–23 and with the active encouragement of L J Comrie, who later became superintendent of the Nautical Almanac Office, she considered the possibility of studying astronomy in the United States. In England, F J M Stratton, though kindly enough, had thought that she could never hope to be other than an amateur astronomer. She took her part I natural sciences examinations in botany, physics and chemistry, and went on to do part II in physics in a further two years, gaining second class honours.The year 1919 was the worst of times because of the problems of recovery from the war years and of political and economic turmoil in Europe, particularly in Germany, Austria, France and Belgium.
W M Smart had supervised her work that led to her first publication in the It is my impression that, in spite of the undoubted inferior status faced by women students at Cambridge, she did pretty well there, largely thanks to her own persistence. However, the simplicity of the reversing-layer concept resulted in its being maintained over decades even to the present day. Alcock and Brown first flew across the Atlantic Ocean in 1919 and air-mail services began.In astronomy, the 100 inch Mount Wilson telescope and the 74 inch telescope at Victoria, British Columbia, were newly commissioned. Erik Gregersen is a senior editor, specializing in the physical sciences and technology. She received one of only four tickets for the lecture assigned to Newnham College, when one of the first recipients dropped out. It would seem that, owing a lot to E A Milne, she did not thoroughly grasp the way emerging radiation ought to be visualized at a time when the concept of the reversing layer was becoming obsolete. Login
The reversing-layer concept collapsed in principle around 1920 on the basis that the limb-darkening of the Sun would be quite different from that observed.