Today’s post is a bit outside the normal orbit of Thinking Meat, but it touches on a couple of themes that are dear to my heart: the immense value of humankind’s pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the urgent need to encourage any human who is so inclined to pursue a scientific career (and conversely, the folly of discouraging or ignoring half of our brain pool on the basis of gender). In particular, in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, I’m focusing on the brilliant contributions of cosmologist Beatrice Hill Tinsley. In her regrettably short life, she accomplished pioneering work that opened up a new field in astronomy.
Beatrice Hill was born in England in 1941 and grew up mostly in New Zealand, where her family moved after World War II. She excelled at not only mathematics and languages but also music; of the possibilities open to her, she chose to focus on astrophysics. In 1961, she completed a master’s program in physics at Canterbury University and married fellow student Brian Tinsley. In 1963, she moved with him to Dallas, where he had a job at the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies.
She got her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, 200 miles from Dallas. Despite the demands of the long commute, complicated toward the end of her degree program by the adoption of a baby boy, her PhD thesis was, according to fellow astronomer Robert C. Kennicutt, Jr., “one of the most interdisciplinary works of its day, and certainly one of the boldest graduate thesis projects ever undertaken.” (Not only that, she completed it in only a few years, beginning her PhD studies in 1964 and finishing her dissertation in 1966.) She was the first to model the ways that galaxies change over time, using mathematical calculations and computer simulations to examine changes in their chemical composition, luminosity, and color. This ambitious project wove together many strands of both observational and theoretical astronomy. This and her later work had ramifications for our understanding of the size and age of the universe, in addition to helping establish the field of galactic evolution within astronomy.
Her academic career in cosmology was semi-stalled for a while by the difficulty of finding a position at the University of Texas at Dallas and by the need to care for the two children she and her husband had adopted. (UTD treated her particularly shabbily; although she designed its new astronomy department at the university’s request, her letter applying for the job of heading the department received no reply.) After what was by all accounts a difficult internal struggle between her commitment to her family and her realization that it was impossible to fulfill her scientific promise in Dallas, she divorced her husband, leaving the children in his custody, and took a position at Yale, eventually becoming the first female professor of astronomy there.
Tinsley’s life was tragically cut short by melanoma. Diagnosed in 1978, she kept working through her illness, making the best use of the time she had left to her. She died on March 23, 1981. She managed to pack an incredible amount of valuable work into her lifetime, including authoring or co-authoring around 100 papers in her 14-year academic career, mentoring young scientists, and co-organizing a pivotal conference on galactic evolution.
Her story is particularly moving to me because of the extremely difficult choices she faced regarding her children. My own children lived with their father during a significant portion of their childhood, and although logically the choice made perfect sense, as he could provide a better home for them than I could at the time, and I stayed in the same town as they were and saw them every week, emotionally it was deeply stressful. (Tinsley’s father reported that she wondered if the separation from the children triggered the cancer; the very fact that she wondered this indicates how painful the decision must have been for her.)
As a species, we have got to keep on finding better ways of encouraging young women to focus on their own life’s work, whatever it is, with the same seriousness and commitment that young men are expected to bring to theirs, and of combining meaningful work with parenthood (for those who choose it—and it should definitely be a choice, not an unthinking default).
didn’t know the story, thanks for sharing.