Sky & Telescope - July 2019 - 63

sucked into the war effort, fabricating optical instruments for
the armed forces, and graduate studies.
For her PhD thesis, she analyzed spectra of the variable
star Gamma Cassiopeiae. She observed in the harshest of
conditions, often alone at night in a cramped space under a
cold open dome, sometimes with the fear-inducing sounds of
ﬂying bombs going off around her. Yet she never complained,
offering the ﬁrst hint of the steely determination and thirst
for knowledge that would later deﬁne her: "Those nights,
standing or sitting on a ladder in the dome of the Wilson
reﬂector . . . fulﬁlled my early dreams," Burbidge later recalled
in a 1994 memoir.
The years immediately following World War II would turn
out to be career-deﬁning for the young astronomer. Alongside giving classes on practical astronomy on the observatory
roof - to students that included an enthusiastic undergraduate named Arthur C. Clarke - she also attended graduate
lectures in physics. There, she immediately hit it off with "an
interesting person" called Geoffrey (Geoff) Burbidge who she
would go on to marry just six months later.
From the outside, the pair made an unlikely couple. Geoff
was a large man with a truculent, impatient character, while
Margaret was so demure and quiet that Miller claims, "My

tronomy at the time, and she
tendered her resignation just a
year and a half later.

E. M. BURBIDG E E T A L. / R E VIE WS OF MODER N PHYSICS VOL.
29, NO. 4, P. 547 (1957) / A MERICA N PH YSICA L SOCIE T Y

1976
Despite, or perhaps because
of, the Annie Jump Cannon Award rejection, Burbidge was elected the ﬁrst
woman president of the AAS.
At the time, the U.S. Equal
Rights Amendment - guaranteeing the same rights for
all American citizens regardless of gender - had been
ratiﬁed by all but three states.
Burbidge put forward to
the membership the idea of
banning annual AAS meetings from being held in the
three dissenting states. She
received highly polarized
responses, but it narrowly
passed, offering a signal of
support from the AAS for
women in science.

wife always used to say 'If Queen Elizabeth ever needed a
stand-in, Margaret could do it'."
But appearances can be deceiving. Though Geoff had
strong scientiﬁc views and a penchant for a heated argu-

1983
B2FH was a transformative
paper deserving of the highest
accolades. And in 1983 this
was recognized when Fowler
was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Physics. Yet even Fowler
was shocked by the omission
of his colleagues. Hoyle could
have been left out for various
reasons: his stance on the Big
Bang theory, the various outlandish ideas he put forward in
later life, or for heavy criticism
of the committee in 1974 for
awarding Antony Hewish and
failing to recognize Jocelyn
Bell Burnell's contributions in
discovering the ﬁrst pulsar. Various commentators have since
posited that Bell Burnell's and
Burbidge's Nobel omissions
were but two of many examples
of sexism in astronomy. Burbidge remains characteristically
reserved on the subject.

p THE B2FH PAPER This seminal paper on stellar nucleosynthesis,
headed by Margaret Burbidge, was cited so often that the authors were
referred to as "B2FH." Above is a schematic diagram of the nuclear
processes by which the synthesis of elements in stars takes place. This
tour de force is 108 pages long.

s k y a n d t e l e s c o p e . c o m * J U LY 2 0 1 9

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