Interview with Margaret Burbidge by David DeVorkin at the University of California, Santa Cruz July 13, 1978

Transcript

David DEVORKIN:

I know that you were born in 1919 in Davenport, England.

Margaret BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

I would like to know something about your family background and your early home life.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. My father was a lecturer in chemistry in the Manchester School of Technology and my mother had been a student there. I think she was one of only two women students there in chemistry. I was born there. Then my father gave up that work and turned to industrial chemistry. He was chiefly interested in organic chemistry and rubber chemistry, and he had a patent that he sold for quite a lot of money. From this, he decided to go into industrial chemistry.

DE VORKIN:

While he was a lecturer at Manchester?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Was he able to capitalize on it?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Or did it revert to Manchester?

BURBIDGE:

No, he was able to capitalize. Actually I'm not quite sure. It could have been after we moved to London. We moved to London I think when I was about two or just under two. So I have no recollection of living in Manchester, although we used to go visit the family that was still there, all through my childhood. So then, we were settled in London, and my mother, with a scientific background, had always expected both her daughters (I had a sister) to have a career of some sort, and she didn't know what.

DE VORKIN:

Is this an older or younger sister?

BURBIDGE:

Younger. She expected us certainly to earn our own living and not to be just housewives. I learned to read very early, because it gave you some power, I think, to be able to read. You weren't dependent on people reading stories to you.

DE VORKIN:

Did you have that feeling at that time?

BURBIDGE:

That I wanted to be independent yes. If I wanted to hear a story, I didn't want to have to ask somebody, or cajole them to read to me if they didn't want to.

DE VORKIN:

What kind of stories did you read to yourself?

BURBIDGE:

Well, I know that before I went to school I went to school when I was six I could read TREASURE ISLAND. I was reading TREASURE ISLAND before then, and I was really terrified, deliciously terrified, by Blind Pugh and the Black Spot and things like that.

DE VORKIN:

Yes. Was it all literature that you were reading at that time? Early literature?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Your mother was interested in having her daughters pursue scientific interests?

BURBIDGE:

She never pushed us. And my sister never went in that direction at all. She wasn't at all interested, and I was never steered in that direction. But I was interested myself and also in numbers. I had an early interest in numbers. I was a very shy child. It was something of a torment to go to school at first.

DE VORKIN:

Really? Because of the shyness?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

What kind of school did you go to?

BURBIDGE:

It was a school that took children only up to age nine. What one would have called kindergarten, except it overlapped with what you call in this country grade school. It did take people younger than six.

DE VORKIN:

Was it privately funded school?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, it was.

DE VORKIN:

What school was it?

BURBIDGE:

It was called Heysham. It was in a large old house in Hempstead. We lived in Hempstead. It was somewhat nerve wracking going there. But again I felt that I had something to withdraw to in that I could read different books from what the other kids were reading.

DE VORKIN:

Different books?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Well, they were starting to learn to read. And I already could read and read pretty well anything I wanted.

DE VORKIN:

How did your interests develop once you started going to school?

BURBIDGE:

Well, then, one of the early things in those days was to learn the multiplication tables. You learned them by rote, you know, at an age when it's very easy to memorize things. So I guess that started my interest in numbers, and I began to be interested in large numbers. By that time, my mother was trying to get me used to being with other children. So I was taken to a dancing class. It was one of these eurhythmic free motion experiences it wasn't regular dancing but it was moving to music.

DE VORKIN:

Exercises too?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, and doing other things, acting out things to music, getting a feeling for different moods in music. But it meant doing something in front of people, and therefore I didn't like it at all. But I remember when she used to walk me to this place in Hempstead, as a kind of consolation to myself, I used to ask her what certain numbers were. I started with, "Oh, what is a thousand times a thousand, that was a million." Then I went on to larger and larger numbers. I allowed myself to ask one question each time we went to this wretched dancing class.

DE VORKIN:

Was this sort of an inducement on her part to get you to go?

BURBIDGE:

Well, yes. Then, when we got up to octillion and when I asked what the next one was, she said, "There isn't any larger number," because I guess she couldn't think of the next word up.

DE VORKIN:

You were just really at that time playing with words?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, but I was writing out the numbers, the number of zeroes. And it used to give me enormous fascination to get a piece of paper and to write 1 followed by 32 or 64 zeroes or 120 or whatever number of zeroes, and just contemplate that large number.

DE VORKIN:

Interesting. Did you ever wonder how long it would take to count that number?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. I did. And I used to count the steps walking to school. And when we had our equivalent of "show and tell," I remember saying, "it took so many steps," I counted the steps to school. Then I remember some wretched little boy said, "Oh, that's nothing, it took me a million steps to get to school." I remember being absolutely outraged, because I knew darned well it wasn't.

DE VORKIN:

At that time if you were equating numbers with steps, you were equating numbers with distance.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

And, if it took you "x" number of steps to get to school, how far it would be to take a million steps, or octillion?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. I used to think about that. Yes. And then, when my mother said, "There's no number larger than octillion," I remember being desolated. I thought, there's got to be a number larger than that. I said, "There has to be. It's not possible. Because you can always add one, just going on adding one, and you're going to get to the next larger number eventually."

DE VORKIN:

Did you ever feel that she was just frustrated?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I did. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

In using it as distance, did this get you interested in the distance to the moon, the distance to the sun?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, only I didn't know anything about that, at that stage. There was a series of books called the WORLD BOOK OF SCIENCE. These were children's books, with pictures. It was a series, and I guess there was something about the moon, and that indeed, that was fascinating. But the idea of distances to start hadn't yet dawned on me.

DE VORKIN:

I have from my father's collection a children's series on science, and in one of them, there is an artist's plate of railroad trains moving off to the different planets and to the sun, and it was indicated, if the train was moving at a certain rate, how long it would take to get to the sun, to the planets, to the stars. Was this one of the plates?

BURBIDGE:

I don't believe so. I don't remember that. That doesn't stick in my memory. I know that railroad tracks also had a link in my mind with distance. So it might have.

DE VORKIN:

Well, let's follow both your home life and your early school life.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

And find out when was your first contact directly with science, the idea of science and what people did in science.

BURBIDGE:

Well, let me backtrack a little bit in age, because there is another landmark that I remember, which I've told other people, and now they seem to ask me quite often about it. It's the first time I really noticed the stars. A small child brought up in London doesn't get to see much of the sky, because it's so often cloudy in the winter when it's dark enough, early enough in the evening, to be looking at the sky. So you don't. It's not like living out here and just seeing the stars. The first time I consciously remember really noticing the stars was the summer that I was four, and we were going on a night crossing to France, for summer vacation. And we were taking the long crossing. I began to feel seasick during the night, and so to take my mind off that, I was lifted up to look out of the port hole on the upper bunk to see the stars. You know how they are at sea, on a clear night. These twinkling lights and then became another fascination to me, tracking down any kind of twinkling light and enjoying twinkling lights. So then around that time or shortly after that, within the next year or so again, before I went to school I used to be taken out on walks by my father, and sometimes this was particularly in summer vacation we'd see something gleaming in the distance. And I'd say "Let's go and find out what that is." It would often be some discarded tin can or piece of broken glass. And it would perhaps disappear, the gleam, before we got to it. It became something of a game tracking down these gleaming lights in the distance.

DE VORKIN:

I see a very strong parallel. That's marvelous. How far did you live from the Heath?

BURBIDGE:

Very close to Hempstead Heath.

DE VORKIN:

Did you see the stars at all from the Heath? Or were you ever out at night there?

BURBIDGE:

I think we didn't go out at night there.

DE VORKIN:

There is a little observatory there.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, there is, and I never went to that. I was never taken to that.

DE VORKIN:

That's too bad.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I know. But the Heath was a playground. We lived very close to it.

DE VORKIN:

So, this was your first glimpse of the stars.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Did your parents talk to you about what the stars were?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, a little bit. Not very much. Except that for both my 12th and 13th birthdays, my grandfather my mother's father knew that I was interested in the stars, and knew also that Sir James Jeans was some kind of distant relative on my mother's side so he gave me birthday presents on two successive years he gave me James Jean's books.

DE VORKIN:

This was a little later.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. I was 12 and 13. What happened between about age six and about then, I don't remember, in connection with astronomy.

DE VORKIN:

There was nothing in your early schooling that got you interested?

BURBIDGE:

No. But there was a continuing interest in mathematics which was developing. I used to think quite a lot about mathematics. One time later on, I thought that was what I would study. Shortly before I went to university, I thought that was possibly going to be my field.

DE VORKIN:

Your father during this period of time remained in industrial chemistry?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, he did, except he began to be ill. He had a lot of bad health. He was quite a bit older than my mother, and he ended up bedridden.

DE VORKIN:

How old were you at that time?

BURBIDGE:

Well, he died when I was 17.

DE VORKIN:

When you were 12 and 13, was he still working?

BURBIDGE:

No. Not really.

DE VORKIN:

What form of income did your family have at that time?

BURBIDGE:

We were living off his patents.

DE VORKIN:

That maintained the family?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Those must have been rather good patents. What was it?

BURBIDGE:

Well, there were several. There was one on vulcanizing rubber. The hardening process of rubber.

DE VORKIN:

He invented that?

BURBIDGE:

Well, he invented the fast way of doing that. It used to take a very long time. Then he invented the kind of coating which you put over medicine bottles, it used to be called "Duroprene."

DE VORKIN:

Well, I can see they were very useful. OK, moving on to the point where you read the books by James Jeans, was one THE MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And then the distance business fell into place. Then I realized the stars were at these kinds of distances, these numbers that I'd been fascinated with. And at that time, I thought the most wonderful thing would be to be able to actually measure the distances to the stars. And I didn't so much think about finding out what they were made of or what was going on in them, it was just their geometry, where they were. How big was the universe.

DE VORKIN:

At that point you were going to what kind of a school?

BURBIDGE:

Again, I went to a private school in Hempstead, which closed down when I was about 13, I think. Around about that time. The old lady who was in charge of it was just too old and it closed down. Then I went to a regular high school except that it was a private school. It was called the Francis Holland Church of England School. It was in London near Regents Park.

DE VORKIN:

That's quite far downtown.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, so I would have to walk down, and take a bus. Actually to start with the first few years, there was a school car that went around and picked up kids. It wasn't a bus but it would take about a dozen kids.

DE VORKIN:

Did you have science at this school?

BURBIDGE:

Not very much. We had general science to start with, physics and chemistry, at a very elementary state. Then when we were getting ready for university entrance, the thing to take was botany. That was what one had to study in detail. It was the only science they presented there.

DE VORKIN:

Was everyone expected to go on to university at this school?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. I think so. Yes. Or to have a career of some sort.

DE VORKIN:

They were very career oriented.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. But it was mostly oriented toward the humanities, arts or languages. People used to go to Oxford from there quite a lot. I think their major goal was to get people into Oxford.

DE VORKIN:

I imagine your family was surviving reasonably well, with the patents and all?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Was there any question whether you'd be able to go to college or not?

BURBIDGE:

No, there wasn't. No. In those days, we had a fairly comfortable life financially it was a fairly comfortable life. We had a house in Hempstead with two maids. When my sister and I were young, we had a nanny. Real old "between-the-wars" kind of style.

DE VORKIN:

Oh yes. Did your sister go to the university also?

BURBIDGE:

No. She didn't.

DE VORKIN:

That was a conscious choice of hers.

BURBIDGE:

It was a conscious choice, but it was also the coming of World War II. She went into the Women's Royal Naval Service, the WRENS. She never did have an interest in science. She was not particularly good at mathematics. She was much better on the side of writing, and she used to write. She did very well in English composition and those kinds of things in school, which I did not do so well in.

DE VORKIN:

So your strength definitely is in mathematics?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Did you find yourself interested in physics at this time?

BURBIDGE:

Oh yes. I had passed university entrance when I was 15.

DE VORKIN:

Is that early?

BURBIDGE:

It was early. Yes. In that kind of a school, you just went at the pace that you were at. There wasn't the rigid business of trying to keep you in the same age group. And so I had some time at the end of school, when my mother felt that it wouldn't be suitable for me to go to university yet that it would be too much. I'd be plunged into a life that I wasn't really old enough for. So therefore I would stay on at school and do what I wanted to, more or less.

DE VORKIN:

I see. But you could have gone when you were 16.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. But I went actually when I was 17, just after my 17th birthday. But in staying on in school, we had a succession of good mathematics teachers. There was a good teacher, and so I went on doing math.

DE VORKIN:

What was the teacher's name?

BURBIDGE:

I don't remember. Her name is gone. But I do remember the science teacher, that was Miss Barter. Mary Pearson Barter. I remember her very well.

DE VORKIN:

Is there some reason why you remember her?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. She was a very strict teacher, and when I'd been younger in school, she had a rather piercing, grating voice, and the younger children were somewhat terrified of her. And if you did anything naughty, you know, she was the one that you feared most catching you. I can remember being sent out of class once, for actually doing my math homework in an English class being caught doing it and not listening.

DE VORKIN:

She was the science teacher?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. So I was sent out of class, and I remember kind of hovering around in the corridor. It was the first time I'd been sent out of class and I was a little nervous. And then I heard Miss Barter's voice coming down the corridor around the corner. So I began scurrying away so she wouldn't catch me. But later, toward the end of my school period there, I had quite a different view of her and admired her very much.

DE VORKIN:

Did she teach laboratory science?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, she did. And although they had no physics teaching there, she made available to me a set of physics books. First of all, she showed me what books to get in physics. She helped me get some textbooks so I could study by myself. She gave me the run of the laboratory, including some equipment they had for simple experiments in electricity and magnetism, and some lenses and prisms and things where one could set up a little light path experiment and lay out the things that were in the book. And so she was very understanding in that sense.

DE VORKIN:

There was no astronomy though or anything like that.

BURBIDGE:

No, there wasn't.

DE VORKIN:

Was this a girls' school?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Those two questions didn't go together necessarily. I just had the afterthought.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. I should have said that it was.

DE VORKIN:

You went to a school that did send graduates on to university. There was no question that a woman would go to university? You grew up in an environment where there was no question?

BURBIDGE:

That's right. And I think there was much less prejudice against women, in England, going into science. I mean, the things one hears of here, girls being actively discouraged from pursuing physics, was not so. Certainly it was not so in that school. And I think it was not the general prevailing atmosphere among the people that we had contact with outside of school.

DE VORKIN:

What kinds of contacts did your family have? You mentioned that James Jeans was a distant relative.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Was there any contact with him?

BURBIDGE:

I never met him. No. But it was known that he was.

DE VORKIN:

What kind of people did your mother socialize with? What kind of friends did you have in the area where you grew up?

BURBIDGE:

There was my set of school friends, and my particularly close school friends. Then there were neighbors.

DE VORKIN:

Were there any influences that would have helped your interest in math and science? Were any of your friends interested in science?

BURBIDGE:

No, actually there weren't, no.

DE VORKIN:

So it was really an internal feeling that had developed with you?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

But through prep school at least, if we can call it that, you were interested in mathematics.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Now, let's talk about the time when you came to choose a university. How did that process develop?

BURBIDGE:

That came about because my mother still wanted me to live at home. She didn't want me to go to either Oxford or Cambridge. And so, she decided that I should go to University of London. Now, there were a number of choices there, and just how she picked upon University College, I don't remember.

DE VORKIN:

Was it entirely her choice? Did you discuss the matter with her?

BURBIDGE:

She discussed it. I don't know who she would have discussed it with.

DE VORKIN:

None of the teachers at your school?

BURBIDGE:

Probably she did. She probably discussed it with Miss Barter. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Not with you.

BURBIDGE:

She discussed it with me, but I didn't have any input. I mean, I didn't know anything about what the different colleges in London had to offer.

DE VORKIN:

Had you overcome any of your shyness at that time?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, quite a lot, with children, but not in new environments. A new environment was always a nerve wracking thing. In fact, my mother went with me, this would be the summer at the end of my 16th year, shortly before my birthday, and she took me to University College to see the people there.

DE VORKIN:

This is after you'd had the year on your own at prep school.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Devoted primarily to mathematics, I assume?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, doing mathematics and Latin. I liked Latin. That was one of my subjects that I really did enjoy.

DE VORKIN:

So the choice of university was pretty much decided. And you don't really know how your mother finally decided on University College?

BURBIDGE:

No. I do remember though that it had two little domes out in the courtyard.

DE VORKIN:

University College did?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And it turned out to be the one place that you could really study astronomy. You could actually take a course in it.

DE VORKIN:

Do you think this was something in her mind, that maybe you should study some astronomy?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I think perhaps so.

DE VORKIN:

Was she the one way back on the boat crossing that showed you the stars?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

That was your mother. Did your father take any interest in your training?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, but I don't have so much recollection of him. And I think the fact of his bad health, his being an invalid, reduced his impact that he might have had.

DE VORKIN:

It sounds like you're very different from your sister.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

But did you play a lot as children?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, we played a lot. We also fought a lot.

DE VORKIN:

But would you say that your childhood was relatively solitary, other than that?

BURBIDGE:

No, I had close friends. Usually, a succession of close friends that always meant a lot to me.

DE VORKIN:

Let's move on to University College now.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

What was the structure? I'm still learning about University College and University of London. It seems to be a university spread all around London with different colleges and each college was relatively autonomous.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, but the examinations are uniform. It's the same set of examinations for all the different subjects.

DE VORKIN:

You entered in 1935?

BURBIDGE:

No, 1936.

DE VORKIN:

At that time did you enter directly in mathematics?

BURBIDGE:

You had to take four subjects to start with, and I took pure and applied mathematics and physics and chemistry.

DE VORKIN:

How did your freshman or first year begin?

BURBIDGE:

Well, it was a very different environment, because I'd been at a girls' school, and here for the first time I was in a coeducational establishment, and fell prey to all the usual things.

DE VORKIN:

What kind of things? Social?

BURBIDGE:

Social, yes, and having a pretty unhappy love affair with a student there.

DE VORKIN:

Was it anything that we should talk about for the development of your interests?

BURBIDGE:

No, I don't think so. He was in geology. He was some three or four years older than I was. It led to my getting to know a bit of geology, because I used to help him with some of his work.

DE VORKIN:

Did it affect your studies at all?

BURBIDGE:

At one point it did. I wasn't working very hard. And again, there was one lecturer there who took a particular interest in me, Constance Rigby, she's still around. She became a Fellow of University College, a couple or so years after I did. This is a sort of honorary thing that they do for people who were there either as students or on the faculty. She taught pure mathematics. One time, I was coming home from college at the end of the day, and I used to go on the tube from Hempstead Station to Warren St., which is very near the University College. And I was coming back, coming up on the elevator I think at Hempstead Station, and she was there also. I don't know what she was doing there. I don't think she lived in Hempstead. But she said, "Hello, Margaret. I've been meaning to try to catch you alone and have a word with you." I thought, "What's coming?" And then she gave me a lecture about the fact that I wasn't working. She said, "Things come easily to you. But you've still got to work." I did take that to heart. I remember shortly after that, we had one set of exams coming up, and it was going to be right after Whitson.

DE VORKIN:

I'm not acquainted with that.

BURBIDGE:

It's a holiday. It's the next public holiday after Easter, and we were going to spend the long weekend in the country, in Lewis, actually, where we would go to Klinburne to the opera. I took my work to study for the exams. I spent a fair amount of time during that weekend studying, and so everything came out all right at the exam.

DE VORKIN:

What year was this again?

BURBIDGE:

That must have been 1938, I think.

DE VORKIN:

The first courses you took two math, one chemistry, one physics.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Was there anything in particular in there that helped jell your interests as you moved along, or were they simply courses to take, cover, finish and go on?

BURBIDGE:

Well, by then I was wondering what I would then major in. And I was still undecided between mathematics and chemistry, I was thinking. I wasn't thinking so much of physics at that time. But during that year, I guess, I discovered the astronomy courses, and discovered that these little observatories, these little domes out in front in the courtyard, were actually doing something. People were there in the evenings and classes were going on there.

DE VORKIN:

Do you recall what fascinated you about it? Or was it your longstanding interest?

BURBIDGE:

It was my longstanding interest. And then I made inquiries, and I found out that after this first year, when I had to pick whatever I was going to major in, I could then pick astronomy, and I did. Astronomy with an applied mathematics minor.

DE VORKIN:

At that point you'd been reading or had been exposed to the Jeans books?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

What other books had you been reading in astronomy?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. I'd been reading other things, again on a popular level, Eddington's popular books. And general descriptive books in astronomy also.

DE VORKIN:

I see. Had you read Russell, Dugan and Stewart?

BURBIDGE:

No, I hadn't.

DE VORKIN:

OK. Well, that's certainly not popular. That's getting into serious work.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

But with the Eddington and Jeans books, of course, we have them working very, very strongly on the meaning of the New Cosmology.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Oh, there was another thing that I was very interested in, and that was quantum mechanics, and that side of physics.

DE VORKIN:

You got this through Eddington's books primarily?

BURBIDGE:

No, Max Born.

DE VORKIN:

Which book of his?

BURBIDGE:

THE RESTLESS UNIVERSE.

DE VORKIN:

What was it about that that fascinated you?

BURBIDGE:

The new look at physics, that was different from what I'd been doing on my own at school and had been doing the first year in college, which was more classical physics.

DE VORKIN:

You were not exposed at that time to quantum theory?

BURBIDGE:

No.

DE VORKIN:

But you knew of its existence?

BURBIDGE:

That's right.

DE VORKIN:

You still decided for astronomy.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Did you see the application of physics to astronomy?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Now I began to see that the stars were not just something which were describing the geometry of the universe, but were individual things that one wanted to understand the physics of, find out what they're made of and what's going on in them.

DE VORKIN:

To your recollection, who did you discuss these ideas in astronomy with?

BURBIDGE:

Well, I suppose with the man who was running the astronomy program there. That was C. C. L. Gregory.

DE VORKIN:

Was he accessible to you when you were an undergraduate?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. He as a very accessible teacher. He was a good teacher, and a person who took great interest in his students. He was good on both the mathematical side and the practical side. But I suppose I would put his ability on the practical side ahead of theoretical qualities, and so it was he who first taught me things like how to make accurate measurements in astronomy.

DE VORKIN:

By the early forties you were working on parallax work. Was this his basic research?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. It was he who encouraged me to do this. Right after I'd got my bachelor's degree, then the thing was to look into a job. And the first thing I thought of and the first application I made for a job, was to somebody to whom quite a number of Gregory's students went, and that was Comrie, the man who made the mathematical tables. And this being before computers, he employed a lot of people who would do all the hand calculations for tables and so on. This was something of a time of turmoil, the beginning of the early part of the European World War II, and so, I applied for this job and I got it. Comrie was a strange person. On the very first day he took me out to lunch. I thought this was kind of a social thing, making a new employee welcome. But something nasty came through some side that I decided I didn't want to have anything more to do with, and so I quit after that one day.

DE VORKIN:

Was it a personal thing?

BURBIDGE:

Personal thing. I thought he had designs on me. That he was, in other words, a dirty old man. (Laughs)

DE VORKIN:

That's fascinating.

BURBIDGE:

So anyway, I quit.

DE VORKIN:

He really did a service for astronomy. (Laughter)

BURBIDGE:

So then I found that I could enroll as a graduate student and be working also at University of London Observatory.

DE VORKIN:

Was there a need to work at that time? Did you feel you had to support yourself?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. There was still not a financial need, but yes, the expectation was there. My mother still expected me to be independent and therefore I should be supporting myself, now that I'd got the degree.

DE VORKIN:

Is there anything else about your undergraduate years that we should cover, in your training, the types of courses, development of your interests? That sort of thing? Did you go to any Royal Astronomical Society Meetings by that time?

BURBIDGE:

No. The first one I went to, I think, was after I'd got my degree, after I'd got my bachelor's.

DE VORKIN:

So then University College can be thought of as just taking courses, becoming aware of astronomy.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And getting to use those little telescopes.

DE VORKIN:

What sort of telescopes were they?

BURBIDGE:

They were a 6-inch and a 4-inch. The 4-inch was a transit circle. So you just learned to take transit stars and learned the whole procedure: errors of the instrument, alignment, making accurate settings. We did a lot of spherical astronomy. And W. H. Smart was in fact the external examiner for the degree.

DE VORKIN:

He was at Cambridge at that time?

BURBIDGE:

I think he was. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

So other than that one external examiner, you had no contact with other astronomers, other than Gregory.

BURBIDGE:

I think that's right. Gregory felt that they didn't have much going in the way of spectroscopy at University College, so he would send his students to Imperial College.

DE VORKIN:

With Alfred Fowler?

BURBIDGE:

No, it was H. Dingle and R. H. Pearse of molecular spectroscopy.

DE VORKIN:

So you had no contact with Fowler?

BURBIDGE:

No. I didn't. But Gregory had had a lot of contact, and I guess that's why he sent his students there. I think he himself had been a student of Alfred Fowler.

DE VORKIN:

I'm interested in Alfred Fowler myself. He was an associate of Lockyer's.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

He was the one that really broke away from Lockyer. BURBIDGE. Yes. And I guess that is right, and he had a big influence on Gregory, and Gregory had been a student of his.

DE VORKIN:

I see. Yet there was no spectroscopy at University College?

BURBIDGE:

That's right.

DE VORKIN:

Is there a reason for that? Funding?

BURBIDGE:

I think it was funding, and the small number of staff they had in astronomy, and Gregory's feeling that it was better done at Imperial College, and it was easy enough for students to just go on the tube to South Kensington.

DE VORKIN:

So you took a course from Dingle.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

How did you react to him? Because he was very fascinated with cosmology.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, but he wasn't talking about that at all. It was pure spectroscopy. And so was Pearse's. And it was both theoretical and practical. There was a lab where we would do experiments with spectrographs and spectral lines and so on.

DE VORKIN:

On the theoretical end, though, you were exposed to quantum mechanics at this time?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

How did your interest there develop? Did you find spectroscopy a very powerful and interesting area?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I did.

DE VORKIN:

You took that job with Comrie, which has nothing to do with spectroscopy or anything else.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Was this purely a vehicle or did you see it as actually the beginning of your career?

BURBIDGE:

No, I saw it as a vehicle, the thing that I ought to do. I ought to start earning money. I ought to have some kind of a job. The world was seeming to turn upside down, with the war coming.

DE VORKIN:

Was there anything interesting about Dingle? Did you have any special contacts with him, in your interest?

BURBIDGE:

No. He was rather aloof from his students. He gave the impression of being a very precise and rather cold person, not at all like Gregory. I mean, Gregory could get angry about something or angry with a piece of equipment that went wrong, and was a very human person.

DE VORKIN:

Let's move on to the point where you quit working with Comrie. What did you do then?

BURBIDGE:

Well, then I went back to Gregory. And I found out that, I could get a paid studentship, and work for a Ph.D., working at University of London Observatory.

DE VORKIN:

Did he think it peculiar that you only worked a day for Comrie?

BURBIDGE:

He understood, actually. I told him enough so that he understood. I think he knew he perhaps knew Comrie. (Laughs)

DE VORKIN:

So you went back to school, basically.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

What was your job at that time?

BURBIDGE:

It was to look after the instruments at University of London Observatory, which had a 24-inch refractor and an 18-inch refractor on the same mounting. That was the telescope that was used for parallax work.

DE VORKIN:

24-inch refractor? A long-focus refractor?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. It was the old Radcliffe refractor. And it had been moved from Oxford. It had never operated very satisfactorily in Oxford, and it turned out that there was one bearing that was not quite circular. Gregory discovered this and got it put right and it worked very, very well. He got it for essentially no money because they didn't want it. They were moving the Radcliffe Observatory to South Africa anyway.

DE VORKIN:

Yes. This was a Grubb Parsons telescope?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And then there was also a 24-inch reflector called the Wilson Reflector, which again Gregory had acquired from a man in Ireland. He'd gone and personally charmed this man into giving this telescope to University of London, and he'd himself pretty well set it up.

DE VORKIN:

He was a real entrepreneur.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. I regard him as the founder of that small observatory.

DE VORKIN:

At Mill Hill?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

So this was your first contact with serious professional astronomy?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

He put you in charge of it?

BURBIDGE:

Well, he started me working with it. He said, "There are three things you can do. You can do astrometry. You can do spectroscopy. Or you can do photometry. We have the setup to do any of those things at this observatory." I chose spectroscopy, although, you see, the astrometry had interested me, in the way of getting distances. But I was now more interested in finding out the properties of the stars. So I started then doing spectroscopy, and working on Be stars.

DE VORKIN:

How did you choose Be stars in particular? That's an interesting choice. There were some bright ones?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, there were some bright ones. And there was one particular bright one that was undergoing one of its outbursts, gamma Cassiopeia.

DE VORKIN:

Which is the star you did published work on. ^[1]

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Anyway, another thing was that the lenses of both refractors, the 18-inch and the 24-inch were valuable enough that one didn't want to leave them up in the telescope. So we took them out of the tube and put them down in the base of the pier. There was a hollow inside of the pier, that was separated from the outer part, and they seemed to be fairly safe there from bomb damage. And it was thought that the mirror of the Wilson Telescope was not that precious, and one could continue to operate that.

DE VORKIN:

So during the war, parallax work ceased.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Had there been a program?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, there had. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Gregory was running that?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And a man called Pring. Now, Pring had gone in the Army, and the long time technician there, who had been trained by Gregory from when he was a 14 year old boy had gone in the Air Force, and he was kind of an engineer technician working on planes in the Air Force. So it was my job to keep things in order at the observatory, keep the instruments going, and at night time, to do my own observations. Then we started some war work there. Gregory went in the Admiralty. He was one of the scientific people working on sort of classified things in the Admiralty.

DE VORKIN:

Do you know what he did?

BURBIDGE:

Oh, he had to do with navigation, the business of navigating near the Pole. In those days, there were some disastrous mistakes made, I think. Well, before the kind of navigational schemes that one has nowadays, when it was still mostly done by star settings, as you get toward the Pole things can go very badly wrong.

DE VORKIN:

That's for sure.

BURBIDGE:

There were other things to do with weapons that he was working on, but it was classified work so he didn't talk about it.

DE VORKIN:

And you never found out what he did. But he worked for the Admiralty.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

What did Pring do, do you recall?

BURBIDGE:

Pring was just a regular Army officer. In the infantry.

DE VORKIN:

Did he survive the war?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, he did.

DE VORKIN:

What was the war work that was done at Mill Hill?

BURBIDGE:

Well, there had been an instrument firm that Gregory had always dealt with called Cassella, for example, spectrum measuring machines were made by Cassella and so, he'd had a long contact with them, and they were doing work for the Ministry of Supply, a variety of instrumental work. They had some things that they wanted to subcontract, fairly small things, a bit tedious for them to do. And so they subcontracted these to Gregory to do, or to have me do at the University of London Observatory.

DE VORKIN:

What were they?

BURBIDGE:

One was a set of range finders, of a somewhat new design. There were two prisms in a head that rotated. You would see two images of a plane, and you'd line them up. At the other end of the tube was a little graticle, at the front end of the tube there was a prism and the two lenses a pair of rotating prisms and two lenses. And the back end was a little scale with a needle pointer. They'd been given a set of lenses by the Ministry of Supply to make some few hundreds of these. They were easily held in the hand. They were quickly rotated. You could very quickly get a reading on a plane, and see, by making the wing tips of the two images made by the prisms touch, and looking at the pointer, you could get a setting.

DE VORKIN:

You assembled pre-made parts?

BURBIDGE:

The parts were pre-made, but the lenses were not uniform focal length. So every one of these brass tubes had to be turned down on a lathe individually. First of all, you had to solder the pointer on the scale, and then you had to get that in focus by turning down the end of the tube, and you'd have the lenses in the head, and you had to get the tube the right length to get this thing in focus. So each one had to be done individually on the lathe. And there were all these other steps, like the insides of the tubes had to be blacked, and low temperature solder had to be used, because the prisms were held in already with normal solder, they were already in place.

DE VORKIN:

So you basically did the final fabrication of these rangefinders?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Giving each one a personal touch.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And then the other thing was, some rectangles of fairly thick plate glass, with two little etched holes, one slightly larger than the other, which had to be filled with black. These were used in the stereoscopic arrangements for serial reconnaissance photographs. And these little holes had to be of certain size. They had already been etched but they had to be filled with some kind of black enamel and baked, so they could rub over paper and be handled and this wouldn't come out. And we had to do experiments. Cassella had not found a suitable kind of black enamel to put in these, so we did some experiments and found that a particular kind of oil, actually, a lavender oil and a powdered black enamel would work. If you made a mixture and under a microscope filled these little dots, these little holes, and then they were transported carefully to the firing ovens that Cassella had for baking, the lavender oil didn't sputter as badly as the other kind of oil. Sometimes we got them back and there would be little sputterings out that had to be touched up again under a microscope.

DE VORKIN:

Did you work with other people on these?

BURBIDGE:

No. I was doing that all by myself.

DE VORKIN:

How did you arrive at the lavender oil? Was this some kind of empirical technique?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, well, I think Cassella had suggested a number of different kinds of oils, and we just ordered these and tried them out.

DE VORKIN:

That's interesting. Did you do anything else on this order during the war?

BURBIDGE:

No. I didn't do any mathematical work. And I didn't go in the service. This was the time my sister was in the WRENS. I considered doing that, but I would rather do some individual thing that seemed to be useful, that I could do.

DE VORKIN:

So you were doing war work.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

You were also maintaining the observatory, at a time when it wouldn't have been maintained. Were you doing some spectroscopic research?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

That's a pretty busy schedule.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. At that time, my mother was an air raid warden in Hempstead. My father had died. I had moved out from Hempstead. My mother didn't particularly want me to live there. It was more heavily bombed. And I was living in the Gregory household. His wife was working then, she was working for some war relief thing in London, I forget just what it was. Later on she was working for the Lord Mayor, doing secretarial work. And he had two children. His son was in the Air Force. His daughter was a land girl, working in farming somewhere in the country. And they had a large house in Mill Hill. He had a number of people there. It was a bit safer there than closer in to London.

DE VORKIN:

Mill Hill was not in town, it was well out of town.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

He commuted in?

BURBIDGE:

He used to cycle in to the Admiralty every day.

DE VORKIN:

So it wasn't that far. Where is Mill Hill?

BURBIDGE:

Well, it's seven miles further out than Hempstead. I used to cycle to visit my mother in Hempstead and I knew precisely how far it was. So I suppose it was about 13 to 15 miles out of London.

DE VORKIN:

During this period, you had worked on Be stars. Your graduate work was pure research? There were no further courses or anything to take? Beyond the Bachelor's degree?

BURBIDGE:

No, that's right. There weren't any available. I would have taken them had they been available. And those were what I took right after the war, things that I'd missed out on.

DE VORKIN:

I was going to ask you about that. There was a hiatus between '43 and '46, when you got your Ph.D. and when you first published. During that time you'd taken some courses?

BURBIDGE:

No, '43, that was still the war. And I was carrying on with stellar spectroscopy.

DE VORKIN:

How did you actually decide to do the spectroscopy at that time, particularly to pick out Be stars?

BURBIDGE:

Well, I decided to do spectroscopy, when I was given the choice of things. Astrometry was out anyway because the lenses were out. But also I had begun to be more interested in the nature of the stars, and to do that, you had to do spectroscopy. Spectroscopy seemed the most powerful tool.

DE VORKIN:

By photometry being available, do you mean that there was actually a photometer?

BURBIDGE:

There was photometry with a Photometer.

DE VORKIN:

A photo-sensitive cell?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Who built that?

BURBIDGE:

I guess Gregory had.

DE VORKIN:

He was interested in that very early period too.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Did you consider what would be more useful?

BURBIDGE:

Well, it seemed to me spectroscopy is a much more powerful thing to use.

DE VORKIN:

The Be stars?

BURBIDGE:

I don't quite know, why that particular sort of star. I suppose there I was reading the literature, and I guess I was puzzled as to how you would have the emission lines present at the same time as the photospheric absorption lines, what kind of structure was needed.

DE VORKIN:

What were you reading then? What do you recall as being important?

BURBIDGE:

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL. That's where most of those things were published. There wasn't much in the MONTHLY NOTICES. But of course MONTHLY NOTICES was what one had to read.

DE VORKIN:

There were ongoing B star programs at Mt. Wilson?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, and there was D. B. McLoughlin. I read a lot of his work.

DE VORKIN:

At Michigan?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, and Otto Struve. Struve had made a big impression I'd been interested in Struve's work.

DE VORKIN:

Through the war, working on these different Be stars, did you do a spectroscopic thesis?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

What was your thesis?

BURBIDGE:

It was on the variations in Gamma Cassiopeia, it periodically undergoes an outburst, and it was going through one then, and following the changes of the emission lines, which appear to come from a ring, or appeared then to come from a ring.

DE VORKIN:

That was your first paper, "Changes in the Spectrum of Gamma Cassiopeia." ^[2]

BURBIDGE:

Yes, it was a small part of my thesis. My thesis actually was never published. I mean, the long study. It was a time when you didn't publish thesis studies. There was a big cut down on publications.

DE VORKIN:

Yes, sure. What about the Royal Astronomical Society. Did you have contact with them?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I did. By then I did go to meetings. And I can remember one meeting. When was it Eddington died?

DE VORKIN:

'44.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. I remember a meeting in '41, and I remember people that had been names to me, like Eddington. I was very disappointed in Eddington, because he'd been such a figure of enormous stature to me through his writings, and when he appeared on the platform to read a paper, he fixed his gaze on some far corner of the room, and gave a very uninteresting talk, and seemed a crabby little man. That's how he struck me.

DE VORKIN:

That's interesting. Who impressed you otherwise?

BURBIDGE:

I think I remember being somewhat disappointed in all the well known astronomers.

DE VORKIN:

Milne and R. H. Fowler?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, Milne impressed me.

DE VORKIN:

Did you give any papers?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I have two papers, one on Gamma Cass, and one on a nova, a recurrent nova T Corona Borealis that had an outburst.

DE VORKIN:

There was a paper on that you published in 1946.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

And you did that paper with Gregory?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Now, you noticed in 1942 that you used Gamma Cass observations taken after the closing of the observatory in '39.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

The observatory closed officially in August '39 because of the war?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

The lenses were taken out. And so during that whole period then, as you were working for Gregory, that was during the war, the lenses were out. When did the lenses get put back in and the situation become normal?

BURBIDGE:

Of course the reflector was still working all that time. The lenses were put back in I guess in 1946.

DE VORKIN:

And at that point, did you start doing astrometric work?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I did.

DE VORKIN:

Was this on your own initiative?

BURBIDGE:

No. Pring came back from the Army, and he was the first assistant there. That was his title, first assistant. And I was the second assistant. And it was just part of the observatory work. You did parallax plates morning and evening, and proper motion plates in the middle of the night. And Pring was in charge of measuring these.

DE VORKIN:

And you were the observer?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

That's interesting. Looking at the Harvard tradition, the women were the measurers, the men were the observers.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

That seemed to be a very strong bias.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

But that bias didn't exist at all.

BURBIDGE:

I guess he did some observations. He must have taken plates as well. There was a roster, a schedule.

DE VORKIN:

Were there other observers?

BURBIDGE:

No, there weren't.

DE VORKIN:

After the war, were there any students that came in?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And one interesting student was Arthur C. Clarke.

DE VORKIN:

Really?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Oh, tell me about that.

BURBIDGE:

Well, there were a number of students who came part-time, or what we used to call external students, who came to take a course, or do some work. For example, there was an Air Force wing commander who came to learn some astronomy. And Arthur C. Clarke came. I was running the practical class then, which was using the smaller telescope, the 8-inch telescope, and using theodolites for navigation, those kinds of things. And the beginning students were coming back to University College, and were coming out also. Arthur C. Clarke came in a group of those. Geoff and I became friends with one of these other students who came from University College, a man called Stuart Reid. He told us afterwards that one night when I was conducting this class on the flat roof of the observatory, there was a bit of a commotion. I never knew quite what had happened. Arthur C. Clarke was very anxious to always get to the theodolite first and make the settings first, very eager, and he'd nearly knocked this little fellow off the roof.

DE VORKIN:

He was already publishing by that time?

BURBIDGE:

Well, that I'm not sure. I think he may have been but he was certainly not well known. But he was very interested in the British Interplanetary Society. He wanted to know celestial mechanics, that was the thing he wanted to learn then.

DE VORKIN:

Anything else of his interests that you recall? Did he come up to you, ask you questions?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Everything to do with the planets and interplanetary travel. Nature of the stars, not so much. I don't remember him being particularly interested. Mostly solar system.

DE VORKIN:

Local objects?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

And you had contact with him only through this one class.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Did you maintain any social contact?

BURBIDGE:

No, I didn't. I didn't see him again until years after when we were at some function at Berkeley.

DE VORKIN:

You'd already met your husband by that time.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I met him (Geoffrey BURBIDGE) in the fall of 1947, when classes were starting properly again in University College. I was going to make up some of these courses I'd missed, that I should have taken on the way to the Ph.D. And so I was going to classes that David R. Bates was giving, D. R. Bates.

DE VORKIN:

'47, that means that you taught Clarke in '48 or later in '47. You already knew your husband at that time?

BURBIDGE:

It could have been '47 that Clarke was coming out.

DE VORKIN:

How did you actually meet Geoffrey BURBIDGE?

BURBIDGE:

Well, he'd been an undergraduate at Bristol, and he'd taken his degree in physics, and then he'd had to do his year of war work, '46 to '47, and he'd gone to what's called Road Research. I guess he must have told you all about that?

DE VORKIN:

Yes, he did.

BURBIDGE:

So then he was back and enrolled for a Ph.D., and so he was going to the same classes that I was going to, and that's how I met him, in Bates's class.

DE VORKIN:

How did you actually get together?

BURBIDGE:

Well, we just got to talking.

DE VORKIN:

How did you recognize him first?

BURBIDGE:

As an interesting person. Apart from astronomy, he started talking about tennis. Now, I'm not any good at sports and never was any good at tennis.

DE VORKIN:

But he was very keen on it himself?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And then we used to go to the opera. There were some very good things that were easy to get into and inexpensive in London in those days. So we used to go do that. Then we went to an extra class, an evening class that E. P. George was giving.

DE VORKIN:

Where was that?

BURBIDGE:

London School of Economics. It was on radiation, quantum mechanics of radiation, Heitler and all that sort of stuff.

DE VORKIN:

Then when you started talking to Geoffrey BURBIDGE about astronomy, how did the interest develop?

BURBIDGE:

Well, he was working in physics, you see, and Massey was his advisor. So the contact in Bates's class was really the one that started it. Not the quantum mechanics class that Bates was giving, we were going to that, but we also went to one on upper atmosphere physics that Bates was doing. It wasn't actual astronomy, but at least it was the physics of what was going on in the air glow, the night glow, of emission lines and so on. And then, well, then I guess I invited Geoff out to the observatory.

DE VORKIN:

Had he expressed any interest in the observatory by then?

BURBIDGE:

Well, he began to get interested.

DE VORKIN:

Or was he interested in you?

BURBIDGE:

I don't know, but anyway, he started coming out to the observatory. And then, he had one of those DSIR Fellowships. But the he got a job at the observatory. That must have been in '50 or so, after we were married.

DE VORKIN:

When did you finally realize you were going to get married to this fellow?

BURBIDGE:

Well, only about January, 1947 '48? He was visiting out at Mill Hill and we were going for a walk.

DE VORKIN:

You'd known him for how long at that time?

BURBIDGE:

Since the start of October.

DE VORKIN:

You were collaborating at that time. There were a few parallax papers that have both your names. ^[3]

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Yes, around about that time maybe a bit earlier an old man who was interested in astronomy and had made a lot of money called Perren had come out to the observatory to visit. He endowed the Perren Chair of Astronomy. Anyway, he wanted to give some money to astronomy, and it was at a time when Gregory and I were the only people that could be around the observatory, and we showed him things through the eight-inch telescope, and we talked a lot to him, and he really liked the place and decided to leave his money to that place. Well, then he died and his family contested the will. There was a long protracted business with the university. In the end the university decided not to spend it on telescopes or anything like that, but to set up a chair of astronomy, and they did not name Gregory to that first chair, which was, I think pretty disastrous something that nowadays I would have fought. But in those days, there was no way I could get my say, that I thought he deserved it. He'd actually done most of the work to get the money. Anyway, he had an all out row with the university, and he resigned, ahead of his retiring age.

DE VORKIN:

Did this affect him seriously economically? How did he survive that?

BURBIDGE:

Oh, he had some private money. I think financially he was quite well off. He was OK, but certainly it was very unfortunate.

DE VORKIN:

When did this happen? You were still working there.

BURBIDGE:

That must have happened in 1950, because it was at the time that I became acting director of the place, and that was because he'd quit. And around that time, Pring had left to take a job in Africa, some kind of a government job, that was an advance over what he had, a financial advance.

DE VORKIN:

Did he have a Ph.D. in astronomy?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, he did.

DE VORKIN:

You were at the observatory through 1951, approximately.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

But during that time, you and your husband took a summer's leave, possibly a month or so, at Haute Provence. What encouraged you to do that?

BURBIDGE:

Well, we were still interested in these kinds of stars, and to get fainter ones and to really get good weather, we realized it wasn't much good carrying on in London. A 24-inch telescope versus the 26-inch we could use in Haute Provence was important. The weather, and the fact that the London lights were back on, and the road up there past Mill Hill was beginning to be a busy road. There had been very little traffic on it during the war, because of gasoline rationing. So we wanted to go to a good observatory where we could actually do something.

DE VORKIN:

How did you come to choose that one in particular?

BURBIDGE:

I can't remember if this was before or after I was married, I'd applied for a Carnegie Fellowship. I'd already started thinking about the US as the place to go to do observational astronomy, and I didn't know that they were restricted to men only. I saw the advertisement in the OBSERVATORY magazine.

DE VORKIN:

Was that true then?

BURBIDGE:

Sure it was true.

DE VORKIN:

Is it true now?

BURBIDGE:

No, it's not true now, but it was very much true then.

DE VORKIN:

I didn't know that.

BURBIDGE:

Well, people say "Is there an discrimination against women?" People don't realize how much there used to be.

DE VORKIN:

I certainly didn't realize that.

BURBIDGE:

Well, anyway, I got a very nasty letter back from I. S. Bowen, who was the director.

DE VORKIN:

Do you have that letter?

BURBIDGE:

I wish I knew. I started thinking about that the other day when somebody was asking me. And I'm not sure. I have a bunch of old papers that came when Geoff's mother died, which had been stored in her house in Chipping Norton, and I've never gone through these, but that letter could be there somewhere. I don't know. I might have just thrown it out in disgust. I hope I can find it. But I don't know.

DE VORKIN:

One doesn't think of the Carnegie Fellowship, as exclusively for men.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, being made to think that: "You should have known better, you should have known that this was not open to women."

DE VORKIN:

That was what he said?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Well, that was what came through.

DE VORKIN:

It was a personal letter from him.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

That's quite a surprise.

BURBIDGE:

Well, you know that Geoff had a Carnegie Fellowship later on.

DE VORKIN:

Yes. We'll get to that.

BURBIDGE:

It was still not open to women then.

DE VORKIN:

That's how you pretty much gained access to the telescope.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Well, we'll certainly go to that soon. At Haute Provence then you observed for a little while.

BURBIDGE:

We must have had about six weeks there, something like that. I know we had to pay our own way there. Did he tell you that?

DE VORKIN:

No, I didn't know that.

BURBIDGE:

We applied for a grant to the Royal Society to pay our travels. And it was turned down because they thought you ought not to want to go out of the country to work.

DE VORKIN:

I think he (Geoff) did mention that. Yes, it sounds familiar.

BURBIDGE:

I remember it cost us about 80 or 90 pounds, which was a lot of money to us in those days.

DE VORKIN:

Yes. Let me ask this question, too, a more direct question, about your relationship with your husband as far as professional work is concerned. It was understood from the beginning that you were both going to pursue research?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

There was no question about it?

BURBIDGE:

No question.

DE VORKIN:

No adjustment or anything at that time.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Were you worried about this, as far as the possibility of getting married and leading what everybody would consider to be the normal life for a woman you know, raising a family, that sort of thing? Was there a conflict in your mind, let's say, before you were married, that you'd have to do one or the other?

BURBIDGE:

No. There was never any doubt. Later on, there was a conflict over a family, because I guess I would have liked to have had more than just one child.

DE VORKIN:

When was Sarah born?

BURBIDGE:

She was born in 1956. It had been delayed and delayed because we had no stable place to be at. And we were always traveling around or living in some dorm.

DE VORKIN:

Well, you were on various fellowships.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

If there was going to be that conflict between marriage career you would have taken the career? Is this how it was going to be?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. But I don't think I ever thought of it in those terms. It didn't seem to me it was that conflict, not between marriage and a career. And Geoff felt no hurry about having a family.

DE VORKIN:

But there are plenty of men around who don't want their wives to have a career.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. But he never had the least feeling of that sort. In fact, he was always very supportive, and rather encouraging.

DE VORKIN:

So then, you had gone through University of London Observatory to 1951. What induced you at that time to leave?

BURBIDGE:

Well, we'd had this experience in Haute Provence, and we'd realized that there wasn't a future, in what we wanted to do, in England.

DE VORKIN:

Well, who replaced Gregory? Were you upset enough to want to leave because of that?

BURBIDGE:

No. It was C. W. Allen. But there was an intervening period when I was acting director, when we got some construction done at the observatory and an expansion, and my husband had very great faith in Massey and so did I. We went to him for help since he knew all about how to manage the university, and so we would go to him for advice on getting the building. That was at the time that part of the new buildings were put up. And then C. W. Allen was coming. But we'd already decided we were going to leave.

DE VORKIN:

You'd already decided?

BURBIDGE:

That we were going to leave, and it was a question of where, what opportunities there would be. And then he applied for an Agassiz Fellowship and he got that. And I applied to Otto Struve. He was then, I guess, President of the International Astronomical Union. Anyway, around 1950, he was a big international figure, and I wanted to work in what he was interested in and Yerkes was a place I wanted to go to.

DE VORKIN:

But he'd left Yerkes?

BURBIDGE:

He hadn't at first.

DE VORKIN:

Just into '50, then.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. That was when I started seeing what I could do, what kinds of possibilities there were for me. He said he thought I could get a grant from the International Astronomical Union. He encouraged me to apply, and I did. So I got that. With that and Geoff's Agassiz Fellowship, we could just live, you know, on what students wouldn't consider livable now.

DE VORKIN:

Yes, I'm continually surprised. I talked to your husband about how you actually split up your time and all, but I'm still not quite clear about it. You were to go to Yerkes?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I was to go to Yerkes, because that was what actually the IAU grant had been for. It was to do the work there. Now, certainly Struve had by then gone to Berkeley. But at one RAS meeting, S. Chandrasekhar was there, and I'd gathered up courage to introduce myself to him, and he was again very encouraging and supportive, "Come to Yerkes, that would be a great thing to do." And we knew that Geoff had to go to Harvard. So it seemed that we had to split up to start with, when we first came, and I was living in the boarding house that van Biesbroeck ran at Yerkes. They were kind people who looked after all those students and post-docs who were living in their boarding house.

DE VORKIN:

Who else was there?

BURBIDGE:

D. Osterbrock was there. Harold Johnson, Nancy Roman, Dan Harris he died a while back. Later on, Larry Helfer. Yensen from Norway.

DE VORKIN:

So there were quite a few people?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

How did you feel about being separated? That couldn't have been very happy.

BURBIDGE:

No, it was lonely. Also everything was very strange. It was much stranger than any place in Europe, going from England to France or anything. To go into the Midwest was something completely strange.

DE VORKIN:

How did you get there, by train?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, by train from new York. We went on the Queen Mary. We had a Fulbright Grant to travel on.

DE VORKIN:

Did you apply for it together?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Oh, and other people who helped us at that time were the Woods, Brad Wood and Bede Wood Frank Bradshaw Wood we'd met them at our first I AU in 1948 in Switzerland, in Zurich.

DE VORKIN:

And you met them there?

BURBIDGE:

We met them there and became very friendly with them.

DE VORKIN:

They helped you personally, with funds?

BURBIDGE:

No, they invited us to stay with them. That was when they were in Philadelphia. And they met us, when the boat came in. They met us at the pier and helped us through Customs and Immigration. That was a very long business because that was the McCarthy Era and we had to get our visas which was not all that easy.

DE VORKIN:

What were your first impressions of the United States? How long was it before you actually got to Yerkes?

BURBIDGE:

I think, a few weeks. We stayed with the Woods for a while. And then Geoff went off to Harvard, and he was living with a family of psychologists. They were both psychologists. Again, Shapley was director there, and made everybody welcome, and Menzel and Whipple and all those people were very nice to people from overseas.

DE VORKIN:

You didn't go up to Harvard at that time?

BURBIDGE:

No, I didn't at that time.

DE VORKIN:

You were to Yerkes.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And I was at Yerkes, and then I wanted to have some observing time at McDonald. That would be the biggest telescope I'd ever used that's the 82-inch.

DE VORKIN:

You knew that, of course, before going.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. That was Struve's big telescope, that he'd built. I guess I started working for both Morgan and Hiltner. And Hiltner said, "You can come on to McDonald, the time has all been scheduled but I'm going down for a run in photometry, and there will be many non- photometric nights, and you can do spectroscopy on them."

DE VORKIN:

The changeover wasn't that difficult?

BURBIDGE:

No, it was easy. You just put the spectrograph on in the afternoon. It was very easy. Working at the Cassegrain of the 82-inch.

DE VORKIN:

Yes, not like it is today.

BURBIDGE:

No. So that was going to be in December, and so, then I arranged that Geoff could come too and we could work there together. I know I had to give him some instructions how to get to McDonald what train to take and so on, what tickets to buy, and I gave him the wrong instructions.

DE VORKIN:

Where did he go?

BURBIDGE:

Well, it turned out all right, but things were still very strange to me, names of things, and I had learned certain acronyms like Grand Old Party, GOP. There was quite a division of opinion about McCarthy. I think some people like McCarthy. A lot of people probably in the Midwest.

DE VORKIN:

Yes. Well, he came from that area.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Williams Bay would have been very pro-McCarthy.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Well, it was strange. But the railroad he had to go on was the Gulf-Mobile- and-Ohio, part of the journey you have to take to get to Texas. And again, then, people were not funded to go. You got a certain amount of money but you went the cheapest way you possibly could because you didn't get enough money to cover the trip, and so, this was called the G M and O Railroad, and I confused it with the GOP. (Laughter) And one of the things that you did in the fall there was gather up leaves. Chandra used to have leaf raking parties. You gathered up nuts. There were various pecan trees around Yerkes, and pecans were nuts that I had never encountered before. We didn't have them in England. The town that one had to get to by train eventually was called Pecos, and so my first instructions to Geoff were: that he had to get the GOP Railroad to Pecan! And he actually went and asked for that.

DE VORKIN:

How did that get straightened out?

BURBIDGE:

I'm not quite sure.

DE VORKIN:

That's marvelous. Did he forgive you?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, he did.

DE VORKIN:

That's great. Were there living facilities for women at McDonald?

BURBIDGE:

There were cottages. Yes, there were a number of lettered cottages. There was House A that was the director's and House B that was, I think, Kuiper's. And then there were a number of lesser ones. House H was the next biggest and Hiltner always had that. Then there were smaller ones, E and F. I suppose they probably still exist. I haven't been there for years. Anyway, we got one of those cottages, and there was no dormitory and no diner. You had to buy your own food in Fort Davis and cook it.

DE VORKIN:

Wasn't Fort Davis quite far away?

BURBIDGE:

17 miles.

DE VORKIN:

That wasn't too far.

BURBIDGE:

And there was a vehicle that went down every afternoon to pick up the children from school. You could phone in an order for groceries and have it picked up. It was pretty well run. There was no discrimination against women working on that telescope. Nor was there ever any that I encountered at Yerkes. The only thing in the University of Chicago was the nepotism rules husband and wife were not allowed (both) to be on the faculty.

DE VORKIN:

Not just in the same department, I suppose.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

That would affect you later on, then.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, later on. But there was nothing but encouragement, particularly from Chandra. We became very good friends with Chandra.

DE VORKIN:

In some of your work at Yerkes you acknowledge Stromgren. Was this just a formal thing, because he was director later on?

BURBIDGE:

No, he was also very helpful.

DE VORKIN:

How did you research interests develop while you were there? You were still working on Gamma Cass.

BURBIDGE:

Well, no, I wasn't working on Gamma Cass, but on a bigger program of Be start. Objects in the galactic plane anyway. After that first run at McDonald, where again it was galactic plant time, so we were working on Be stars, I then went to Harvard.

DE VORKIN:

The second year?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, in the beginning of '52, about February of '52, we went there, and we got an apartment there. And then we had a lot of McDonald spectra to measure. I don't know if Geoff told you about when George VI died, and Queen Elizabeth became Queen?

DE VORKIN:

No. Tell me the story.

BURBIDGE:

Well, Shapley was always interested in people and he already had had Geoff in to talk to him several times. He had this fascinating revolving desk that he had, with all these things in it, and of course he had us in together as soon as I got there. As soon as we got there, I wanted to have a measuring machine to measure the spectra, and they didn't have one. Didn't have a spectral measuring machine or plate measuring machine.

DE VORKIN:

This was for accurate wavelengths?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, accurate wavelength.

DE VORKIN:

Not radial velocity measures?

BURBIDGE:

Well, partly variations of radial velocity in these variable stars. Harlan Smith was a student there at that time, and he was also interested in getting a plate measuring machine. He was trying to get spectra with the Agassiz telescope of short period Cepheld variables. So Shapley was willing to buy a spectral measuring machine, but money was not all that plentiful even then and he had to look into it.

DE VORKIN:

Shapley in this period was having difficulties with McCarthy.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, he was.

DE VORKIN:

I know that it affected the observatory.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, it did. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

You were aware of it at that time?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I was. It was one of my reasons for disliking McCarthy so much. But anyway, he was going to get this machine, but he wanted to look into all possibilities; to get an inexpensive a one as he could. He wanted a lot of details anyway, and convincing that he should get it. Then he called us in some time early in '52, and I thought it was going to be about this machine. He told this story, Shapley himself reminded me in later years of this story. He said, he called us in to tell us that King George VI had just died in England and Elizabeth was the new Queen.

DE VORKIN:

Had you heard that?

BURBIDGE:

No, we hadn't heard it. He broke the news to us. And as he re-told me the story afterwards, he gave us this news and said, "You've got a new Queen now." We sat in sort of stunned silence for a few seconds, and than I said, "Oh now, about that measuring machine " (Laughter)

DE VORKIN:

Was he taken aback at that?

BURBIDGE:

Apparently it stuck in his mind, because he recalled it to me some several years later.

DE VORKIN:

How did you feel about Elizabeth anyway?

BURBIDGE:

Neutral. It wasn't particularly interesting to me. It was obvious that she was going to be Queen some day. I don't think I had expected that George VI would die as young as he did.

DE VORKIN:

Well, anyway, did you get your measuring machine?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Then at the end of that year, Geoff's Agassiz Fellowship came to an end, and so then we both applied for research assistantships at Yerkes.

DE VORKIN:

You were pretty happy with the working conditions there?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Certainly with the 82-inch telescope.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. So we got those research assistantships, and we were working for Morgan then. I guess I was still working partly for Hiltner. But our task was to use the 40-inch telescope. Morgan was busy on his long program of classification of B stars for galactic structure, mapping galactic structure.

DE VORKIN:

This is why I'm interested in why you started with B stars.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, it was independent. It was a coincidence. He was interested in them from the classification point of view. So we used to do that. And the other research assistants there were doing parallax plates, but we were not taking any of the parallax plates. We were taking the spectra.

DE VORKIN:

Who was in charge of that, van Biesbroeck?

BURBIDGE:

No, Strand used to come there for the parallax work. He used to come in about once a week. He was the person actually in charge of that.

DE VORKIN:

How did you like the 40-inch?

BURBIDGE:

Oh, I liked that.

DE VORKIN:

Did you use it alone?

BURBIDGE:

Sometimes, yes.

DE VORKIN:

Did you find any problems moving that thing around?

BURBIDGE:

Well, it's a heavy thing to move, and the dome is a heavy thing to heave around. It's a nice telescope.

DE VORKIN:

Yes. I used it myself, before they changed it.

BURBIDGE:

Oh yes. It was cold in the winter. I remember, one was somewhat relieved when the temperature got down to 5 below, because that was when we used to have to stop observing because the oil got thick.

DE VORKIN:

During that period, '51 - '53, you had general papers on spectroscopy.^[4] You worked on Chi Ophiuchi. These were Hiltner's observations, I take it?

BURBIDGE:

No, they were our observations. We used the Coude at McDonald. And we took infra-red plates. We measured some Paschen lines. We were always also going to whatever lectures were being given, and in particular to Chandra's course on radiative transfer, and that's why we were concerned with the Balmer Decrement, the transfer of radiation in the Balmer lines, and the strengthening of the higher members of the series in the strict planetary nebulae decrements.

DE VORKIN:

Now, your husband was moving very strongly in the line of physics.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

And between the two of you, how did you look for research projects at this time? You were working on the B star problem with Morgan.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

But what was your interest? At that time there was no interest you had in galactic structure.

BURBIDGE:

No, I was not interested. I wasn't working in galactic structure. I was still on the physics of the stars.

DE VORKIN:

How did you go about choosing problems?

BURBIDGE:

Choosing problems? Well, going through the literature, and picking out items of interest. There were all those Mt. Wilson Catalogue (MWC) stars, a huge fund of stars there. And then picking out ones that were interesting. We got interested in stellar rotation too and the line profiles.

DE VORKIN:

What I'm trying to get at actually is that by 1953, you were interested in rotation, stellar rotation, but you had published a paper on the abundance of the elements with your husband.

BURBIDGE:

Well, by then, yes. You see '53 was a transition time. And I can tell you how that came about.

DE VORKIN:

You had these finite research fellowships at Yerkes.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

You knew they were going to end. Were you looking for something more permanent? BURBIDGE. No, it came about because we applied for time at McDonald, galactic plane time, to continue the work on B stars Be stars and looking into rotation in connection with the gas ring around fast rotating stars. In those days, all the pressure was not on the galactic pole but on the galactic plane time. We asked for time in December and January, but we didn't get it. We got it in April which was galactic pole time. That was in '53. And in those times, you went for about a month at a time to McDonald, travel not being as easy as it is now. You had one batch of time a year. But there was a transition around about that time, in '52 or '53, before Kuiper and Urey had their great disagreement and became enemies.

DE VORKIN:

And Urey?

BURBIDGE:

Harold Urey was on the campus.

DE VORKIN:

I knew Kuiper had differences with other people, but I wasn't aware of this.

BURBIDGE:

Well, you ought to get a chance to talk to Harold Urey, while there's still a chance, because he's not well now and he's well into his eighties. Have you ever talked to Urey?

DE VORKIN:

No. He's a distance from our central line of interest.

BURBIDGE:

You should. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

I wonder if he's been talked to by other people?

BURBIDGE:

Perhaps he has from the physics side and the chemistry side, yes.

DE VORKIN:

I'll ask the Center to see if they're interested. Meanwhile, could you give me some idea of what the differences between Kuiper and Urey were?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Well, he was on the campus at Chicago, of course, then, and he was working on the abundances in meteorites and the whole solar system plus looking at the moon, and he felt that Kuiper, I think, plagiarized a lot of his work on the origin of the solar system. Anyhow they had massive disagreements. But this was before, and they jointly spoke at a conference that was held out at Yerkes on the abundances of the elements. I still had connections with the OBSERVATORY MAGAZINE in England, and I said, "Well, all right, I'll take notes and I'll write an account of the proceedings of this conference, to go in the OBSERVATORY MAGAZINE." ^[5] So I attended this conference. Geoff and I were both attending it and I was taking very full notes. Then, that opened up a whole new field something that I hadn't really thought about: what is the origin of the elements? Of course, in those days, there was Gamow and Ulam. Gamow was there, and Maria Mayer was there it was the cold polyneutron model and practically nothing on the origin of elements in the stars. Hoyle's paper of '46 was discussed a little bit. But most of the emphasis was on the Big Bang origin or some kind of an early origin of the elements.

DE VORKIN:

The triple alpha process was just being suggested at that time by Salpeter and others.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Were you aware of it at that time?

BURBIDGE:

Not then. Not immediately then.

DE VORKIN:

Not at the conference?

BURBIDGE:

Not at the conference.

DE VORKIN:

OK. It was proton-proton, the CNO cycle, and that was it.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And a lot about abundances in meteorites, and so called universal abundances although the first papers on stars with different compositions were beginning to appear. The Schwarzschild paper, for example, had appeared. Things with low metal content.

DE VORKIN:

They were still trying to explain populations at that time.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Well, anyway, this conference, and the effort I put into it was considerable. I used to go in to Chicago once or twice per week. It must have been the transition between '52 and '53. But I used to check out my notes and my account with Maria Mayer and Harold Urey. And then I wrote this thing up. Then we'd applied for our time and we'd got April instead of December at McDonald and so we said, "Well, this is not Be star time. How about we look at some stars with strange abundances?" That started the magnetic stars, the Ap star work. People were trying to explain those then not in terms actual composition differences in the surface layers, but some kind of excitation differences. And so we made the list of Can Ven and the other bright magnetic stars that would be around in April, and that's how we started working on those. And we collected a large number of Coude spectra, with the idea that, come the summer of '53, we'd have to go back to England. Our two years as exchange visitors would be up.

DE VORKIN:

As exchange visitors that means that you still had a position back in England?

BURBIDGE:

No. No position. But only a visa that was only good for two years. And a Fulbright, which meant that you were supposed to go back to where you came from and spread the word back home of what your experiences had been. But in the summer, we applied to go to the Michigan Summer School in 1953, at which again Gamow was lecturing, and Baade was lecturing. Again, it was a major landmark to me, and to Geoff I think.

DE VORKIN:

Who else was there that you recall? Fowler wasn't there?

BURBIDGE:

No. Fowler was not there. The particular people I remember were Baade and Gamow. I think Bachelor was there, lecturing on turbulence. But Baade was wonderful at those things. He had funds of stories. And then again, nobody ever got down his material before he died.

DE VORKIN:

I know. That's why we're trying to collect it now.

DE VORKIN:

At that time of course Baade was still working very actively on revising distance scales.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And the first modern Color-Magnitude diagrams, and an understanding of them, were coming in.

DE VORKIN:

Sandage's work partly.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. He was talking about that, and the whole revision of the age; the disappearance of this anomaly between the radioactive age of the solar system and the inverse Hubble time.

DE VORKIN:

With his recalibration.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

That must have been very exciting.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Did that encourage you actually to go more into the abundance work?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, it did. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

What was your immediate interest at that point? Understanding the populations?

BURBIDGE:

Understanding the populations, and stellar evolution, and the origin of the elements.

DE VORKIN:

Even stellar evolution during that period was very much up in the air.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, it was. Yes. Because it wasn't until Hoyle and Schwarzschild got out the color Magnitude Diagram of a globular cluster that there was an understanding of what was happening in red giants, that was beginning to come through; that they had reached the point where the inhomogeneity would carry them over into the right hand part of the Hertzprung- Russell Diagram.

DE VORKIN:

Would you say that this growth of your interest in abundances, in your first paper with your husband, ^[6] was a mutual interest?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, it was.

DE VORKIN:

Which one of you came to it first as a field? You did?

BURBIDGE:

I don't really know. I think it was a thing we did together. Because we were both at Wisconsin, at this Kuiper-Urey Conference.

DE VORKIN:

Yes. Now, when did you start making plans to return?

BURBIDGE:

Well, during that spring, of course. We'd been applying and looking into what the jobs would be back in England. And Geoff had two offers. One was to go to Manchester.

DE VORKIN:

As what?

BURBIDGE:

As a lecturer or assistant lecturer. And one was to go to Cambridge on a DSIR job, working in the Cavendish. He talked this over with Chandra. And I had no prospects, either place.

DE VORKIN:

Did you make your own applications?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, but there didn't seem to be any openings.

DE VORKIN:

I see. Where did you apply?

BURBIDGE:

I can't remember now. Probably to the same places.

DE VORKIN:

You certainly wanted to be together?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. But we realized that we could live on one salary then, and that we'd got all these Coude spectra that needed to be analyzed. Firstly, I think Chandra did not think very highly of Kopal. In fact that's putting it mildly. And Kopal was the person who was trying to persuade us to come to Manchester. Oh yes, Kopal was over here in the US. That summer when we were in Michigan, we had an apartment that somebody had vacated during the summer, and one evening, one very hot evening during the summer school, the Michigan Summer School, who should come knocking on the door but Kopal, and he came in with a hard sell as to why we should go to Manchester and not Cambridge. When he went out of the room, we looked at each other and we said, "Well, that settles it."

DE VORKIN:

I see. I think your husband mentioned that, but I'm glad I have it from your side.

BURBIDGE:

OK, so it was Cambridge. But I had no job there but we could live on the one salary.

DE VORKIN:

How did you feel about that though?

BURBIDGE:

Well, I didn't mind that so much. What I bitterly resented was having to pay what Redman called "bench fees" to use the spectral measuring equipment. He charged me. I think it was only 5 pounds a term. But he charged me!

DE VORKIN:

Would he have charged anyone?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Or was it discrimination again?

BURBIDGE:

No, he would have charged anybody, I think, that didn't have a job.

DE VORKIN:

You didn't have the money, so you were charged.

BURBIDGE:

That's right.

DE VORKIN:

You were a volunteer research associate. That was your official title while you were there.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

And your husband was working with Martin Ryle, is that correct?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

But you had your own mutual research interests. How did you proceed? How did you pursue them at that time?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Well, he used to go into the Cavendish, and he'd be working there in the days. I used to walk along Madingley Road, out to the observatory. We were living in a tiny apartment on Botolph Lane, over a tailor's shop. You had to go through a little yard and up some back stairs, and there was no room to keep bicycles there, so we couldn't have bicycles. I mean, you couldn't have carried them up. It was a little spiral staircase that got to our floor. And the only place under shelter in the back yard was occupied by the ground floor people. So anyway we used to walk to get everywhere. So I used to walk. Oh, we did have microphotometer tracings of all these spectra before leaving Yerkes.

DE VORKIN:

You took them while you were at Yerkes?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. We'd stayed up night and day to get those done before we left for the Michigan Summer School. Michigan was on the way back to the East Coast, to then get the ship back to England.

DE VORKIN:

So you had those tracings to work on.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. They were for measuring equivalent widths.

DE VORKIN:

Did you do these at home?

BURBIDGE:

We did those at home. And the measuring for the wave lengths for the line identifications of these thousands of lines in these rare earth spectra was done at Cambridge Observatory. I used to write to Charlotte Sitterly to try and get whatever was available on rare earth spectra, and she used to tell me, "Nobody's interested these days in the Zeeman analysis. It's hard to get anybody to work in those at the National Bureau of Standards." She would send me whatever she could. And it's funny, this stuff is still coming in now, now that I no longer need it. But at the time there was practically nothing done on the second ionization spectra.

DE VORKIN:

That's right. I talked to her, about her general work, that sort of thing.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

She seemed to have a feeling that some of the directions at the National Bureau of Standards weren't the only ones that she really wanted. I don't know if you thought that. Was that your only contact with her?

BURBIDGE:

No. Again, she'd been a person that we'd met at that IAU meeting back in 1948, along with the Woods, and she said she'd have us when we first came over to stay with them in Washington. So she and Banney (Bancroft) were good friends of ours, in that sense, that they helped the transition to another country. I should say to backtrack a little, that strangeness of the Midwest did not exist in the Cambridge, Mass area. Cambridge, Mass seemed very English to me. Well, it still does, the layout of streets, the awful traffic pattern, the old buildings.

DE VORKIN:

Emerson said that the streets were laid out by cows.

BURBIDGE:

Well, after all, that's how they were laid out in England.

DE VORKIN:

Right. Your impressions are interesting. Were they maintained? Did you see differences in Texas?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Did you still feel that the United States was the place to be?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

So you weren't alienated.

BURBIDGE:

No. And the strangeness gradually wore off. I suppose it wore off least of all in the Midwest. That still seemed to me the strangest.

DE VORKIN:

Yes, me too. I certainly had that feeling when I went to Wisconsin. It was very different from California.

BURBIDGE:

The second time we were at Yerkes, in the '57 to '62 period, was when Kevin Prendergast was there. And of course he was an ardent New Yorker. He didn't think much of the West Coast, but he could put up with it. But he hated the Midwest. He used to say that the country should have been settled from the West and from the East and they should never have met in the middle.

DE VORKIN:

In a way, it was. The Spanish settled the West. Was he a student of yours?

BURBIDGE:

No. He was a contemporary.

DE VORKIN:

I wasn't sure. In your Cambridge days, I know from the interview with your husband that things didn't go too smoothly with him in Ryle's group.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. At that time, it was beginning to be realized that synchrotron emission was the source. But Ryle was still favoring plasma oscillation, despite the fact that you had to get the energy out in the high harmonics. And Geoff used to have long arguments with him. Did he tell you about one argument, after which Ryle took to his bed for some days?

DE VORKIN:

No.

BURBIDGE:

Well, I think it was about synchrotron versus plasma oscillation. Ryle was getting very heated, and Geoff loves a good argument. But all of Ryle's people we used to call them "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the little group of people that worked around Ryle, Shakeschaft and all those people protected him. They were enormously protective of him. And they knew the things that upset him, and they could hear this argument going on behind closed doors, and I remember Peter Sheuwer and Shakeschaft and Baldwin came up to me and said, "Can't you go in and stop it? Do something? This will make Ryle ill." I didn't want to stop it. I thought, well Ryle is arguing a silly line, let him get an earful. So the argument ended, and Ryle did indeed run a fever and took to his bed for about a week. And all his people had to go around there to work with him.

DE VORKIN:

He has a serious psychological problem, then?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

I didn't know it was like that, but I know his reputation, to be protected, and I've seen him in a controversial position, which he didn't take to very well.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Well, we learned how they managed this at conferences, afterwards. If they thought it was going to be something controversial coming up, they used to have a plan of action planted questions and they used to sit scattered through the room, in different strategic places. And the Seven Dwarfs would come up with questions at the right time, when Martin was being challenged on anything.

DE VORKIN:

I see. Sort of a united front.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Your husband did say something about that part. But you had your own particular interests, apart from what he was working on with Ryle. The Ryle business of course did bring up synchrotron radiation. And your husband did work at that.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. He was one of the early people working out the energetics of synchrotron radiation.

DE VORKIN:

You didn't participate in that.

BURBIDGE:

No, I didn't. No.

DE VORKIN:

You stayed with abundance work?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

And during this period you met William Fowler.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Now, Geoff met him. I think Willie Fowler was giving one of those _____talks.

DE VORKIN:

What were those talks?

BURBIDGE:

Oh, it's a long Cambridge tradition. It must have dated back to Dirac probably or pre-Dirac. It's kind of an evening informal seminar with a speaker. And Geoff went to a talk that Fowler was giving. I didn't go. So he got a meeting with Fowler. We had begun to realize, from the analysis of the spectra, that the abundances are anomalous there are real over- abundances. And we thought, they're probably located on the surface, but they seemed to be involving neutrons. Now, you know, there is still a controversy going on about how much the Ap stars are pure element segregation, and how much nuclear processing there might be, but there seemed to be neutron effects coming in We realized we didn't know much nuclear physics. We knew a lot of spectroscopy and atomic physics, but we were not well up on nuclear physics, in particular things to do with neutron capture. And here Geoff met this nuclear physicist, you see, on sabbatical. Willie Fowler was partly encouraging us. He said, "Come around to my office." He had an office in a different part of the Cavendish. So we went around and got talking about all this.

DE VORKIN:

Both of you went?

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

When your husband came home after that lecture, did he talk about Fowler?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I think so.

DE VORKIN:

Was he excited?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. He was.

DE VORKIN:

So then you both went to meet Fowler.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Geoff may have had several meetings with him before I went along. I can't remember that, but perhaps his recollections, as to how he did that, are better.

DE VORKIN:

I'm interested in your impression, of meeting him and then starting to think about collaborative work.

BURBIDGE:

Well, the first thing was that Willie Fowler told Geoff, "Well, these are the heavy elements. I don't know anything about heavy elements. I work only on the light elements. But Hoyle was there, and Fowler was very interested in Hoyle's equilibrium process, and the intermediate weight elements.

DE VORKIN:

This was getting up to the iron peak.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And then, it was not hard to see, again with the triple alpha process, that you could have a source of neutrons by simply passing the alpha process, carbon 12 though a hydrogen burning region, getting C 13, and then C 13 alpha N. And we suddenly said, "Well, let alone these heavy elements in these stars, but how about the lighter elements?" Then we started plotting up, with whatever cross sections we could get, neutron capture for the lighter elements, and seeing that you did get a smooth curve abundance times capture cross section looking as though all things you couldn't account for through the CNO reactions and all the triple alpha processes, could have been made by a modification of those things by neutron capture.

DE VORKIN:

These ideas pretty much developed then? Did you develop them?

BURBIDGE:

They developed all though that year, then. We began working concentrated in the year '54 to '55.

DE VORKIN:

Did you approach Hoyle? Or did he approach you?

BURBIDGE:

I think Fowler knew him already. He'd been out at Cal Tech. So it was Fowler who made the contact there. Then the four of us used to work during the day in the Cavendish, and then at night round in Fowler's house.

DE VORKIN:

That must have been very exciting.

BURBIDGE:

It was very exciting. At that time the Can Ven work was drawing to an end, and we realized that we wanted to work on a different sort of heavy element problem the barium II stars and S type stars. Those were going to be more connected with the heavy element neutron capture.

DE VORKIN:

This is what you were really looking at, neutron capture? Certainly during that period of time?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. We wrote the long paper on the analysis of Can Ven ^[7] ; Geoff and I did. Then we wrote the paper with Fowler on the neutron processes that might be going on. ^[8] But we obviously wanted to get back to the States, to carry on this work.

DE VORKIN:

You did. You talked to Fowler about it?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. And he said, "You have to come back. You come back as immigrants this time, not on any exchange visitor's visas." So we had to set about to get immigrants' visas. Then there was a question of jobs. And still of course I could not apply for a Carnegie Fellowship. But he said, "Well, Geoff apply." So he applied and he got one. Fowler said, "Well, I can find a research associateship in Cal Tech, in Kellogg." 8 2/BURBIDGE & Fowler ApJ 122 (1955) p.271; ApJ Supp. 2 (1955), p.167.

DE VORKIN:

You worked at Kellogg?

BURBIDGE:

So that's what I did. And it was nominally part time, but of course as all the women astronomers have done who have ever been on "part time" positions we worked full time and were paid part time.

DE VORKIN:

How did you feel about that?

BURBIDGE:

Then, it seemed all right. I didn't resent it. But others who have been in financial situations where they did have to resent it certainly may have. It happened to Vera Rubin for a long time.

DE VORKIN:

Let me ask you one question that takes us back a year or two, and then I want to talk about your work at Cal Tech and Mt. Wilson. You wrote a paper on Freundlich's proposed red shift law. ^[9]

BURBIDGE:

Oh yes.

DE VORKIN:

How did that come about? Was it something that interested you and your husband momentarily?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Momentarily. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Anything to discuss about it?

BURBIDGE:

Well, we thought it didn't make sense; mainly because of binary stars, and all the other things. It was one of those things that seemed worthwhile to knock down.

DE VORKIN:

Who had noticed it first, your husband?

BURBIDGE:

I think so, yes. I think he noticed it.

DE VORKIN:

It seemed like something that he would get into.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I think so.

DE VORKIN:

We've talked a bit about it. Let's go to Cal Tech, 1955-57. You were a research fellow there. Did you actually work in Kellogg? Did you have any responsibilities that weren't directly in line with your research?

BURBIDGE:

No. It was pure research.

DE VORKIN:

How did it all work out there for you?

BURBIDGE:

Now finally we had enough money to live on. Because Geoff's Carnegie Fellowship was reasonably well paying and so was my half-time money. So we rented an apartment in Pasadena. Now our sponsors were the Fowlers. You know, we stayed there first of all when we arrived in Pasadena, and then found an apartment. We got there I suppose the end of September, and we had bought a car. I guess Geoff probably told you about our first car, that we bought the second year at Yerkes, 1952, that we drove to McDonald, a 1939 Ford that we bought for $100 and drove all the way to McDonald. We couldn't go above 35 miles per hour. You had to put in one quart of oil per 80 miles. We used to carry a drum of oil.

DE VORKIN:

Did you buy the car from another astronomer?

BURBIDGE:

No, we bought it from a Williams Bay person.

DE VORKIN:

But it got you there.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, it got us there. It died on the mountain. Martin Crebs repaired it enough so that it got us back to Yerkes. Anyway, we'd again stopped off in the East, and I think we'd stayed that time with the Sitterleys. And then we'd gone to Yerkes on the way there and we'd bought a car in Yerkes. Then we'd driven to California from Yerkes in a much more reasonable car. And we'd arrived I suppose at the end of September at Cal Tech.

DE VORKIN:

This is 1955.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Then I got pregnant in November. And we'd got this arrangement that Geoff would apply for observing time on Mt. Wilson, and we were working on two things. One was the question of abundances, as a function of age of stars, looking at metal-poor stars, and one was looking at the barium II stars we picked one particular barium II star. We would have liked to work on Zeta Cap, but Jesse Greenstein had got that in his drawers, and so it was hands off for anybody else.

DE VORKIN:

Really?

BURBIDGE:

Oh, yes.

DE VORKIN:

Was that a friendly sort of thing?

BURBIDGE:

It was moderately friendly. But the spikes were out, very much. Jesse's always had that. Nobody could poach on his preserves.

DE VORKIN:

I didn't know that about him. That's interesting. Is there anything interesting there?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, he resented our working on the metal-poor A type Stars. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

I never realized that at all. Did he resent your being there?

BURBIDGE:

No, I don't think he resented our being there. And if we had worked with him, it would have been one thing. But to work independently of him, you had not to poach on his preserves. So we picked the second brightest barium II star that we could find.

DE VORKIN:

Your husband had applied for the observing time. But everybody knew that you were going to be doing the observing?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Everybody knew. Bowen knew, of course, but as long as you didn't rub his nose in it, he didn't mind. And we went at it fairly cautiously. Of course we stayed in that Kapteyn Cottage and not in the Monastery.

DE VORKIN:

There are no facilities for women there?

BURBIDGE:

No. Well, they always said that the bathrooms were not laid out so that you could have women there. The men would be embarrassed and so on.

DE VORKIN:

Is that true?

BURBIDGE:

I've never been in the Monastery so I haven't the least idea.

DE VORKIN:

OK, I'll have to ask somebody else.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Then they said there was only one rest room in the dome.

DE VORKIN:

How do you manage that?

BURBIDGE:

Well, you use the one rest room like you do in a house.

DE VORKIN:

And they were giving these as reasons. Was Bowen the only one, or do you think there were others on the staff?

BURBIDGE:

Oh, I think Paul Merrill also. All the old guard, what I would call the old guard. Not Baade, of course. Baade thought it was all nonsense and so did Minkowski.

DE VORKIN:

What kind of contact did you have with Baade and Minkowski at that time?

BURBIDGE:

Well, Baade was living on the next street over. After I got pregnant, we sort of concealed it as long as we could, because of the things about going up the mountain, we'd been told, was that the lab assistants wouldn't like to take orders from a woman. And so we'd gone at this very cautiously. For example, we'd brought our own night lunch stuff until the night assistant said, "Why are you spurning our night lunch arrangements?" We said, "We thought you wouldn't want to prepare night lunch for us because we're not living in the Monastery." They just laughed at that, ridiculed. But still one went fairly cautiously. We knew all those night assistants very well. Arnie Ratzlaff and the one who just tragically shot himself, Gene Hancock.

DE VORKIN:

Shot himself?

BURBIDGE:

Just a year ago or something. And the third one, I've forgotten his name, Al, I've forgotten his last name. But anyway we got to know them all quite well. But for example, with the 60-inch, Arnie Ratzlaff used to like to sleep during the night, and he'd got a sort of couch laid out, and Geoff and I managed the telescope perfectly well the setting and the moving of this big observing ladder around. And I thought, "Well, if they know I'm pregnant, they're going to start getting all up tight and fussy." So observing clothes will hide a multitude of sins. So "We won't let them know." And word somehow never got up from Pasadena, up the mountain.

DE VORKIN:

That you were pregnant.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. We went on working there. But when I was about six months pregnant, there was one cloudy run when we were invited around to Arnie Ratzlaff's house, and it was hot in his house, but I wouldn't take my observing coat off. I was sitting there sweltering in that. And I thought, "Well, this is probably it, and it's also getting a bit awkward getting up that observing ladder. So we have enough data now, we will quit observing." Then it turned out that all the wives of those night assistants were very put out that they hadn't known.

DE VORKIN:

Why?

BURBIDGE:

Oh they thought personally it would have been interesting, whether or not it would have upset their husbands, they themselves would have liked to have known.

DE VORKIN:

Were they very supportive of your presence there doing research?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. They were. As far as I know, they were.

DE VORKIN:

But the husbands?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, they were too; it was they who said, "Why don't you eat night lunch the way everybody else does?"

DE VORKIN:

The husbands said that.

BURBIDGE:

Yes.

DE VORKIN:

Not the wives.

BURBIDGE:

No.

DE VORKIN:

You had no real contact with the wives?

BURBIDGE:

Well, we used to on cloudy nights. We used to do that, go round to their houses and so on.

DE VORKIN:

Did you work during the cloudy periods of the runs? Did you have data up there you could work on?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. We did.

DE VORKIN:

Were there any restrictions at Cal Tech, on your husband, being a Carnegie Fellow from the Hale Observatories?

BURBIDGE:

We had two offices. We had one down in Kellogg that was mine, and one up on Santa Barbara Street that was his, but we used to alternate between the two.

DE VORKIN:

So there was no problem with you working on Santa Barbara St.

BURBIDGE:

No. But around that time was when we were turned out of our apartment, because they didn't take children in our apartment, and the landlady said, "You'll have to find another place to live." So we started looking around, and we rented a house very close to Cal Tech, in the area on Chester that's now part of the parking lot ground. It was all Cal Tech-owned property, and we rented this little house that was very nice and very convenient. And one street over was Baade. Already we used to see a lot of Baade and Minkowski, up at Santa Barbara St., but we began to see Baade socially a lot, and became very good friends with him.

DE VORKIN:

Do you have some sort of recollection of Baade?

BURBIDGE:

The first recollection goes back to the Michigan Summer School. He had a wonderful way with young people, of talking to them about his experiences. You know that book that Gaposchkin made, out of his lectures that he gave at Harvard, after he'd retired? ^[10]

DE VORKIN:

Mrs. Gaposchkin? Yes.

BURBIDGE:

Yes. There's an actual manuscript version of that that has all the homely stories in it of his experiences. I may have a copy of that.

DE VORKIN:

We'd love a copy.

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I think I could dig that out. He was so intensely human. And he was a wonderful teacher of observing techniques. He would give you little clues, as to what to do to be a good observer, like, "Late in the night, never do anything very quickly. When you're going to make some change of setting or whatever, just do it slowly and think about it, because you might be tired." Little things like that. And experiences of what it's like being in the prime focus cage, or the Newtonian platform all night long.

DE VORKIN:

So he was talking about the 200-inch as well as the 100-inch?

BURBIDGE:

Yes. Well, we used to talk to him of course he got involved in the nuclear synthesis.

DE VORKIN:

Did he?

BURBIDGE:

We used his supernovae light curves, during the Californium days. And his name is one of those papers, one of those early papers, on the decay of supernovae. ^[11]

DE VORKIN:

Well, the paper on Californium 254 in supernovae that was with your husband, with Hoyle, with Christy and Fowler in 1956. ^[12]

BURBIDGE:

There's one with Baade on it too.

DE VORKIN:

There probably were several papers, that's right. But as your husband recollected it, he had noticed the similarity in the decay 2 curve and the light curve.

BURBIDGE:

It was Geoff who spotted that. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

That was a very exciting time.

BURBIDGE:

It was. Yes. And he was looking then in the just declassified material on the hydrogen bomb explosion, and seeing this decay, seeing how Californium was built, and that it had this particularly long half life, and he noticed the similarity.

DE VORKIN:

Yes. Were you the first one told, to your knowledge?

BURBIDGE:

Yes, I think so. Yes.

DE VORKIN:

I wasn't too sure how he made this discovery, but that was an interesting thing. It must have been a boon