Remembering Vera Rubin: The Trailblazing Astrophysicist Who Confirmed the

Existence of Dark Matter

Dont shoot for the stars, we already know whats

there. Shoot for the space in between because thats
where the real mystery lies.
By Maria Popova
In his insightful reflection on the crucial difference between talent and genius,
Schopenhauer likened talent to a marksman who hits a target others cannot hit, and
genius to a marksman who hits a target others cannot see. Among humanitys rare
genius-seers was pioneering astrophysicist Vera Rubin (July 23, 1928December 25,
2016) a coruscating intellect animated by a sinewy tenacity, who overcame towering
cultural odds by the sheer force of her unbridled curiosity and rigorous devotion to
science. In confirming the existence of dark matter, Rubin revolutionized our
understanding of the universe, paved the way for modern women in science, and
recalibrated the stilted norms of her profession.
Rubin fell in love with the night sky as a young girl, but knew no astronomer, living or
dead, to hold as a role model. Eventually, she came upon a childrens book about 19thcentury trailblazer Maria Mitchell Americas first professional female astronomer
and the first woman admitted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
whose story reframed Rubins landscape of possibility and emboldened her to pursue
stargazing as a vocation rather than a hobby. It never occurred to me that I couldnt be
an astronomer, she told Alan Lightman many years later in their wonderful 1990
conversation.
Rubin received a scholarship to Vassar, where Maria Mitchell had taught the first class
of women astronomers as the first woman on the faculty nearly a century earlier. As
long as you stay away from science, you should do okay, her chauvinist high school
physics teacher counseled her upon receiving the admission news. Mercifully, she didnt
heed the unsubtle message driven by the same tenacious obsessiveness that
underlined her groundbreaking discoveries, she plunged straight into science and
graduated from Vassar in 1948 as the only astronomy major in her class. Rejected from
Princetons graduate program, which only admitted men, Rubin instead obtained her
masters degree from Cornell and Georgetown while nursing one child and pregnant
with her second. (She would go on to raise four children, all of whom would become
scientists.)
In her work on spectroscopy, Rubin drew on the revolutionary discoveries of the
Harvard computers the unheralded team of 19th-century women astronomers who
classified stellar spectra decades before women were able to vote. In 1965, she broke a
colossal glass ceiling by becoming the first woman to observe at the Palomar
Observatory, home to the worlds most powerful telescopes at the time. She went on to
do pioneering work on galaxy rotation, based on which she confirmed the existence of
dark matter a cornerstone of our modern understanding of the cosmos.

For decades, Rubin remained a tireless champion of science as a pillar of society. We

need senators who have studied physics and representatives who understand ecology,
she asserted in her electrifying 1996 Berkeley commencement address a remark of
chilling timeliness and urgency today.
That Rubin died without her Nobel Prize is nothing short of a travesty, bespeaking the
flawed cultural machinery by which such honors are meted out. But there is higherorder consolation in the wise words of astrophysicist Janna Levin, whose own career
was built on the path Rubin paved:
Scientists do not devote their lives to the sometimes lonely, agonizing, toilsome
investigation of an austere universe because they want a prize.
In the preface to Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters (public library) Rubins anthology
of essays, papers, and speeches spanning 36 years, her commencement address among
them she addresses one of the most central and most misunderstood principles of
science: that the power of not-knowing is as essential to science as it is to art and that
ignorance, rather than hindering knowledge, is the springboard for it. Rubin writes:
Scientists too seldom stress the enormity of our ignorance. Virtually everything we
know about galaxies we have learned during the last 100 years But what are the
questions for future astronomers? What questions will astronomers be asking of the
universe 100 years from now? A thousand years from now?
The questions easiest to enumerate, Rubin points out, are those identified but
unanswered by the era questions about the precise rate of expansion of the universe,
the amount of mass it contains, the nature of dark matter, and the potential for life on
other planets. But the more interesting questions, she suggests, are those we barely
know enough to ask among them, the possibility of other universes and the question
of how the detection of gravitational waves, merely a hypothetical feat at the time of her
writing, would change our understanding of the cosmos. (Weve only just answered the
latter, two decades later; as Rubin anticipated, the answer has profoundly altered our
understanding of the universe.)
Echoing her formative role model The world of learning is so broad, and the
human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize
only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us, Maria Mitchell had marveled in
her diary more than a century earlier Rubin writes:
As we peer into the universe we are peering into our past, but our eyes are weak and
we have not yet seen to great distances. No one promised that we should live in the era
that would unravel the mysteries of the cosmos. The edge of the universe is far beyond
our grasp. Like Columbus, perhaps like the Vikings, we have peered into a new world
and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still
more mysteries of the universe remain hidden. Their discovery awaits the adventurous
scientists of the future. I like it this way.
In early 2016, halfway through her eighty-seventh year, Rubin joined Twitter for
approximately twenty-four hours, over the course of which she tweeted exactly six
times: five aphoristic thoughts on human life and the universe, one piece of dark matter

news, and one warm congratulatory note to a laureate of the Nobel Prize she herself was
never awarded a testament to her singleminded scientific devotion and her
unbegrudging generosity of spirit.
To commemorate this irreplaceable woman, Ive joined forces with artist Debbie
Millman who also helped me commemorate Oliver Sacks on an original piece of
art based on Rubins final Twitter aphorism: Dont shoot for the stars, we already
know whats there. Shoot for the space in between because thats where the real mystery
lies, rendered in felt letters over the hand-painted abstract text of Rubins
groundbreaking 1980 paper on galaxy rotation. The piece is available as an art print,
canvas print, and stationery cards, with all proceeds benefiting the Association for
Women in Science in Rubins name.
For a richer taste of Rubins genius and her extraordinary life-story, see her conversation
with Alan Lightman about dark matter, women in science, and our never-ending quest to
know the universe.