Vera Rubin

Note: During hour 5 interview location moves to Rubin residence and Bob Rubin joins the conversation.

Yeager:

My name is Ashley Yeager, and I will be asking the questions today.

DeVorkin:

David DeVorkin, and I will be taking notes and also asking questions, and we are here to interview— Rubin: Vera Rubin, and I guess I will try to give some answers today.

Yeager:

I guess we were going to start where the last interview left off, with your Georgetown years, so my first question was, what was the atmosphere for research at Georgetown?

V. Rubin:

Well, Georgetown was a very small place. The permanent faculty must have been, I don’t know, like two, and many of the courses were taught by scientists in the area. So, the only thing that I can think of saying really is that the atmosphere was absent. I mean, there was no body of people. There were a couple of other people that worked there and did science of various kinds. It was very pleasant. I worked from nine to three a couple of days in the week, and then I taught. There was only a graduate school of astronomy, and all the courses were in the evening, so that was convenient for me. In fact, the people I was closest to were my students.

DeVorkin:

Who were your students?

V. Rubin:

Many of them were people that worked at the Naval Observatory that had master’s degrees, and they were interested in getting Ph.D.’s, and there were a bunch of about five or six people. One of them was Jaylee Burley at that time, now Jaylee Mead. We wrote a series of papers on stellar motions beyond the solar radius, trying to get a rotation curve for our galaxy. There were five Naval Observatory people and Jaylee, so that was while she was doing her class work for her Ph.D. There was someone named Kiasatpoor from the Naval Observatory. There were three papers in A.J. [Astronomical Journal] in ’62 and ’63. And they were very interesting, because they knew about stars. I mean, they knew about cataloguing, so we did a class program where we picked all the O and B stars beyond the Sun, and some close but interior, and we derived their rotation curve from three-dimensional notions. In the abstract of one of the papers we said that the Keplerian decline, the expected Keplerian decline did not occur. The rotation velocities were flat. That was ’62. I seem to have forgotten that for the next ten or fifteen years.

DeVorkin:

Really!

V. Rubin:

Really. Really.

DeVorkin:

But there were problems with the masses of galaxies even then. Were you aware of that?

V. Rubin:

You know, to be very honest, I have to say either I was or I don’t know, I don’t remember. It certainly was not prominent in my thinking. I think we all at some level knew about [Fritz] Zwicky’s work. But the paper was in German, at least the first one, and I have never read it. I mean, I now know that he had later ones, but it’s really not possible for me to say what I knew then.

In fact, one day or days, I looked up all the references to Zwicky’s early work, and none of us cited it. I think the first contemporary reference I found was Faber and Gallagher’s annual reviews in 1979, which was really a review of masses, and so they did it for clusters and they did it for galaxies and they did it for binary galaxies, a very, very extensive thing, and they mentioned Zwicky.

Yeager:

How much contact did you have with Gamow after your thesis?

V. Rubin:

After my thesis? In fact, he didn’t come to my Ph.D. thesis [defense], because he was at Berkeley for that six months or something, yes. But still, it was very interesting getting to know him. Then he moved to Boulder, so I saw him infrequently. I saw him in ’63 at the first Relativistic Astrophysics Meeting in Texas, and I think I saw him there. Then I saw him in one of those at New York. I didn’t have a lot of contact.

He was really drinking very heavily, and that sort of depressed me. I remember at the New York Relativistic Astrophysics Meeting, ten o’clock one morning, we were sitting together. I mean, we were friends. If we were in a meeting we sat together and we probably had a meal together, and at ten in the morning he asked me if I would go out with him for a drink, and I said no. And that may have been the last time I really spent any time with him. I mean, we were at Boulder once, and I think I can truly say we saw him and we talked to him, but we saw him because we saw him walking down the street and we sort of stopped and talked. So not a lot.

I have some very interesting letters. We would correspond a little. I would ask him if he was going to a meeting, and the answer was generally no, or if he was we would talk about something, so I think we were friends. I don’t think he had a lot of friends. I mean, maybe. If so, I was not aware of that.

DeVorkin:

Where did he live when he lived here in Washington?

V. Rubin:

I sometimes met him in his house.

DeVorkin:

Where was that?

V. Rubin:

Out in Bethesda somewhere. I mean, I had always lived in the District [of Columbia], and I don’t know. But it was a very, very nice house. When I knew him, during the time I was writing my thesis he was sort of in the process of divorcing his first wife, and when I would meet him at his house I don’t know that I ever saw her. I don’t even know that she was in the house, but I presume she was, because he would be screaming at her. I mean, if he couldn’t find a piece of paper he would start yelling to her, you know, “Why are you always messing up my papers so I can’t find them?” I mean, I was very young, and this was sort of embarrassing. As I say, I can’t remember ever seeing her. I mean, it was like a play, where she was offstage. I sometimes saw his son, who would drive up on his motorcycle sometimes, with his big dog sitting on top of his motorcycle.

DeVorkin:

Would you say that Gamow’s work earlier on, with [Ralph] Alpher and [Robert] Herman, had any influence on you as his student later on?

V. Rubin:

Well, I mean it had a strange influence in the sense that I knew of him because I knew of their work. I mean, I knew who he was and what he did. I knew he was at George Washington, and, in fact, it’s even closer than that. I gave a talk on my master’s thesis at Haverford in December 1950, and that got a lot of attention, and Gamow heard about that. I’m not sure how, but there were several ways he may have.

One of them is that when we left Cornell in ’51, Bob took a job at the Applied Physics Laboratory, and he shared an office with Ralph Alpher, who had been Gamow’s student. So, I don’t know how much it went through that line. I know I started getting phone calls from Gamow. We were living in a little apartment outside of Washington — I had one child — and he started asking me very interesting questions.

DeVorkin:

Was it about the rotational properties of galaxies or of the universe?

V. Rubin:

No, not at all. It was about the distribution of galaxies in the universe. I had already started graduate school at Georgetown. This is really the fifties, and I don’t know whether I said some of this, but I was really miserable being out of school. We moved to Washington, we had a child, and Bob went off to work every day, and I stayed home with the baby. So, we moved here in August or September, and partly due to his encouragement. I would actually cry when I read the Astrophysical Journal that came into the house. I mean, can even tell you what papers, because people were doing work that I would have liked to have been doing.

So, I went back to Georgetown. I went back to graduate school. Georgetown was the only place that had a Ph.D. program in astronomy. Then Gamow was calling and asking me all these interesting questions, and I finally decided that one of them would make an interesting Ph.D. thesis, and that was, he asked me whether there was a scale length in the distribution of galaxies. So, there were multiple routes to him, and he was very kind to me, even before we really—he had heard about my master’s thesis, and he even told me, I guess—I got a letter from [Martin] Schwarzschild. He told Schwarzschild at Princeton when he went up there, that I was having trouble getting it published, and I got a very nice letter from Schwarzschild, asking me if he could help me, and I told him by then I just thought the best thing to do was to go on to different things than to try and get that published.

DeVorkin:

That’s quite a bit of support.

V. Rubin:

It was.

DeVorkin:

Would you say this was outside the old-boy network, or this was part of the old-boy network?

V. Rubin:

This was the old-boy network, but Gamow was—maybe Gamow wasn’t out of it, because he could talk to anybody he wanted to. But he was a little bit different from many of them, and he did things very differently. In fact, I have some charming letters. He was not here, as I said, for my Ph.D. I sent him the thesis. He wrote me one of his charming letters, saying, “Well, it looks very impressive, but of course I haven’t gone through all the mathematics.” I mean, he was interested in answers. He had interesting questions and he liked them answered, and it was just wonderful for me.

DeVorkin:

A man of that stature certainly, because he’s also well known popularly, very well known, and here he is paying attention to you.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I just did things. I thought this was all great, everything seemed at some level unbelievable. By then I had two children. In fact, you know, I went to Georgetown in ’52. Father Heyden was there. I was pregnant, I was Jewish, this was a Catholic boys school, and I told him I wanted to enter the graduate school, having had a master’s. And he said yes. If he had said no, I don’t know what I would have done.

And then, of course, I mean the real remarkable thing in all this is that because Gamow and I did not really have a common meeting ground, I would sometimes meet him in Maryland, but most of the time I would meet him here. The first time I ever walked into DTM [Department of Terrestrial Magnetism] was to meet Gamow, and he had no real rights for being here. So, I learned about DTM by meeting him here, and I remember the first time I walked in. I mean, I was so impressed I must have decided then—that was ’52—that this would be a nice place to work.

DeVorkin:

Did he perform this wonderful mentoring, in a way, with other people, too, do you know?

V. Rubin:

I don’t know. I could have asked—we knew Ralph Alpher. Do you know that Ralph is getting the Medal of Science? On the twenty-seventh of this month. I’m not sure whether he will be—in fact, we called Helen Herman, I called her about two days ago. Bob has called Ralph a couple of times. He’s in Texas now. That’s another whole story, and he’s not in great shape, and I assume he is not coming to the ceremony. I don’t know.

DeVorkin:

He donated the YLEM bottle to us.

V. Rubin:

Oh, I don’t know that I knew that.

DeVorkin:

Yes, yes. We have it on display.

V. Rubin:

I have a slide of that, and it’s signed by each one of them.

DeVorkin:

I’d be very interested. Make sure you keep it.

V. Rubin:

If you ask me where it is, I would tell you I almost don’t know. We were somewhere some night.

DeVorkin:

That would be definitely worth having. But moreover, as part of your papers I think it’s very important. Have you made arrangements for your papers?

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

Is it "LC"? (Library of Congress)

V. Rubin:

Yes. I never heard it called that, but they seem to be the right initials, the Library of Congress.

DeVorkin:

I heard that rumor and I was delighted. You couldn’t have done better.

V. Rubin:

Okay, thank you for saying so. I mean, they called me, or they wrote me a letter. My life is full of stories. I never thought about what I was going to do with them, but I really have been saving them, I mean just because I’m a packrat. So, I went to Sean Hardy, of course, and I spoke to him, and he thought that was wonderful. They had invited me to come down and talk to them, so we both went. I took him with me as my informant or something, and they showed us lots of interesting things. I asked them about Maria Mitchell, and he said, “Well, I thought you would ask something like that.” So, he had looked, and they had one piece of paper from her or about her or something. They have very few women, I mean like almost none.

DeVorkin:

Yes, that’s right, in the sciences.

V. Rubin:

Yes. So, we had a very pleasant—they were very nice. I mean, I was looking them over, and with Sean’s help I decided that would be fine.

DeVorkin:

I can tell you that as a user, you couldn’t have chosen a better place.

V. Rubin:

Okay. Yes, they showed—they were doing one of the Supreme Court judge’s things, so in a big room they had a long table, and this judge would only give them the papers if they took them in his files. They had to cart his files over.

The other part of the story is, I grew up wishing I had been George Gershwin. I’m really a fanatic about musical comedies and things like that, and Sondheim was having some kind of a thing at the Library of Congress. So, in the letter accepting, after this formal letter and signing it, I wrote a handwritten note at the bottom asking—I think I did this. I mean, I certainly did something like it—if I could have some tickets for the Sondheim show. It was a show that he was putting on.

And the answer came back that even they couldn’t get them, but because there was so much interest, there was going to be a rehearsal that afternoon, and they sent me three tickets for that. We went, and it was phenomenal, because he was in the audience and it was a real rehearsal. It was the first time. You know, I don’t know whether they did it with pieces of paper in front of them, but they were singing and dancing, and with each scene he would get up and give them instructions. So that’s what I got out of saying yes, they could have—I thought that was a fair exchange. It was a magical afternoon.

DeVorkin:

That’s great, that’s really great. Okay. Well, do you feel that there are any insights that you can give us to George Gamow, or should we move on from there?

V. Rubin:

No. He was delightful. He was very childlike in many ways, which made him very pleasant. And he wanted answers, which in some sense, I mean I’m not George Gamow, but, I mean he really wanted to get answers to things, and I think we did very well together.

Yeager:

How do you think reputation plays into whose ideas are accepted in science as relating to Gamow.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Well, probably a lot, probably a lot. It’s reputation, and it’s where you work, and who thinks you’re good. We’ve seen this the last couple of days, because of this business about Ralph Alpher. I mean, certainly Ralph—they were very bitter people, because their work was not properly discussed or referenced or honored, and I think part of it was their lives, that they left an academic position and went somewhere else. I mean, there’s a real establishment and a real path, and if you’re on that path you have a certain entrée into all kinds of things, including people’s brains. And if you not, you’re an outsider.

But Gamow I think sort of spanned lots of areas. In fact, when I first started working here, and told people that I first got here through George Gamow, they would say, “Oh yeah, they were the years he was always bothering us about DNA and he had this model.” You know, he had a spiral, but not a double spiral. But the words they use, I mean, “That’s when he was always bothering us,” while I don’t think they would have said that from friends that came from Caltech or MIT.

Yeager:

Did the development of NASA have any influence on your work, or did you ever consider accepting a position there, or think about going to work for them?

V. Rubin:

No. I never considered leaving DTM. I mean, I didn’t have many offers, but I at least had one very legitimate offer, and I said absolutely—I mean, the idea of leaving here was impossible, because I couldn’t imagine any place being better than this. But yes, Sputnik, no, no, it is true. No. I mean, all the questions I wanted to answer weren’t answerable by what NASA was doing. Really, that’s it. I virtually never used the space telescope. Once or twice I took some pictures, and they weren’t very helpful.

DeVorkin:

Other people working in the Washington area, of course, like Nancy Roman, answered the call, and she had her reasons. Were you in contact with Nancy or people like that, and was this a debatable question?

V. Rubin:

Yes, I was in contact with Nancy much of the time. I mean, I would see her at meetings. There were always groups of women physicists and astronomers. I think I knew her very early. I actually went to NRL one day to see Herb Friedman, in ’57, because we had been in Illinois ’55 and ’56, then moved back to Washington, and I was still on the Georgetown payroll. I was doing things for them. I mean, I was working on grants that they had, mostly with planets and the Sun, and solar eclipses.

That certainly wasn’t what I wanted to do, and Herb Friedman had—in fact, I think I went to Bureau of Standards, too, and I started measuring spectra for Mrs. [Charlotte Moore] Sitterly at Georgetown. She gave me some of these three-feet-long, about one-foot high solar spectra from one of the solar telescopes at Mt. Wilson, so I learned to measure spectra from her really.

DeVorkin:

That’s when National Bureau of Standards was in NW Washington?

V. Rubin:

Was over there, yes. Then I went to visit Herb Friedman, and I guess it was clear I could have had a job. That may be overstressing it, but he was interested enough to ask me to come down. I drove down, and at every intersection I was in the wrong lane for how I had to turn. I mean, I guess I had a map to get to NRL.

DeVorkin:

It’s not that easy.

V. Rubin:

By the time I got home, I thought I couldn’t possibly go there every day in the week. I don’t think he ever knew that. That’s why we never went any further.

DeVorkin:

That’s interesting. Okay.

Yeager:

So in the 1960s you worked with Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge.

V. Rubin:

That’s right.

Yeager:

After their elucidation of the formation of elements in the stars, how did your relationship with them begin?

V. Rubin:

Well, it’s sort of hard to remember how things—probably I met them at meetings. I was very interested in their work, and Bob had an NSF senior fellowship. You could have a year off. He was at the Bureau of Standards, and someone wanted him to come to Norway, so he decided to take a year off and he got an NSF fellowship. This was Trondheim, and he decided none of us would be happy in the Norwegian winter, where it was dark most of the day. So he had several opportunities, and he picked La Jolla to work with a physicist there, and partly because I could work with the Burbidges.

DeVorkin:

So he was definitely considering your career?

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes. He made it possible, he always did. So, the summer before, maybe a year before, there was an AAS meeting in either—probably Phoenix. It certainly was in Arizona. It wasn’t at Lowell, so it must have been at Phoenix; maybe it was at Tucson. I must have contacted—maybe it was ’63 already. I had contacted the Burbidges, who I didn’t know well, but I must have—they certainly knew who I was. I mean, I must have been in contact with them somehow. I was relatively isolated. Georgetown didn’t have much of a department, so what I really knew well was published work. I mean, I really read the ApJs [Astrophysical Journal] from cover to cover.

So, they asked me to have lunch with them at this AAS meeting, and so the table consisted of four of us, them and Allan Sandage and me having lunch together, and I really understood this as an interview for my request to spend a year with them. So, they started talking about galaxies. I mean, it was a wonderful conversation. I still remember it. And there certainly were a few places where I knew things that they did not, because I read the literature so well about galaxies. I mean, had they been talking about star formation I couldn’t have said a word, so I think I passed that interview, and I went and spent the year with them, and it was very profitable.

They had lots of spectra that needed measuring first, and I measured spectra, and I learned from them. They were really the first astronomers I ever, continuous, I mean over a long period, interacted with, and the fact that they were interested in my ideas, I mean sort of coming from Georgetown, where there were really not astronomers around, was no judge of what—but I had a wonderful time with them. But Bob did not. His advisor was off for the first six months on a sabbatical or something, the person he was going to work with. But we had a lovely year. We had a gorgeous house overlooking the Pacific. I mean, it was unbelievable.

DeVorkin:

How old were your kids by then?

V. Rubin:

[19]63, they were three to thirteen. I can’t believe—we drove out, we camped, we had a station wagon. I don’t know how—in fact, my mother told stories of pushing us in the car at three a.m. and shutting the doors and off we went. I mean, how we packed. My recollection is that we didn’t ship anything. I mean, we rented a furnished house, but just camping gear for six of us. But the trips in and out, I mean across the country, were wonderful, and we loved it.

DeVorkin:

Would you say you worked with both Burbidges?

V. Rubin:

Yes, in a sense, in a sense. I had an office. They were in the process of building the new university campus up on the hill, and we were at the Scripps Oceanography Institute in this gorgeous building that went out—no, I guess the first couple of months I was in one of the regular Scripps buildings, sharing it with a young man who only was unhappy because to change into his bathing shorts for lunchtime, he couldn’t do it in the office because I was there. He had to go to the men’s room.

DeVorkin:

What an imposition.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Then we moved to this other new building out over the water, and I had an office. I worked most often with Margaret, because I was measuring spectra, but I probably talked to Geoff most. Well, he likes to talk, and he would come in and sit down and talk a lot, but it was always about pretty much exactly what we were doing. He would talk about grand ideas. It was great fun with both of them.

DeVorkin:

Would you say that you were a student, or were you a colleague?

V. Rubin:

I was a colleague, very much. I guess by ’63, I certainly had measured enough spectra that I knew how to do it. They had better equipment than I had had. We had our first computer at Georgetown before I left, which was ’65, but the first one was pegboards.

DeVorkin:

Oh, banana plugs sticking into a board?

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes. And you had a series. What I really remember was measuring, because they had lots of [spectra]. They were very, very generous. Geoff was impatient, but in some sense, I am impatient, too. I mean, I would finish measuring something, some object they had studied, and it would be interesting. Geoff was sort of the organizer, and he would say, “Well, you did all this work. We could write the paper, but why don’t you take the weekend, and if you get something written we’ll use that. That’ll be the start of the paper. And if you don’t get around to doing it, I’ll do it.” They were very generous to me, and often I wrote it, so it was like a younger colleague. I don’t think I was on their level, but they were very willing to let me do the work.

DeVorkin:

Did this change the dynamic between you and Bob, as far as the importance of your career?

V. Rubin:

Boy, I don’t even think about things like that. I don’t even know how to answer. No, he was always very, enormously more than supportive. He was always encouraging me. You know, there’d be a meeting early on and I would say, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly go. How could I leave you?” And he would say, “Of course you can go.” So, I don’t know what changing would mean.

DeVorkin:

Well, just the both of you together thinking about choices, future choices and stuff. Was there a chance you could stay with the Burbidges, stay in La Jolla?

V. Rubin:

It never came up directly. We became friends with the guy that came from Chicago and hired the Burbidges, a Nobel Prize winner from about the fifties Harold Urey, and his wife. They became good friends, and they were wonderful. But they became friends with everybody. She was wonderful. They would come to dinner, and he would keep looking at his watch, and she told him—they weren’t allowed to leave any place till ten o’clock. I mean, that must have been her rule. That certainly was on his mind, because he had brought the Burbidges. In fact, I heard Margaret Burbidge give her introductory, you know, professor-level talk, because she came as a full professor, but in the Department of Chemistry.

DeVorkin:

Yes, she had to be in chemistry.

V. Rubin:

Yes, because of the two of them [could not be in the same department]. It was clear [that Urey] wasn’t going to hire both of us. I don’t even know that we would have stayed. We probably would have stayed. It’s very hard to tell.

DeVorkin:

This was not an issue, though, an overt concern?

V. Rubin:

No, not at all, not at all. We were both very happy in the East.

DeVorkin:

Yes, Bob was at the Bureau, but you were at Georgetown.

V. Rubin:

That’s right. I was at Georgetown.

DeVorkin:

Did you know that you would come back being dissatisfied with Georgetown?

V. Rubin:

You know, that’s another question. It’s sort of lost in my brain. I think I knew, starting in ’63, so it was just about the same time we went to La Jolla, I started observing at Kitt Peak, and teaching and observing and having four children was just more than I wanted to handle. If it had been impossible to do anything else, I probably would have made it work. We came back in the fall of ’64 and Georgetown was beginning to fall apart, the astronomy department. I mean, from my point of view, I didn’t like the way things were going. It had very little money, almost none. Father Heyden would take any grant that would give him money, and they were almost always from the air force. At one of the eclipses he did some timing. This was an air force grant. The eclipse I think was at Khartoum, and I used this timing, I don’t know, to do something, maybe get distances between [stations]. All I know is that I wrote a first draft, and it was taken from me and classified, and I never saw it again. And that really wasn’t what I was interested in doing.

I had become a friend with [Gerard] de Vaucouleurs, and he was very helpful. He had grant money, and he would give me money to spend time on galaxies, because at some level, I mean, I had to satisfy Georgetown for what they were paying me. But it was really the observing that was the last straw, to go away a couple of times a year when I was teaching, so I would come back behind.

DeVorkin:

How did you come to know de Vaucouleurs, or he you? Was it through your research?

V. Rubin:

It was through my early work at Cornell. It was through my master’s work. He wrote me. I started hearing from a few very interesting people, and he was one of them. He would come and visit whenever they were in Washington. We really had become friends, and we talked about science, and I was doing some kind of galaxy work for him, and so life was just too complicated. But it really was partly the Georgetown—I haven’t really said this much, but the environment was just not the way one would want to do science, and so I did two things.

The first thing I did was resign. I wrote a letter to the dean in late December, telling him that I would continue working till June, and I told him why. The end of that story is, about two years later they had this committee that was headed by a Harvard [astronomer]. I’ll think of the name shortly. Anyway, they had a very high-powered three-person committee who told them to either put in a million dollars or shut the department.

[By then] I had decided that I wanted to work here [at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism]. I used to come and talk to Bernie [Bernard] Burke. I’m sure I’ve told you this. So, I just walked in one day and asked Bernie if I could get a job, and I went home and told Bob that if I had asked him to marry me I don’t think he would have looked more surprised. Until the end of the war, even the secretaries here, from the beginning, were male. They had never had a woman staff member.

DeVorkin:

So, that was the issue, not what you wanted to do.

V. Rubin:

I asked Bernie whether he should talk to Merle Tuve, who I guess by then I had met once or twice, or whether I should, and he said no, he should. But he invited me to stay for lunch, which I had never been invited to before, and at lunch, I don’t know whether he had talked to Tuve, the director, by then, but at lunch Tuve said, “Well, we do a lot of learning at lunch,” and there was a blackboard there, “so why don’t you get up and tell us what you’re doing?” He said this to me.

So, I got up and told them I had been most recently doing the rotation work with the Burbidges, and I told them about that, and I sat next to Kent Ford or across from Kent Ford. I did not know that Kent Ford had just built an image-tube spectrograph. I mean, that was just a gift out of the blue. They gave me a piece of glass with a spectrum on it, and they asked me if I could measure it, and I went back to Georgetown and I measured it. I must have come back or something, and told them and showed them. Then I got a call one afternoon from Tuve, asking me how soon I could come and talk to him about a job. This was March of ’65. I had come [originally] in January of ’65. I said, “I can be there in ten minutes.”

And he said, “No, I meant next week.” I said, “No, I’ll be there in ten minutes,” and I came, and I can tell you exactly what I was wearing.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

V. Rubin:

A blue suit. It was so memorable in my life. I walked in and he had Tom Aldridge in the office, because he said this would all be oral and so forth, so he offered me a salary, and I told him from the beginning that I wanted to go home at three o’clock, as I did at Georgetown, but I still worked [at home]. I mean, we have a long dining-room table. Well, you’ll come, and you’ll see it. I would work there, and the kids would work there. So, he offered me a salary that was exactly two-thirds of my Georgetown salary, and I told him I would take the job. He wanted me to start April first, and I said, “Well, I’m teaching at Georgetown.”

And he said, “Well, I’ll call up, and we’ll take over your salary and you can teach.” And he said, “I want you on here from April first.” So, April first I drove up that winding driveway, and I backed into a spot, and I knocked the lamppost over. [laughter] And that was my first day of work. And Miss Russell from the office upstairs had to come down and ask me how I spelled my name, because not one piece of paper had crossed the secretary's desk. Nobody had asked me for my name or my address.

I learned afterwards that Tuve had had a desk put in Kent Ford’s office and in Bernie Burke’s office, so if I wanted to do radio astronomy I could sit there. And I walked into Kent’s office and never left, and I worked here every day. I mean, the classes at Georgetown were at night. I still left at three, because by then the kids were five to fifteen, so that’s the story. I mean, the fact that there was an image tube here [was critical].

DeVorkin:

When did you know that?

V. Rubin:

At that first lunch in January, because Kent was there, and he had just come back from Mt. Wilson. They had used the solar telescope to do something. Then in April they were observing at the McMath solar telescope, that very high resolution. They were looking for lithium in stars. There were no optical astronomers here at D.T.M. In fact, after Tuve asked me to start and I said, “Well, I can’t, because I’m teaching,” I then told him we were spending the summer at Brookhaven. We used to do anything to get out of Washington in the summer. We went to Boulder several years, and we went to Los Alamos several years. They were wonderful.

So Tuve said, “We don’t hire you by the day. We hire you by the year.” So, we went to Brookhaven and I spent the whole summer, when I wasn’t on the beach, measuring positions in Andromeda, offsets.

DeVorkin:

So you were preparing galaxy rotations?

V. Rubin:

I was preparing, [after] I had a couple observing runs with Kent. I had an observing run with the Burbidges at McDonald in April. I mean, I was sort of embarrassed, [even though] people here travel all the time, but here I had just arrived, and I had to go observing.

DeVorkin:

But that’s activity for work.

V. Rubin:

That’s right, that’s what I was doing. Yes, so that’s why I’m confused, but I did do the Andromeda measurements at Brookhaven, but I may have the summers wrong. That may have been ’66. I don’t know. I think Kent went out to observe in the summer, and I was here. I know what I was reading. Maarten Schmidt had just published his paper on QSOs, and I went to Tuve to tell him about that, because it really was exciting. It was an April first issue, but I think it must have come out when I had just started working here, because the first thing I ever did with Kent, we did it for about a year or two, we studied QSOs with the image tube. Then I decided again that’s just not the way I wanted to work, so we went to Andromeda.

DeVorkin:

Not the way you wanted to work because?

V. Rubin:

Because the competition was too demanding. So, I went observing, so I was wrong. Measuring Andromeda started in’66. In ’65 I went to Lowell to join Kent, and we did QSOs, and we could see H-Alpha. We didn’t discover any, but we did spectroscopy, and we had an image tube that went through 9,000 angstroms, so we could see H-Alpha in everyone, where people only had one or two lines. We published a paper, and we published a paper of the night sky and published a spectrum in that. I think we had three QSOs.

It was a good lesson, because my phone would ring. I was by then very good friends with the Burbidges and with Maarten Schmidt. All kinds of people would call and ask me if I had spectra of such-and-such, because if I did they wouldn’t do it, and if I didn’t have a spectrum they would, and if I sort of had one spectrum and I didn’t know whether I believed it or not, I didn’t know what to say. I decided very rapidly that that wasn’t the way I wanted to spend my life, and I had always been interested in what happens at the edges of galaxies, partly because nobody ever seemed to be interested in that. I really did certainly then feel like I just wanted to work at my own pace, and do something that people would be interested in, but wouldn’t bother me while I was doing it. And Kent was just wonderful, because all he wanted was the image-tube spectrograph to be pushed to its limits.

DeVorkin:

Was [William A.] Baum at Lowell at the time?

V. Rubin:

Yes, he was, and he was wonderful.

DeVorkin:

Was there interaction?

V. Rubin:

I talked to him a lot. I haven’t thought about this. You know, we should really go faster, have to get to the seventies at least. No, but it’s fun, I don’t do this often. Let me jump over to Andromeda. I may have told you this story. I gave a talk at the AAS in ’69 or something on Andromeda, and it was, oh, this wonderful guy from Berkeley, I guess, an elderly gentleman who spoke to me at the break after, and he asked me when I was going to publish the paper we had, I don’t know, ’69, on H-II regions or something, across Andromeda. And I said, “I don’t know. You know, there were six hundred and some H-2 regions, and we’ve only done sixty-nine.”

He was Albert [A.E.] Whitford, and he said, “I think you should publish the paper right now.” So, I went home and published the paper, and then I went back to the problem I had tried to do for my master’s thesis, and that was to see if there were really large-scale motions in the universe. By then a 4-meter was available. Andromeda had been done with the 2.1-meter telescope at Kitt Peak, and you really needed something bigger. So, we did that for about three or four years, and published that in ’74 or ’75, or something like that.

DeVorkin:

Let me ask, going back to Baum, could you give me a sense of, with Kent Ford and Baum together, the question of instrumentation - the image tube. Baum was, of course, also on the Carnegie Image-Tube Committee.

V. Rubin:

That’s right, that’s right. And Hall, John Hall.

DeVorkin:

John Hall as well. I would like just a sense from you of these instrument providers. Where would you place Baum, because more than some of the others, he did astronomy.

V. Rubin:

He did the astronomy. That’s exactly right. The reason I’m hesitating, my interactions with him were always on the astronomy side. We went to Lowell a lot, because the image tube was kept there, and all the work and all the changes on it were done there. So, Kent spent a lot of time at Lowell, and he and Baum, I mean the best way I can answer your question, it’s just they were very, very close. I mean, they seemed to enjoy working together, and if there were problems they solved them together. I don’t know much more than that about them.

DeVorkin:

Did they work as a team when they were together?

V. Rubin:

They did. But there were really times when I went out there with questions on my mind, and I would sit in his office and we would talk. I mean, apart from—probably a lot in connection with the large-scale motions. I don’t know when he left Lowell, but my recollections of sitting in his office were that it was often about these things I was doing, and people didn’t believe. I always seemed to be in this predicament.

DeVorkin:

What I’m looking at is kind of like the spectrum of the instrument providers, where you have Kent Ford, who builds the hammer and is looking for the nails. Baum, though, is somewhere in between. Was he also interested because of what he could—that he could stretch the technology?

V. Rubin:

I think it must have had to be, just because, I mean if you asked me to classify him, I would classify him as an astronomer, not as an instrument builder.

DeVorkin:

That’s an interesting spectrum. There’s people like Jerry Kron.

V. Rubin:

And where do you put Jim Gunn?

DeVorkin:

And where do you put Jim Gunn, excellent point.

V. Rubin:

I mean, I would tend to call Gunn an astronomer, although the instruments he makes are phenomenal.

DeVorkin:

And they always had been, even from his amateur days —he built telescopes.

V. Rubin:

Yes, I think there are a few people like that.

DeVorkin:

Now to you and Lowell, your working on the hydrogen regions; these are H-II regions?

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

What’s going on?

V. Rubin:

Well, let’s see. Pick a year.

DeVorkin:

Well, I think what’s important for the structure of the interview is that we’re pretty much finished with Georgetown, we’re well into Carnegie.

Yeager:

Did you know Barbara McClintock’s position at Carnegie before you arrived?

V. Rubin:

No, no, not at all, not at all. I don’t think I could have named—I don’t think I even understood what the relation of Palomar and the West Coast was at the time. I just didn’t know. In fact—and I must have told you this—in 1963 Allan Sandage asked me if I would like to observe at Palomar. No woman had ever observed there before. Okay. The reason I’m saying that is, that was late ’63’,64 I got a piece of paper to apply on it, where it said, “We are sorry we cannot accept applications from women.” Someone had penciled in “usually.” And I asked for time in December of ’65. April of ’65 was the annual Carnegie evening in downtown Washington, and I went, and there was the director of the Carnegie Observatories. Can you tell me his name? His father was the previous director.

DeVorkin:

Babcock.

V. Rubin:

Babcock, yes, Horace Babcock. I went up to Horace Babcock. I had met him five times. I introduced myself, and we must have had a few pleasant words, and then I said, “You must know—,” and I had written his secretary to tell her that my address had changed, because we had paperwork because of the observing. And I said, “Do you know that I am now employed by the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism?” And you will never guess what he said to me. He said, “What are they calling you?” I swear they were his words. And I said, “I don’t know. I guess they’re calling me an astronomer,” because he believed that all astronomers had to work at Pasadena, and I, of course, knew none of that.

DeVorkin:

Politics.

V. Rubin:

Yes. And that started a battle, and Merle Tuve when he was dying called me one day at work, and I always walked, so I didn’t even have a car, and asked if I would come and talk to him.

DeVorkin:

At his house just off Chevy Chase Circle?

V. Rubin:

Yes. I had never been there. Kent drove me and sat in the car. Tuve had very bad Parkinson’s disease, and he trembled, and he had trouble walking and talking, and it was really painful. Several times I asked him if I should leave. In fact, at one point I asked him if he wanted to see Kent and he said no, and he gave me a packet of all the files between Babcock and himself. Babcock really fought for no astronomy here.

DeVorkin:

Where is that?

V. Rubin:

I gave it to Sean Hardy. I had it in there [ her office] for a couple of years, and then when I knew, when he was here—and, in fact, I told Solomon that it existed, and that Sean had it. So, this is an ongoing battle, but I mean, life is just remarkable.

DeVorkin:

Yes, but the dynamic between the astronomy that’s done here, and astronomy that’s on the West Coast is going to be a major historical question in the future.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I think it’s a little better. Yes, Babcock insisted that all optical astronomy was done there. You know, there are no rights and there are lots of wrongs, but Tuve apparently wrote to Babcock, and that may have been in there. That’s probably where I learned this, in that package, to tell him that they were going to start doing radio astronomy here. I think, in fact, if Kent Ford had not existed, or the spectrograph—I mean, when I told Bernie I wanted to come work here, my idea was I could continue doing the things I wanted to do, and there were radio astronomers around who could take me, or they could get the data themselves, or I would do something else, but the idea of joining the optical and the radio data was very appealing. That, I think, could have been a very interesting future also. But we had a ten-year advance over everybody, because we had the image tube.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Yeager:

Were the Burbidges responsible for getting you re-interested in galaxy rotation??

V. Rubin:

You know, it’s just too long to answer questions like that. In ’60, the papers I published with Jaylee and the other third-channel students were ’62 and ’63. In fact, they even came to my house, the class, because I was leaving that June to go to La Jolla, and we published three papers. I know one was ’62, I’m not even sure—the first was just the data. The second was a comparison with the radio observations. I think they were cute papers. I haven’t re-read them in twenty years at least.

But so I was doing that before I went out, but not in the way I would like to. In fact, that’s what I went to Kitt Peak for initially. I was doing individual stars. We took Hiltner’s list of O and B stars, and got radio velocities and plotted, you know, projected them for the plane, and plotted them. They’re perfectly—they have fairly sets of reasonable error bars, and, you know, they’re flat and we said so. I think if I had had a better brain and had remembered all these things, the minute I saw Andromeda I would have connected it with that, and we would have been at least five years ahead of the game, but I didn’t. It was so unlikely that something phenomenal would be discovered that I never discussed it.

Yeager:

What triggered your continued research on velocities, and made you decide to try to determine the velocities out with spectral lines? Because the Burbidges only appear to be focusing on the central nucleus.

V. Rubin:

Yes, that’s easy. It was the image tube. You know, the early spectra of Andromeda were eighty-nine hours or something like that, by Peas [phonetic] and people like that. And the Burbidges did what everybody else was doing. They took an hour, so it was what they could get in an hour. We said the image tube was ten times as fast, and that’s probably right. So, had they gone ten hours, they could have done what we did.

DeVorkin:

But who gets such telescope time?

V. Rubin:

Well, they had a lot of time. No, I’m not saying they should have. I mean, instead of doing ten galaxies in one night, they could have done one galaxy or something. I mean, it’s how you plan things, and nobody in their right mind would have just done one. They would have done just what they did. But it is interesting. I went back to one of our papers, one of my papers with them, recently for reasons that I can’t remember, so it was probably published in ’65 and it was a galaxy.

What they always did was what everyone did, and after their rotation curve they would extrapolate it in a Keplerian falloff. And in this paper, which I think was published in ’65, that I had done with them with their data, and I was the first author, I ended up by actually extrapolating it three ways, one with a flat-rotation curve, one with a falling-rotation curve, and one with a rising-rotation curve, saying that, I think making the statement that we were not going to extrapolate it really, but then we did. I mean, because the idea that it fell was no more secure than the others.

DeVorkin:

And you knew that.

V. Rubin:

I knew that, and they left it in the paper. I mean, I wasn’t always sure when I wrote these drafts and handed them to Goeff that—yes, I mean I knew that was something they had never done. So, certainly, the best thing I got out of my time with them was really this feeling that I could be a real astronomer. Up till that point I sort of wondered if I would, especially when I was scrubbing the kitchen floor or something. I mean really, I would occasionally say to my children, “Do you think Margaret Burbidge is scrubbing her kitchen floor?”

Then one day I called her from Washington, and I remember her saying, “Can I call you back in ten minutes, because Sarah’s here with her friends and I was just starting to scramble some eggs?” or something like that. And I don’t even think I ever told Margaret, but that was such a nice, reassuring sentence coming from her.

DeVorkin:

Absolutely.

V. Rubin:

So I got a lot of confidence working with them. But I still tended to think that there was an awful lot we didn’t know. Well, people tend to push how much we do know, and that’s true.

DeVorkin:

There were other astronomers doing galactic dynamics at the time, but this might have been just before [Jeremiah] Ostriker and people like that, they were getting interested in it.

V. Rubin:

Yes. After Andromeda I didn’t get back to it till about ’75. Yes, so all these great papers were coming out.

DeVorkin:

Why didn’t you get back to it?

V. Rubin:

Because I was doing the large-scale motion programs.

DeVorkin:

So you were really doing two different things.

V. Rubin:

Yes, because that seemed to me an important question, and that was easier observationally, because all you needed was a red shift, and we had been using—and so things were sort of in flux. It was sort of ’73, ’74, when Kent was adding an image tube to the 4-meter, so it was instrument-driven in some sense. When the 4-meter had an image-tube spectrograph, then I went back to the rotation curve. But before it did, I just did the central velocities, because a factor of ten—I mean it’s close to a factor of fifty if you don’t demand equal resolution. I mean, if you just want a quick-and-dirty picture, you can get a factor of fifty.

DeVorkin:

I didn’t realize that.

V. Rubin:

Yes, and for equal resolution it’s a factor of ten.

DeVorkin:

I guess I have to ask this question. Why was the image-tube technology here so much more advanced than anywhere else?

V. Rubin:

Because of Merle Tuve.

DeVorkin:

Because of Tuve, and the Carnegie image tubes.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Tuve understood probably, I was going to say in the late fifties, but even not so late, and he on his own made a group of people that he called the Carnegie Image Tube Project, and he went to NSF, and he told me that any time he went to NSF he had two proposals, one in each pocket, for different amounts of money, one for much more than the other, and after talking to them he would decide which one to—he was a real operator. He induced these people to be on the—he had decided that the astronomical community would never get a usable instrument unless they got together and decided what they wanted, and had someone build it for them. I mean, if they did it sort of piecemeal it just wouldn’t work, or it would take too long. So, this committee looked at what kinds of things there were, and, in fact, Kent Ford in all—and Kent Ford got a Ph.D. at University of Virginia, I think, in ’57, and they hired him immediately. He had been studying thin films or something. It was a physics Ph.D. doing experimental work, and it was just what they wanted. He had a lab here, and he—I mean, they went to industry, and industry would try and make things, and he would test them. They did it with RCA and they did it with half a dozen, well, with three or four other people.

DeVorkin:

He was the embodiment of the committee?

V. Rubin:

Of the tube. That’s exactly right.

DeVorkin:

That’s how we should situate him.

V. Rubin:

That’s exactly right. They were looking for someone, and he was just perfect. In fact, I think he even knew it a year or two before his Ph.D. was done. He studied under a man whose name, it’s not a question of forgetting, it was not a name I knew, at Virginia, who was doing fundamental work on films.

DeVorkin:

There’s another summer intern with us this summer, Samantha Thompson, who has been looking at image tubes with me, mainly at McGee.

V. Rubin:

In ’66 I went to visit McGee. Bob had a meeting in Copenhagen, a physics meeting, and I didn’t go. I’m not sure how these things are related, but Tuve had often thought I should go visit McGee. I mean, that’s just the way he did things. If you’re using an image tube. So here I went off to England. I surely had been in Europe before that, but you know, you didn’t fly off to talk to somebody about an image tube, and I really enjoyed it. So, I spent a day or two at the lab, and then met Bob in London. What we did next—maybe I had a meeting, I don’t know. But it was nice. I mean, by then I knew a fair amount.

DeVorkin:

McGee was the one who would declare what’s the state of the art, what’s beyond the state of the art, what works, what doesn’t work, and I know that he consulted for the Carnegie Image Tube Committee. Your purpose for going there was just for exposure?

V. Rubin:

Yes. Well, maybe to learn something, maybe to tell him what we were doing. I guess by then we had enough spectra, and I mean things were going pretty-well with us. But he wasn’t doing the same kind of image tube at that time.

DeVorkin:

He had his Spectracon that he was developing. Was there any interest on Tuve’s part of looking at the competition, so to speak?

V. Rubin:

Well, I think at some point, that was part of Kent’s job—they weren’t even looked at as competition, as much as—no, it was really, everybody was looking for the best thing they could to do this, and I think Tuve and the committee believed that they were going down the best route. But other people were doing things, and they were always interested in learning how the other people were doing, and there was a lot of interplay between them.

DeVorkin:

’66, Merle Walker was still using the Lallemand tube.

V. Rubin:

Yes, that’s correct.

DeVorkin:

And there was Jerry Kron’s stuff.

V. Rubin:

That’s right.

DeVorkin:

You had these different designs, these different philosophies, and so the Carnegie Image Tube was one among several. So, I’m interested in what constitutes acceptance of a new technology, a very important question, and in this case, would you have any thoughts about how your rotation work helped to validate the tube?

V. Rubin:

Well, I’ll tell you something I heard after I got my job here. As I said, I walked in not knowing that the image tube was being done, existed.

DeVorkin:

Then you met Kent.

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes. Apparently, when Tuve heard that I had come and asked for a job, so I must have learned this from Bernie Burke, he said, “Well, you know, if Merle Walker goes to a meeting and says he did this with his image tube, nobody notices. But if Vera goes to a meeting and says she did this with the Carnegie image tube, people will notice.”

DeVorkin:

What? That’s fascinating. What’s going on there? What do you think is going on?

V. Rubin:

I have no idea. Maybe I was more exuberant. I mean, it was clear, and maybe I was not a trained physicist. I mean, I could go to a telescope and I could take these spectra, and I could do it alone, although one of Merle’s—we had two laws when I moved in here. One was, don’t spend money we don’t have, and the second was, no high voltage when you’re alone.

DeVorkin:

Sure, sure.

V. Rubin:

And Kent and I rarely violated that, but on occasion we did.

DeVorkin:

I can imagine where that rule came from.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Well, it came from that fact that if someone’s around you can be resuscitated, and if they’re not you can’t.

DeVorkin:

Have there ever been any accidents here?

V. Rubin:

Not that I know of. I’ll tell you something else. I loved Merle Tuve, but many people hated him. I mean, he was a tyrant of sorts, but he got things done. When Tom Aldridge became acting director here, he called me in and he said, “Every time I look at our salaries, your low salary is an embarrassment to me.” I was still a three-quarter-time employee. So, he told me when I wanted to be a fulltime employee to let him know, and three days later, after spending sixty hours on Andromeda I walked in and said I wanted to be fulltime. But then I said, I’m still going home.

But the other thing he told me was that—this is Tom Aldridge—someone had come to our door; that’s the wrong way to put it. An insurance company was hired by Tuve to insure my life and to insure Kent Ford’s life, because he was afraid that we would fall off a telescope platform. He was very—and Tom Aldridge told me that Kent’s life was insured for four times what my life was. So, what’s going on here? I mean, that’s a question that applies to women. I mean, it’s women and it’s technical people. You know, it’s complicated, and Merle just was a gentleman of the old school.

DeVorkin:

Are galaxies too big in angular diameter to do like what Keeler did for Saturn, in other words, get the rotation curve of Saturn’s rings by just putting a slit across Saturn?

V. Rubin:

Well, the answer, of course, is that galaxies come in any size you wish. I mean, Andromeda is four degrees, and at a red shift of seven they’re a tiny point, so depending upon which galaxy you pick. Having said that, all of our—except in Andromeda we went point by point, because the galaxy is so big, but that’s the only galaxy we did that way. Every other galaxy had a slit across the galaxy.

DeVorkin:

Okay, good. So, you did do it that way, integrated?

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes. Well, I don’t call that integrated, because we’re getting every point separately. I mean, integrated to me would be getting one spectrum.

DeVorkin:

Is it proper to think that that spectrograph had a slit, and the slit was imaged across the galaxy.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Yes, what I’m looking for is this. I mean, here’s one of the first pictures we ever published, and they’re rotation curves of ten galaxies. This was in the seventies, and you can see that the rotation curves are flat. But each one of those points—so the galaxy would fit just like this, and each one of those points came from a point on the galaxy, so I don’t call that integrated. I mean, integrated would—so every one of these is flat, then it goes across the nucleus, so on this side they’re going away from us, and on this side, they’re coming toward us.

DeVorkin:

Right. That’s just the technique that Keeler used for Saturn.

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes. And when they did—who did Andromeda in 1912 and 1914?

DeVorkin:

V. M. Slipher.

V. Rubin:

When Slipher did Andromeda, Saturn was his velocity standard.

DeVorkin:

Oh, really?

V. Rubin:

Yes, and I can’t conceive of doing that, because the motion of Saturn is so rapid that from one day to the next it would be—well, not that rapid, but I mean because of its orbit it would be coming toward you or going away from you. I mean, you’d have to do a lot of arithmetic before that was a standard.

DeVorkin:

I’ll go back to look at that. That’s fascinating.

V. Rubin:

No, they say that, and that always impressed me. So that’s the answer to your question. But that means that every galaxy we have ever published, except Andromeda, because we did that point by point, ended by, I mean the most distant point, one of two ways. Either that’s how big the slit was, or the galaxy was smaller, and we never really asked the question, what happens beyond that. I have seven nights at Kitt Peak in November at the dark of the Moon to go five times as far on two galaxies, something that nineteen years ago in a paper I said we ought to do.

DeVorkin:

It’s a little surprising because there’s been so much attention to looking for mass of halo.

V. Rubin:

That’s correct. Well, people have just published papers about Andromeda. Have you seen these? They’re at seven times as big as has been—yes. I mean if that’s real then we know that our halo intersects Andromeda’s.

DeVorkin:

Wow.

V. Rubin:

Yes, but the density is falling very fast. And in this paper nineteen years ago, I quoted myself in my proposal, so we’ll see.

DeVorkin:

Should we talk about the Rubin-Ford effect, or ask you a question about it?

V. Rubin:

That’s the large-scale-motion thing.

DeVorkin:

Yes. We should move to that?

V. Rubin:

Well, sure.

DeVorkin:

Well, is that appropriate?

V. Rubin:

No, that’s what we did in the early seventies when we first had access to the 4-meter.

Yeager:

The note I had made about that was that it was harshly criticized, and it was documented that you abandoned this research because [unclear] expectations associated with isotopes and the standardization of the cosmic background radiation. So, can you talk a little bit about these facts, and then your decision to steer away from that research?

V. Rubin:

Well, it’s a very muddy subject. I mean, a lot of people did it afterwards with bigger samples and better instruments, and everybody got a different answer, and it’s clearly dependent on what galaxies you pick. I mean, it was very controversial because nobody believed it, but it doesn’t really have much to do with the background radiation, because we were looking—we took a shell of galaxies just beyond Virgo. I didn’t want to get involved with the Virgo, what the motions in that were. I mean, we really got an answer that you could draw a line through the sky, the 360 degrees, and these were all positive and these were all negative, with very few exceptions, and people did it later going much farther, I mean getting a much more distant shell, and everybody that got it got a slightly different answer, everybody that did it.

DeVorkin:

And that was selection?

V. Rubin:

Yes. I mean, everybody was doing it right, and I think it was just dropped.

DeVorkin:

But now, today, there are things like the Sloan survey.

V. Rubin:

Yes, all that. You could pick the data and do it.

DeVorkin:

What was getting in the way? It was just so time consuming to get all those galaxies’ spectrum?

V. Rubin:

Yes, it was, and I guess it was so dependent on your sample. I mean that’s what we all learned. If someone—I mean, a couple of guys at the space telescope did it later very well, out at about 15,000, 12,000 kilometers per second, and they got the same thing, and they had to fight, as we did, for every—I mean nothing they did was wrong, but almost no one has ever gotten the same axis as anyone. People have even done it, or tried to do it, and gotten nothing. I think Martha Haynes and her group showed that as they went farther and farther they saw less and less really. I don’t know what the real answer to that is.

DeVorkin:

Okay. The connection with the background radiation was just the fact that anisotropy was eventually found.

V. Rubin:

Yes, but you can read very good papers on the web right now about reanalysis of that data, and not getting anything like that. I read one within the last two days, that most of what you’re seeing is foreground stuff. I mean, people have said from the start that there were systematic effects in it. I mean, I’m not saying there are, I don’t know. I read the papers. But at some level it’s almost reminiscent of the large-scale-motion thing, I mean especially, I really read one within the last two or three days, I think four Italians, but they really seemed to do an adequate job, and they come to a different conclusion.

DeVorkin:

What is so incredibly compelling about searching for this systematic motion, large-scale, for example?

V. Rubin:

I don’t know.

DeVorkin:

What do you suppose it is?

V. Rubin:

Well, I guess it’s just to learn more about the universe.

DeVorkin:

It’s always [unclear]. It’s dogged you your entire career, right?

V. Rubin:

Well, I wouldn’t say dogged me.

DeVorkin:

But it’s been part of your life.

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes, that’s right. I mean, the one thing I can say about the rotation curves is, there’s no question about the observation. People can fight all they want about what’s going on, but nobody looks at a spectrum and says, “They’re not flat.” So that’s a different kind of—but we got plenty of grief; I don’t know if grief. Allan Sandage came up to me and said, “That’s okay, after probably this, after the first thing.”

DeVorkin:

What are you pointing to, for the record?

V. Rubin:

Well, these flat rotation curves.

DeVorkin:

Has that been published?

V. Rubin:

Yes, a long time ago, like ’76.

Yeager:

I think I have it.

V. Rubin:

[19]77. One of the early—well, he said, “That’s because you did all high-luminosity galaxies. Once you go to something lower luminosity, they’re all going to have falling rotation curves.”

DeVorkin:

Did you do that?

V. Rubin:

Yes, and the opposite is true. The floor of the galaxy—the rotation curve rises and never even turns over. I mean, the poor little galaxy never gets into—

DeVorkin:

Yes. What did Allan say when you did that?

V. Rubin:

I don’t think we ever talked about it again.

DeVorkin:

Let’s go through, then, the progression. Let’s not get to the large-scale motion.

V. Rubin:

Okay, fine. No, no, but I mean that was just an intrusion in the seventies, and I don’t think I’ve done any of that since, so we’ve said it, just about.

DeVorkin:

Okay. So, what we should move into now is the elucidation of the effect that you found, and its acceptance, and its role in the acceptance of dark matter. Does that sound right?

V. Rubin:

Okay, fine. Do you have questions?

Yeager:

Can you discuss a little bit more how your research was received by astronomers. You talked about Aldridge. Were there any other people that mentioned anything?

V. Rubin:

Well, that was 1970. In 1975 the radio astronomers did Andromeda further. I don’t know if you can see that thing stuck up?

DeVorkin:

Yes, this small print about two-feet long?

V. Rubin:

Yes. The line are the optical curve, and the points beyond are the radio curves, so that was pleasant confirmation.

DeVorkin:

But before that time, before that—

V. Rubin:

Before ’75?

DeVorkin:

Yes.

V. Rubin:

Well, it wasn’t discussed a lot. I mean, that’s my recollection. I could pull some of those other things out of the way.

DeVorkin:

This is all context.

V. Rubin:

Okay. I mean, in ’73 there was the [James] Peebles paper on halos, that I guess they said that are three times as massive. Jerry and I did a fair amount of talking in the early nineties, Jerry Ostriker. I don’t know, I think I was sort of a coward. I was always interested in getting more data, rather than making sweeping conclusions, I mean like getting to lower luminosity, and getting Sa’s and then Sb’s and then Sc’s. The more we did, I think the more convincing it got, and the radio astronomers certainly got it. They suffered from this belief that they might be getting velocities from the center of the galaxy in their beam, because they had such a wide-angle beam. So, everybody had arguments against it, and I was much more interested in getting data than in getting into the arguments.

DeVorkin:

Did it get easier for you to get telescope time for this project?

V. Rubin:

Well, it was really almost always easy. Getting telescope time was not a problem, because I only asked for limited amounts.

DeVorkin:

But your first observations were with, was it the Perkin telescope at Lowell?

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

And then you went to the 4-meter after that?

V. Rubin:

Yes, and Chile, and the 4-meter both Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

DeVorkin:

Where did the Perkin telescope come into—why did you start with that?

V. Rubin:

Because that’s where Kent did most of his image-tube testing, and the spectrograph was there. You know, there were two image-tube spectrographs. You have one of them now. At DTM, if you built one of something you built two.

DeVorkin:

The reason for that?

V. Rubin:

That it was cheaper than building two separately.

DeVorkin:

Oh, you’d build them together?

V. Rubin:

Yes, at the same time you made two. Yes. So, one was here, and we actually used that with Lou Brown on the Van de Graff.

DeVorkin:

Oh, really?

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

What did you do with that?

V. Rubin:

Well, you were accelerating things from the top of the tube, and they were going down at relativistic velocities, and going through a gas and doing things. I’ve forgotten the physics. So, there was a little window and we would photograph it, and this is what the spectrum looked like. There were lots of lines from the gas in the tube, and there were lots of diagonal lines from the particles coming down. I had that on by blackboard, or my board in my other office, and people would be sitting there talking, and only one person insisted that she could explain it.

DeVorkin:

As an astronomical object? For the record, she’s saying yes.

V. Rubin:

But I won’t give any names.

DeVorkin:

Do you like to pull this sort of stunt?

V. Rubin:

It was such a remarkable-looking spectrum that, yes, I enjoyed looking at it. It was so weird.

DeVorkin:

What was the composition of the gas?

V. Rubin:

I think argon. I mean, there are books of pictures, you know. With tubes, when you took a picture you put one in the book, too. I mean, this was a very elegant way of doing science which has just disappeared. I mean, there’s no time.

DeVorkin:

Okay, you want to move on?

V. Rubin:

We’re having a hard time moving on. It’s lovely, but—I’m enjoying it immensely.

Yeager:

You talked a little bit about the radio astronomy at the time, and the data that was [unclear] a year or so. Can you describe how the astronomy community reacted as this data was paired with yours?

V. Rubin:

Well, by the end of the seventies people understood that if you wanted to save Newton’s laws, you had to have lots more matter that wasn’t luminous. There was a conference in ’77 at Yale [University]— and that was very influential, I think. Then in ’79 Sandy Faber and Jay Gallagher wrote an annual review, and I think you had to be an idiot beyond that to not, I mean beyond past that. I mean, I think that’s what gave it the legitimacy that it didn’t have before that. I mean, they went through the history. It was they, and I said this earlier, that mentioned Zwicky. You know, there’s a paper, a 1940 paper by [Jan] Oort, his talk at the dedication of the Texas telescope, which on the very first page has this note about NGC 3115, where the rotation curve looks just like these. It’s flat, and he says it bears no relation to the light, and that paper was forgotten more than Zwicky’s. I mean, if anybody spelled it all out, he did there.

This is an aside, but I think I should say it. He and I also became very good friends. I mean, he and his wife would stay with us, and I would stay with them. In fact, once I arrived in Leiden at like eleven o’clock at night to stay with them, and he told me that at eleven o’clock the next morning there was a Ph.D. exam, and he had arranged for me to be on the committee, and there was a cap and gown waiting for me, and there were about twelve of us. It was great fun, but it was all in Dutch except for my question. It was someone that had used an image tube, but it was in Dutch, and you know, I felt like one of these ladies in the routines, you know, where someone joins and when they kick their leg to the left, she does, you know, in these old movies. Well, when they stood up I would stand up. When they took their hats off, I would take my hat. I had no idea what was going on.

But I talked to him— he is an interesting example that doesn’t fit in anywhere, because he didn’t embrace dark matter for a long time, or flat rotation curves, for that matter. I believe, my explanation now to myself, and I don’t know whether this is right or wrong, is because the Oort’s constants A and B showed that the rotation curve was falling. He didn’t talk about things he didn’t like. Let’s see. Maybe it was the flat rotation curves. I mean, there was something I had done, I don’t even remember, that for several years we never talked about, and then one day he talked about it, and I decided then that now he considered it legitimate.

DeVorkin:

Have the As and Bs been reconciled, or do they only apply to the inner portions of the galaxies?

V. Rubin:

Well, they were only certainly at a restricted distance, and I suspect like everything else, one was twelve and one was fourteen or something, I’ve forgotten. You don’t even hear them really discussed very much. No, because I think there’s a general assumption that the rotation curve is flat now. But I always found that amusing, that he—so that may have hindered him in 1940 from getting the answer then and there.

DeVorkin:

That’s quite right, though, when we look at some of the citation patterns, which we’ll get to.

Yeager:

The first gravitational lens was recorded in 1979, how did that observation affect your work and its relation to [unclear] dark matter?

V. Rubin:

That’s just about the time that everybody else was—I mean, all the other work was pointing there. Well, it was very fine. But, in fact, the guy who was at Bell Labs, and is now in California?

DeVorkin:

Tony Tyson

V. Rubin:

Thank you. (I’m waiting for twenty years from now, when we’ll have a little chip under our finger that will have everybody’s name on it), Tony Tyson about five years earlier—I’m guessing at that date—started trying to do that, and it never worked. I mean, he never saw evidence. He looked at lots of sort of face-on galaxies, and he was looking for evidence that there was gravitational lensing and so forth. He was saying that therefore you didn’t need dark matter, at the time. And every time I gave a talk I was asked questions about his work.

DeVorkin:

But that’s very interesting. I didn’t realize that. Good question.

V. Rubin:

No, it really is, and that’s really why I’m telling you this. I actually, I can’t say I memorized, but I sort of had a pat answer, which was that, you know, intellectually what he was doing was a very interesting and great thing to do, but getting the luminosity across a galaxy, especially these were elliptical galaxies where they’re fading out, is just very, very difficult, and that the instrumentation really wasn’t around to do it well enough to see it or something. I mean, I really prepared it, because I knew I was going to be asked it. He was saying that it was proof that there was no dark matter, and I didn’t want to be too unkind, because I thought what he was doing was relatively brilliant, but it wasn’t quite doable then.

DeVorkin:

He didn’t start looking for larger accumulations for some time. He started with galaxies, right?

V. Rubin:

I think so, if I’m remembering correctly. Yes, I really do remember talks where I had to say this, so I think they were elliptical galaxies, and what he was doing was really very tough.

DeVorkin:

For you, was the image-tube a settled, accepted, reliable technology, or did you still have to tinker with it?

V. Rubin:

Oh no, it was very reliable, I mean, once it was on the Kitt Peak 4-meter there were also computers. You sat in a warm room and you never even went out to the telescope. You could have a whole run without having seen the telescope. And everyone used it. It was just on the telescope all the time.

DeVorkin:

So there were not continually problems with transience or other electronic issues?

V. Rubin:

No, not at all, not at all. In fact, I’ll tell you a story. Roger Lynds had put one of his instruments on the 4-meter one night. Kent actually moved out to Tucson for a year or two in the seventies to get an image tube going on the 4-meter, and then he and I had it the next night, for a couple of nights. They were really testing. I always come the night before, but I didn’t then, because we were—so Roger Lynds had observed one night with his Spectracon or something, and then we had it the next night. I must have gotten there by noon, and we did everything all afternoon, and we did a couple of spectra. It just worked from the first.

But I haven’t gotten to my punch line. So then while we were exposing, we just went to sleep on the floor, both of us. I had traveled so I was tired, and we were taking a long exposure, and Roger Lynds called to see if we were working yet, and how things were going, and the telescope operator told him we were on our third spectrum and we were both asleep on the floor. The end of that story is that at least for spectroscopy, so far as I know, it never came off, and Roger Lynds’ Spectracon never went on again.

DeVorkin:

I remember that Lynds would produce spectra that were curved, like waving flags.

V. Rubin:

I don’t even remember that.

DeVorkin:

The early quasars were, the spectrum—

V. Rubin:

You mean instead of being linear they—

DeVorkin:

Yes, they seemed to be curved, and that was always taken out and accounted for in everything, but they said that was the characteristic of the tube he used.

V. Rubin:

No, I don’t recall that, and I don’t think I ever—

DeVorkin:

It could be a misconception on my part. I’ll go back and check it. It kind of looked like a flag waving in the air.

V. Rubin:

No, I don’t recall seeing that. Did he ever publish a picture?

DeVorkin:

Oh yes, yes.

V. Rubin:

And they looked like that?

DeVorkin:

Yes, yes, and it was accepted.

V. Rubin:

I don’t remember.

DeVorkin:

I’ll see if I can find it. Going back to Ashley’s question, though, about the gravitational lenses and the fact that you had to always have a response, is this what kept you cataloguing?

V. Rubin:

You mean making more galaxies? I don’t know. I can’t even answer now. I mean, we ultimately did Sa’s, Sb’s—we started with a group of bright galaxies, and this was probably it. Then we did twenty Sa’s, and then we did twenty Sb’s, and then we did twenty Sc’s, and that was published in ’86. We went slowly, so I couldn’t even tell you right now what I did right after that. Then I started looking at them in clusters. I did little clusters, and then I did Virgo. It wasn’t to get more flat curves, it was to try and learn. Then most recently it’s been very low-surface brightness, just to try and see if there is some way of cracking this puzzle.

DeVorkin:

In your mind, how would the additional observations crack the puzzle?

V. Rubin:

Well, having one do something that dark matter—I mean, I think that most surface brightnesses are going in that direction. The inner parts are so unlike what cold dark matter, or Lambda cold dark matter predicts. I mean, they don’t have points. They have cusps. They’ve flattened out. So just looking really for something that will violate cold dark matter.

DeVorkin:

Very interesting, okay. You’re looking for a baryonic solution?

V. Rubin:

Well, it’s too strong to say what I’m looking for. But no, not a bary. I certainly would have liked a baryonic solution. I talked to Willy Fowler a lot, because it’s the lithium problem, and he finally once wrote me or saw me, very close to the end of his life, and said he had wasted the whole last year trying to see if it couldn’t all be baryonic, and he had finally come to the conclusion that it couldn’t. I mean, he couldn’t get around the lithium problem.

DeVorkin:

I’m not sure I know what that is. Is it primordial lithium?

V. Rubin:

No. It’s how you produce the lithium. I mean, there is a break there, and that’s what puts the restriction on the number of baryons, and I can’t tell you—I mean at that point I could have told you, because that’s really what makes it [unclear], no matter what it is or what the rotation curves look like, there’s only a limited amount of baryonic material in the universe.

DeVorkin:

That’s an extremely important observation or conclusion in terms of how you design your research program, and I’m interested in how influential that is in your work.

V. Rubin:

Well, what it’s really influential in this is the particle physics. I mean, saying that most of the dark matter is non-baryonic I think has revived particle physics, really, in a way that will be hard to stop, even if it’s wrong, because so many lives, I mean so many professional careers, and so many instruments and so forth.

I went to a conference at Harvard in 1980, one of the very first on dark matter, and it was run by a guy who has the Nobel Prize, a particle physicist. They were saying then exactly what they’re saying now, you know, that they’d know in ten years, because the particle machines they were just about to start using would give them the answer, and they were predicting even then that it would be that they would see the non-baryonic matter. So, they’ve really been revived, and I think that’s a faucet that will be hard to shut off, whether it works or not.

DeVorkin:

How would you characterize your contribution to opening the faucet?

V. Rubin:

It certainly was a part of it.

DeVorkin:

Well, it gets to the question of the citation patterns over the last several years, and who’s cited for being responsible for what discovery, and that kind of thing.

V. Rubin:

Well, I’ll tell you what my view is, just, I don’t look at citations much at all. The person that’s really revived is Zwicky. There is not a paper that mentions dark matter that doesn’t start with Zwicky.

DeVorkin:

Why is that?

V. Rubin:

I don’t know.

DeVorkin:

Oh, come on. You’ve got to have some thoughts.

V. Rubin:

Well, I think at some level people are stingy or jealous, or something like that, and they just don’t want to cite too many of their colleagues unless they can cite themselves or something. I don’t know.

DeVorkin:

Zwicky is someone who could be cited, who is not presently competitive?

V. Rubin:

That’s right. He’s dead, and he didn’t get much attention when he was alive, or certainly not for that.

DeVorkin:

Is there a mystique involved with Zwicky that may make it acceptable?

V. Rubin:

No. I think he’s just not competition, at some level. I don’t know.

DeVorkin:

So if you were to look at it that way, I mean, this is a very poignant kind of way, if you’re thinking of it in terms of competition among contemporaries.

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

We have noticed in a number of reviews that Ashley has found, and we’ll move on to them now, that they attribute meaning to earlier articles that refer directly to dark matter, even though the earlier articles don’t mention it at all.

V. Rubin:

So you mean they’re misrepresenting history, sort of.

DeVorkin:

That’s right, that’s right. The sense I have is that there’s an effort among all humans to try to linearize, i.e. rationalize history in terms of the number of logical steps and connections, which may or may not actually exist.

V. Rubin:

I’ve never thought of that, and that’s very interesting. [Tape recorder turned off.]

Yeager:

Okay. So, one of the papers we have [unclear], the one we printed out, it talks about the idea of dark matter being introduced by Zwicky, and then it goes into Ostriker and Peebles. One of the things that Dr. DeVorkin and I found was—and we’re talking about the linearization of history—was that the Ostriker paper was a little bit different in what it was proposing. But then it does go to your paper in 1985, which is one of the most heavily cited papers, based on the ADS citation study.

DeVorkin:

Have you ever seen this sort of thing?

V. Rubin:

Well, I think about three weeks ago or a month ago we were given a three-week free thing to ISI.

DeVorkin:

Oh, to ISI.

V. Rubin:

Yes. And Sean decided to join. When he joined, which was like two weeks ago or something, it went back to 1950, and then within about a week we were told that it goes back to 1900.

DeVorkin:

Yes. Now, this is ADS, which is not as good—

V. Rubin:

Yes, well, ADS is what I’ve always used, but I don’t do it often. Okay.

Yeager:

So that’s looking at Zwicky’s paper from 1933.

V. Rubin:

This is interesting. [laughs]

DeVorkin:

Okay, for the tape, we’re looking at a citation-frequency bar chart, I guess, that Ashley made based on Zwicky’s 1933 paper.

Yeager:

This first one is the 1933 paper, and then this is the paper that you’ve written that’s the most heavily cited, was the 1985 paper.

V. Rubin:

That’s not bad.

DeVorkin:

No, I wouldn’t say, when you see how many citations there are.

V. Rubin:

Yes, that’s pretty good. Well, you know, one thing I really would have said just where you ended, and this reminds me. I mean, I don’t know, you had asked me some kind of question that made me think about how people thought about—

DeVorkin:

Linearizing history.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Well, a more personal comment is that I would consider my career successful if people made use of my observations. I mean, that’s my criteria for success, not how many times they cite it. Or maybe that means they have to cite it to do it. But if it’s just part of the fabric of science, and my part is necessary or helpful or something—so I don’t really care if people cite me or not, at some level, but if they’re doing something like what I did, I mean, I can feel that I started it, you know, that maybe they would be doing it if I hadn’t done it.

DeVorkin:

That’s what we’re trying to get at, partly, of course, how you feel about it, but also in terms of the way scientists behave.

V. Rubin:

This is incredible, this one. [Looking at the citation charts]

DeVorkin:

This is the Zwicky paper, and what you see is an enormous citation increase [to his paper after Rubin’s paper was published], and what we’re trying to do is better understand, well, what are they saying? And, of course, we can read and we’ve been reading it, and we wanted to just relay this one article by, who? I can’t pronounce the guy’s name.

V. Rubin:

Oh, is this the one, Luziscke [phonetic] or something? Well, but look, I mean this is already very interesting. Until ’70, ’70-something, there were one, two, three, four, five, six, there were seven references and that’s all, in forty years.

DeVorkin:

And these are self-references by Zwicky, I believe, some of them.

Yeager:

The first two.

V. Rubin:

Okay. And then here’s where the rotation curve started.

DeVorkin:

Right, in 1970.

V. Rubin:

Yes, sixties, seventies, ’70, ’71, ’72, ’73, ’74, so around ’75. I mean, then people started, and it’s way, it’s really gone up.

DeVorkin:

So try to understand and appreciate these patterns. Let’s just look at this one by Rezeka, Powas, and Theas [phonetic]. In their introduction reads: “The discrepancy was explained by the presence of dark matter,” and then right after that indicating that Ostriker proposed that dark matter is concentrated. Okay, so we went for the Ostriker article. He never mentions anything but maybe missing mass, and I think it’s more than just a rhetorical issue here.

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

What are your thoughts about that kind of, might say, behavior or mode of communication, or treatment of history?

V. Rubin:

Well, I’m not sure I’m wise enough to understand.

DeVorkin:

You’re our last hope.

V. Rubin:

Then you may be out of hope, or something. I haven’t read the Ostriker paper in maybe five years. I mean, I certainly have read it relatively recently. I think we were all at some level just being cautious. I wonder why I wasn’t more daring. I don’t do this very often, but when you press me. You know, statements could have been made all along. Sometimes I think if I had remembered my ’62 paper with the students on the individual stars, where I had been rather more direct, maybe I would have said more things even in the Andromeda paper. But that’s after the fact. I mean, when you first see it I think you’re afraid of making a dumb mistake, you know, that there’s just some simple explanation. I have been asked a lot, you know, what did I think when I first looked in the darkroom and I saw these things? And the first thing I saw was that they all looked alike.

DeVorkin:

Now, you’re referring to—

V. Rubin:

To the rotation curve, yes.

DeVorkin:

Of faint galaxies?

V. Rubin:

No. Well, this was after Andromeda, so this is, I don’t even know what the year would be, ’75 or ’76. This was the first set we ever published. I think in the darkroom I thought, I mean what I now seem to remember is that I thought, well, if they get too fast they must be slowed down, and if they get too slow they must be speeded up, because they all look like they’re doing the same kind of thing. I mean, I couldn’t understand what it was. And then when you start thinking of the options, I think at some level you’re just afraid that you’ll make a terribly dumb mistake.

DeVorkin:

So it wasn’t a “eureka” moment?

V. Rubin:

No, not at all. Not at all. It just takes a long time. It took me a long time. That’s it.

Yeager:

Okay. So, this 1985 paper, that’s your most heavily cited paper, and it’s usually in reference to a universal-rotation curve, and also the idea that the mass is in this dark-matter halo. So this is fifteen years after the Andromeda study, and this is a common practice that it takes that long for the data to accumulate to kind of sway the astronomical community to believe, or to look at a problem with this kind of answer; [unclear] takes that long?

V. Rubin:

Well, not always. I mean, when you discover a quasar, people know that, within a couple of years they not only knew what they were, but they sort of understood at least some of their physics.

DeVorkin:

But they were hotly debated as to whether the red shifts were cosmological or not.

V. Rubin:

Yes, it’s true, so maybe—yes, I would say it took ten years. I would say by ’80, starting with Andromeda.

DeVorkin:

The recognition of dark matter has implications that are profound, like when Henry Norris Russell was shown evidence for white dwarfs and did not want to deal with it.

V. Rubin:

Yes. It’s all of that. I think lots of things come into play. I mean, living through it, when you look at the first set of spectra in the darkroom, you don’t know that it’s going to turn out to be important. I mean, if you knew it was going to turn out to be important, maybe you would think harder and think great thoughts about what this means. But, you know, I mean my first thoughts were that we were able to do it, sort of, and we got spectra, and that was probably the overriding—that was certainly the overriding thing with Andromeda. just getting the velocities, being able to do it was what was uppermost in my mind, with the idea that sooner or later I’ll figure out what it means.

DeVorkin:

You started by calling it the invisible mass component.

V. Rubin:

Okay, I don’t even remember that. Okay.

DeVorkin:

But do you remember laboring over what to call it?

V. Rubin:

No, not at all. If you had written that up and said, “Did you call it invisible mass matter—?” I would have said, “Never.” I’m sorry. Let’s see, what was the year of that? [19]80. Boy, I would have hoped I’d done better by ’80.

DeVorkin:

Yes, why you chose some neutral phrase like that, rather than dark matter. What is the implication of stating there is dark matter?

V. Rubin:

I have no idea.

DeVorkin:

Well, in your mind, would that have been a bold conjecture?

V. Rubin:

To say there was dark matter? What did I say earlier? Did I say such complicated things, or don’t you know? I mean, in an earlier paper?

DeVorkin:

This was your second-most-cited paper that said invisible mass component.

V. Rubin:

No, but it would be interesting to—maybe after you leave I’ll go back to the first paper that I put these galaxies together, like ’76 or something. But you haven’t asked the question about it not being dark matter, which certainly occupies some of my thoughts.

DeVorkin:

Well, what does dark matter mean to you? Today it means non-baryonic?

V. Rubin:

Yes, it has to, I mean it has to.

DeVorkin:

And then, though, did it?

V. Rubin:

No, it didn’t at all. That’s why I had these conversations with what’s his name that I just named, Willy Fowler, because I guess I thought the way out was to make the universe 100 percent baryonic matter, whether it radiated or not. That seemed perfectly acceptable. So I was very disappointed when he couldn’t, or that he couldn’t. I’m happy that some brave souls are looking into modifying Newton’s laws at very low accelerations. I mean, the fact that the laws would not hold at low acceleration seems to me to be perfectly normal at some level.

DeVorkin:

But they would have to be, not hold to a very great degree.

V. Rubin:

Yes, that’s right, but the accelerations are really very, very low out there, and the fact that for very small galaxies the accelerations are very low from the beginning, sort of, and they need much more dark matter in the beginning—

DeVorkin:

Then you’re saying you’re still open to the possibility that Newton’s laws need to be modified to account for this behavior.

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

And that there really is nothing there.

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

Going back to gravitational lensing and Tony Tyson’s later work, which shows that the distribution of mass in clusters of galaxies of the material that’s causing the lensing, is not centered on the galaxy, but is all around, and that there’s an awful lot of it—is that not another indicator, strong indicator that there is something actually there?

V. Rubin:

Probably, yes. Probably it is. That’s why we all believe in dark matter at some level. Yes, I mean, I don’t know.

DeVorkin:

Do you have any additional thoughts about my comments about how people remember history, and sometimes attribute, I mean from the example you gave me?

V. Rubin:

Well, I don’t know. It’s such a complicated story, I mean all of history. You must know, but certainly people who are citing him, and I understand why, and I do it myself. He had seven velocities, which he did not take himself, but almost everything you read makes you believe he went to the telescope and got [them]. It has occurred to me recently, and I’ve never done it, to look up the velocity of those seven galaxies today, and see how correct they are. I mean, wouldn’t it be funny if the velocities were wrong enough? In fact, of the seven, one is a couple of thousand kilometers per second off. I mean, mostly it’s the Perseus cluster, or Coma. You know what? You ought to count how many papers say it’s Virgo.

DeVorkin:

Really, Virgo?

V. Rubin:

Yes. Sinclair Smith did Virgo, and many papers that cite Sinclair Smith also say, I mean they just put it in one sentence, that they have velocities for Virgo. I mean they make it look like they think Zwicky did Virgo, yes.

DeVorkin:

That’d be interesting. We can do that.

V. Rubin:

Yes. And if you do, look up the seven current—I mean, we could do that in five minutes, to see if they’re still as discrepant as they were, which is what he noted.

DeVorkin:

Okay. I think we’ve done pretty well with this, gave you a chance to see those citation patterns. Ashley, you have a few others I think. Did you want to ask questions about them?

Yeager:

Well, these are just the other papers, Zwicky’s 1937 paper, which is another one that people cite.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Well, that has the advantage of being in English.

Yeager:

Right. And I think that’s part of the reason why. I didn’t have any other questions really.

V. Rubin:

Well, I’ll give you another job then. Look up Oort’s 1940 ApJ citation.

Yeager:

It’s interesting that you say that, because the people who cite Oort cite 1932 and not 1940.

V. Rubin:

Oh, but that was something different, I think. He was trying to get the mass by the stars. I’ve forgotten what you call it, on the stars in the galaxy. The Z motions of the stars, yes. So that was totally different. I suspect the ’40 paper isn’t mentioned a lot, and yet, I mean, he has statements that, you know, the distribution of the mass is totally unrelated to the distribution of the light, and things like that, which almost could be just as well cited as Zwicky.

DeVorkin:

That’s right. There has been something of a mystique surrounding Zwicky, that there are some people who tend to want to defend him, feeling that he has not been properly credited, and being who he was generally, with all of his wide, eclectic interests. He sort of is in the same category, in some ways, as Gamow, also combative, sometimes abusively so, although I don’t think Gamow was ever that bad, and that there is a certain—I’d like to hear it from you. Do you have any thoughts about that?

V. Rubin:

No, I think that’s true. I mean, all of those things are true.

DeVorkin:

What does it tell us about astronomers, I mean, because there’s a third person, Ernsy Opik, there’s good evidence that he came up with inhomogeneous star models.

V. Rubin:

And the distance of Andromeda. That was much better than [Hubble].

DeVorkin:

Martin Schwarzschild once said to me, when I asked him about this very thing, that in Opik's case it was a personal animosity. He was so abusive that people did not want to cite him, especially when his conclusions were radical. And he admitted, Martin admitted that in the 1940s it kept him from immediately accepting Opik's work from the late 1930s, but he surely knew about it. Is this kind of a personality dynamic?

V. Rubin:

Well, in some case every citation is. I mean, I think people are doing much more citing now than they did. Maybe papers are longer. There can be three paragraphs that are nothing but the history of what people ahead of them have done, and I think they’re very often vague idiosyncratic. How do you describe what’s happened in extra-galactic astronomy in three paragraphs? So, you pick and choose, and I think a lot of things must go into that. But a lot of it is—I will tell you that when I have to write some kind of an introduction for something, and I have twenty citations that I really think are sort of the history, and I have to pick four or five because that’s all I can use, I try and get a good separation in time, you know, early to late, and I look for women and I look for postdocs of mine. I mean, maybe it’s totally unfair, but you can’t give a whole history.

I’ve just, about six months ago, December I wrote a little thing for Physics Today, what do they call it, the two-page thing where someone writes—if you don’t know it, I will give you one— “Reference Frame,” that’s what it’s called. Well, I can’t get over there, I’ll get it later, and that’s on Andromeda. That’s doing the Andromeda thing.

And I’ve just written another one, which they accepted almost instantly, except it’s a little too long. They have a picture, and they’re going to put it together, and I’ll see it soon, and that’s on [NGC] 4550. That’s the galaxy where half the stars go clockwise, and half the stars go counterclockwise. It’s been great fun. Now, why was I telling—oh, so for that, you know, I said toward the end that there have been half a dozen or something, whatever, papers on this galaxy, and I listed five or six and it just took up too much space, and I had to get to three, you know, because I have to cut words from the other, from the text, too. It was just that kind of consideration. So, three people are going to be very disappointed, and they deserve to be there.

DeVorkin:

This raises another question about looking for systematic characteristics of rotation curves of galaxies. Over the last ten, fifteen years, at least in my mind—it’s much longer for astronomers—the role of collisions in galaxy evolution, accretion, collisions, all of these things which must have a very strong, and do have a very strong dynamical component, have they factored into attempts to interpret the rotation curves that you’re getting?

V. Rubin:

That’s a tough question.

DeVorkin:

Yes, are you really sure that you’re looking only at normal galaxies?

V. Rubin:

I could turn that question around and say, if the rotation curves are flat, they’re normal galaxies.

DeVorkin:

Well, maybe that’s the answer.

V. Rubin:

You know, Francois Sweitzer all his professional life has been interested in colliding galaxies, and has done brilliant work, but they’re such a mess that you don’t really talk about their rotation curves. You talk about their stellar population, their nuclei, whether they’re near and things like that. It’s relatively easy. A normal galaxy looks, especially for the spirals, it looks normal. It has one nucleus and you know how the light is falling off, and it looks normal, and it looks pretty symmetrical from side to side. I mean, there are enough clues.

DeVorkin:

But have you paid more attention to that over time, as the role of collisions and accretions?

V. Rubin:

Not really, not really. Well, I haven’t done a large sample really since the eighties. I mean in Virgo, yes, I took the normal looking galaxies. I did some of the—some of the Hickson groups were irregular. I mean, many of them, they were. I did a set of Hickson groups and, of course, some of them were very irregular. They looked very irregular. If you really can’t define a major axis, or a major and a minor axis, then you know they’re irregular, and most likely because of collisions. No, they’re too hard. I mean, if you do study them, you really have to do the kind of stuff that Francois has done.

DeVorkin:

What about the recent Science News blurb about a galaxy collision that apparently left a dark-matter signature?

V. Rubin:

That’s two clusters colliding, two clusters colliding. We had Stacy McGaw come and talk to us. He’s one of the few people doing non-Newtonian physics, and he was a postdoc here. He’s at Maryland. That’s a messy analysis, and there have been papers to say that it’s not right. There were very fundamental things that I couldn’t understand, because the two clusters were supposed to have collided, and then there was the picture of what was left, and I don’t remember it well enough now, but the point is, they wouldn’t pass through each other, but it looked like they were separating in the wrong way. I mean whichever way they looked they were moving was counter to what the story—I mean, it was very strange.

DeVorkin:

Okay, so that’s just really anomalous?

V. Rubin:

Yes. In fact, papers have already been written and published about why that isn’t correct. And who knows who is correct? But when things are that complicated, it’s just hard to fit them into the box you want them to fit in. I mean, they may fit in no box.

DeVorkin:

We haven’t followed up on your suggestion about the acceptance of dark matter, of no longer having to look for something that is non-baryonic? I mean, when did that happen? What caused it?

V. Rubin:

Okay, yes, yes. I would answer that, your question or my question or whatever. I’d blame it all on the particle physicists.

DeVorkin:

Interesting.

V. Rubin:

I really think it’s revitalized particle physics. I mean, they really didn’t know what they wanted to do, except build bigger and bigger accelerators and just sort of see what they found. I think this really gave them a reason, and I think they genuinely believe they’re going to find things.

DeVorkin:

I toured Fermi Lab [phonetic] about a year and a half ago maybe, and I got the impression that it was more and more cosmology.

V. Rubin:

Yes, it is. It’s all cos[mology now]—maybe not all, but an awful lot of—and in Europe, too, especially.

DeVorkin:

Have the particle physicists reached out to you and to other astronomers? I know that there’s even an Astro-Particle Physics Journal.

V. Rubin:

Yes, I know there is. In 1982 there was a conference in Geneva, and that’s the only time, that and the 1980 that I was mentioning, I think it was Glashow at Harvard, or MIT, whatever, who called this meeting. So that was the first time I’d ever been to a meeting with particle physicists, and then in ’82 there was a real particle-physics conference in Geneva, but I think that was just the beginning.

DeVorkin:

Are you in a position to comment on how the two communities are coming together, or is there a third, hybrid community developing?

V. Rubin:

I don’t know.

DeVorkin:

You haven’t followed any of that.

V. Rubin:

Well, there have always been people like the Fermi Lab people, who know astronomy and know particle physics, but I don’t think there are a lot of people like that.

DeVorkin:

Well, it’s almost a behavioral thing that I’m after. I know that at Yale some of the astronomers are having to deal with pressures from the central administration to behave more like particle physicists, as the particle physicists begin to take on more and more of the astronomical work that the university feels it can afford, and so there is actually a competition I’m sure you’re on visiting committees and things like that to various universities and stuff, or have been in the past.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I’m not even sure I under—I mean, what is acceptable practice, you mean going in teams?

DeVorkin:

The scale of the research, the way questions are asked, the role of observation, telescopic observation, if it’s important or not. I mean, the particle physicists have always said that cosmology did not become legitimate until they got into it.

V. Rubin:

I have been on visiting committees, most recently probably at MIT and Harvard. I mean, certainly the astronomy seems to be—of course, I only see the astronomers. I’m on the visiting committee to the astronomy department. They’re getting big telescopes, their parts of big telescopes.

DeVorkin:

You’re an observational cosmologist, if I can say that?

V. Rubin:

I don’t call myself that. I mean, I just don’t. I don’t even call myself an astrophysicist. All my life I’ve been introduced to people as astrophysicist, and I say, “No, I’m an astronomer.” I mean, I don’t need the physics halo.

DeVorkin:

You deal with very important cosmological issues, and you use telescopes.

V. Rubin:

Yes, sometimes. Well, I sort of stumble into the cosmological.

DeVorkin:

Because?

V. Rubin:

Because galaxies define the universe, I guess.

DeVorkin:

You were doing that since your master’s degree. You were thinking cosmological questions.

V. Rubin:

I guess so, but it was the galaxies I was interested in.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

V. Rubin:

I mean, maybe I’m just more content than some people are. I mean, I’m happy being called an astronomer. I’m happy thinking of myself as gathering data that other people find irresistible. I mean, what more compliment can I get?

DeVorkin:

Again, it’s only couched in certain standards of evidence, but it constitutes identity.

V. Rubin:

No, I understand all that.

DeVorkin:

Then that’s not a concern for you?

V. Rubin:

No, it’s not really a concern now. What I was just going to say is, what’s going to happen a hundred years from now? Whose name is going to be used? What difference—I mean, I am not going to sit around worrying whether my name will ever show up again, but the science I started, I think, has led to other things and led to other ideas, and that’s the greatest compliment I could get.

DeVorkin:

Excellent.

V. Rubin:

So I’m not even capable of understanding whether it’s physics—I shouldn’t say I’m not capable. I don’t want to put my mind to questions like that. I have a limited amount of time to think about things, and I’d rather think about astronomy than who was cited. Although I understand. I mean, certainly for the young people that’s part of the way they get their jobs.

DeVorkin:

Yes, and the way institutions get their money. The pressure is there. It’s a real social pressure, which justified or not, exists. I mean, I’m personally interested in how that affects good science.

You know, [Henry Norris] Russell said something very similar to what you said, and that is that he really doesn’t care whether everything he’s doing is going to be cited or be considered right a hundred years from now. He simply wants to have his fun right now, and get on with it.

V. Rubin:

No, I want to have my fun, but I want what I’m doing to be useful to someone after me. I want it to matter, and I think it has, and so I’m delighted, I mean, because I have been—I mean, I hate to say that I’ve been playing, but it’s been just great fun.

DeVorkin:

Great. Wonderful. Now, we’re nowhere near to finished, okay, so we can’t get too—when is lunch?

V. Rubin:

Twelve-thirty, so we can leave here at twelve-thirty.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Now, Ashley has prepared two sections here, and possibly a third, depending upon time, that get us back into family matters. But we start with reflections, basically on being a person, being a woman, reflections on your work as a woman, and then we move into going back into earlier parts of your interview, to cover a number of things that she read through and found maybe we could well do with a little more information, a little more background, or whether you still feel the same way. Okay?

Yeager:

Once your papers were published in the 1980s, what made you decide to stick with your research and gather even more data about galaxy dynamics?

V. Rubin:

Well, I don’t know. I liked what I was doing. I mean, I hate to say it was fun. There were telescopes. The instrumentation was getting better. I think I took my first CCD spectra in ’84, and virtually never went back. I mean, that was the end of the image tube.

DeVorkin:

Oh, I’d like to get your thoughts on that. Your image tube was always with a photographic plate?

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes.

DeVorkin:

But you could have stuck a [CCD].

V. Rubin:

Yes, you could have, but I don’t think we did that at all. In ’84, maybe in ’83 or something I learned— I could have gotten to Palomar. I observed there a few times, but they never had good enough instrumentation. But then in ’84—yes, you can quote me there. After I’m gone you can—

DeVorkin:

That’s fascinating.

V. Rubin:

Well, they didn’t have an image-tube spectrograph.

DeVorkin:

Yes, that’s true. They kept on using the prime-focus spectrograph, or the film one for—

V. Rubin:

In fact, I can tell you something that you probably should check with Kent Ford, and I don’t know whether this has ever been said publicly. After the image tube was done and accepted, we weren’t even allowed to get grants here, which I think is not bad, but there was money to pay for the image-tube studies, and he set up thirty image-tubes. Thirty image tubes that were then sent around the world to observatories.

DeVorkin:

That was when? In the sixties?

V. Rubin:

Yes, because when I came here, yes, sometime through the sixties. In fact, I helped make magnetic fields that were—put them inside of, and all that. I mean, not a lot, but you know, once a week or something I’d go in and help. The story I’ve heard from Kent—in fact, I was here, but he has said this to me—there were thirty sent out to observatories all over the world. Twenty-nine of them were accepted, and one was returned as not acceptable or something. The package came back. That was Santa Barbara Street.

DeVorkin:

No kidding.

V. Rubin:

Yes. That’s Palomar. Now, you ought to ask him about that. I think they ultimately said it was a mistake or something, but I mean, they went to Japan and Australia and a couple of places, and it may have been just Japan and Australia he actually took them, or certainly I think he did Japan, to make sure that people would understand and so forth.

DeVorkin:

That is very interesting. I’ve not contacted him yet, and that’s been my procrastination.

V. Rubin:

I don’t know what he’ll say. He may say no. He just walked away. We moved into this building just about the time he retired, so he never came here. But the other astronomers insisted that we keep an office for him, and they all predicted that in two weeks he would be back, and I predicted we’d never see him, and we didn’t.

DeVorkin:

Was it an animosity?

V. Rubin:

No, not at all, not at all. Once or twice he showed up for a Christmas party.

V. Rubin:

I saw him at a symposium for Mort Roberts, probably his seventieth birthday, and there was a dinner the night before, and then I talked and Sandage talked, and Kent came. He came to the dinner, and he came to the first two talks, and then he told me he was going out and he’d come back for the reception that evening, and he hoped nobody would notice. He’s just not—I mean, he’s interested in his 600 acres and his farm and his tractors, and he doesn’t even leave. I mean, his wife goes to see their son in the Olympics in wherever, and he may be a little more now, but he just liked it there.

V. Rubin:

Kent is in the AAS directory. I mean, for a while I think there was not even much of an address, but I think there is. He does get here on occasion. I mean, I don’t know how often.

DeVorkin:

Was he here for the big party that you had?

V. Rubin:

I’m embarrassed that I can’t tell you.

DeVorkin:

That was just wonderful.

V. Rubin:

Yes, that was great, that was great.

DeVorkin:

Well, let’s get back to this.

V. Rubin:

Well, I will tell you one other thing that will never get into anybody’s history anywhere, but you’re mentioning the party. Well, this is not at that level at all. This is a party; you’re mentioning the party. When I was sixty-five everybody talked about maybe giving me a party, and everybody had parties, and everybody had to travel, and I said, “Absolutely not.” I like chocolate. I got a Hershey catalog, Hershey chocolate catalog, and I sent everyone of my postdocs, or anyone I’ve ever worked with something I picked that was full of—I think it was a can or something full of little chocolate things, and I sent a note saying, “No symposium,” they didn’t have to go anywhere, they didn’t even have to thank me, but this was celebrating that.

DeVorkin:

An acknowledgment. That’s wonderful. You’ve given me something to think about. I’ll be sixty-five pretty soon.

V. Rubin:

Okay. I was just getting—first of all, they’re nice things and you want to go, but you can’t go to them all, and, in fact, you don’t go to many or even any. But it just seemed it was overwhelming.

DeVorkin:

Who would you suggest I talk to at Palomar, who might still be around, about using and accepting the new technologies?

V. Rubin:

Well, you might talk to Bill Baum.

DeVorkin:

Oh, sure, yes

V. Rubin:

Well, he’s a perfect gentleman.

DeVorkin:

Well, it’s to use his time correctly, too. Okay, well, let’s get back to you. One more Zwicky question and then we’ll leave that.

V. Rubin:

Okay. Well, we should go to lunch. It’s time to eat. It’s the only thing we do on time here. [Tape recorder turned off.]

DeVorkin:

Okay, we’re recording again. This is track twenty-two, and we’re recording after a delightful and surprisingly warm community lunch. I’d say that what we sensed there was a lot of community spirit, a lot of family.

V. Rubin:

Yes, there is a lot. However, I’ve never been up to the exercise place on the top. You mentioned Jim Westphal, and I discovered something in preparing for a talk I gave on dark matter, and I want to tell you in case you don’t know it, and that is in 1975—I think I’m correct—Science magazine published a picture of a cluster of galaxies taken with a photographic plate, and the same cluster taken with some enhanced device. I guess it was one of Jim Westphal’s.

DeVorkin:

[19]75 would have been a SIT or a SIVIT vidicon.

V. Rubin:

I don’t remember. The interesting thing is that this is the cluster that has the gravitational lens, which later was shown from the earliest—much later.

DeVorkin:

An Abell cluster?

V. Rubin:

Yes, the eighth cluster. But you can see it there. You can see it on the picture that’s published in Science. It’s very grainy, but it’s there in whatever kind of—

DeVorkin:

That’s very interesting.

V. Rubin:

It is. I said this in my talk, but I don’t know if that’s really known.

DeVorkin:

I’ll look for it.

V. Rubin:

I was flabbergasted. In fact, then I got in touch with—the other picture comes from the 4-meter at Kitt Peak, the one where there really was a—there was this arc for several years, and no one knew how to interpret it. I e-mailed those guys to ask them, you know, if they knew of the other one, and they did not. I mean, it’d be hard to do real science with it, but if you had someone that was terribly curious they might have asked what this faint little thing is over there.

DeVorkin:

The idea of gravitational lensing goes all the way back into the thirties, with speculation, of course.

V. Rubin:

No, it’s before that.

DeVorkin:

It’s the Einstein relativity test in 1920?

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes.

DeVorkin:

So was there speculation at least when these little wisps were found, that this could have been that? What made the difference—

V. Rubin:

There is a history that I went into. You mean who realized what it was, or—I think it was the French, actually. The French did it first. They did it a couple of months before the Kitt Peak, Roger Lynds. But if I’m remembering correctly, there is a letter to the editor in Nature maybe, around the time of the 1919 solar eclipse, within a few—it’s either 1922 or even 1918 or something, asking whether you could see distant objects.

DeVorkin:

Really?

V. Rubin:

Yes. And whoever that person was is asking about stars, and I think it may have been Zwicky or someone later, or there may have even been an answer saying, no, but maybe a galaxy, or a cluster of galaxies. Yes. I mean, it’s a little bit like the dark matter. I mean, you can find statements earlier and earlier.

DeVorkin:

Did you ever have any interest in applying your observational talents to detecting these things, gravitational lensing effects?

V. Rubin:

Never.

DeVorkin:

Too far.

V. Rubin:

I don’t know. And there was just too much I wanted to do. I should tell you that I have seven nights in November at Kitt Peak, and that’s to go way out.

DeVorkin:

Yes, you mentioned it earlier, and this is the thrust of your search now, is continuing with the rotation—

V. Rubin:

No, I just wanted to go observe. I mean, of course the answer is yes, but I mean, I just sat around thinking about all the things we don’t know, and I realized that every—I mean, I said this earlier—every rotation curve I’ve taken was either ended by the slit size or by the galaxy size. But I never worked hard at all.

DeVorkin:

And no one else had these?

V. Rubin:

No, not with galaxies. I mean, they’ve done it. They’ve done a similar kind of thing with clusters, and they’re starting to do it now with our galaxy.

DeVorkin:

Well, this point that you made earlier in the morning, about how it’s quite possible that the halos of Andromeda and of our Milky Way actually intersect—

V. Rubin:

Yes, I think Jim Gunn knows this. Yes, the second and the third nights of their deep survey, from the second and third nights of their turning on the instrument, they got 28,000 foreground galaxies, and 1.58 million background galaxies, and they added them all up to pretend it was one galaxy. They looked for weak gravitational lensing as the sum of all the background stuff, and they drew a curve of the—I’ll draw it to face you—the integrated mass. So, this is distance and this is mass, and the curve goes like that, and it sort of straightens out at about 500,000 parsecs, which is more than half the distance to Andromeda.

DeVorkin:

Yes, yes. But that’s by inference only.

V. Rubin:

Yes. And they said that they would do better, and so that was five years ago, and about a year and a half ago I picked up the phone and called Jim, and asked if anyone had ever really redone that. And he said a young woman was just finishing it for her thesis, and he suggested I call her. I think I picked up the phone once and didn’t get an answer, and I don’t even remember her name anymore. I mean, that certainly is a doable problem. Maybe I’ll call him again and ask for her name again.

DeVorkin:

But that will be the question you’re asking.

V. Rubin:

Yes, of how—the density, of course, is very, very low. I mean, you’re not adding a lot of matter, but still you’re adding a little bit.

DeVorkin:

Which focus are you going to use?

V. Rubin:

Oh, what I’m doing here is just imaging.

DeVorkin:

Straight imaging?

V. Rubin:

Imaging to look at the red shift of the two galaxies I know, two galaxies I’ve studied, and I’m going to use the 2.1, because it has a ten-minute field and it’s bigger, and I’ll put it here and here. So, I’ll actually be going twenty minutes, yes, from the top, and find stars, and depending—and I think, there’s no doubt in my mind we’ll find stars. I don’t know how easy it will be. And if they’re very faint, we’ll need something bigger than a 4-meter tube.

DeVorkin:

This is to see if there’s anything there to see?

V. Rubin:

Well, yes, because I mean, if you want velocity I think you’ll have to do it star by star. Find them, yes, that they have the right red shift.

DeVorkin:

Okay, going back to the reflections, maybe we’ll start with question number four. How does that sound? Do you want to take it?

Yeager:

Sure. In the 1990s some of your writings become more reflective and personal. Would you say that it was at this time you started to think about the implications of your work?

V. Rubin:

That’s interesting, I’ve never thought—I mean, that’s absolutely true. Yes, I guess I just thought more about things I had never thought about, why I did the things I did. Maybe it was questions like David’s, you know. Maybe I got more interested. I was always interested at some level in the history of astronomy. I mentioned Maud Makemson at lunch. At Vassar you could take freshman astronomy for three points, or you could go one afternoon a week for a fourth credit and get a course on the history of astronomy from her, and that was one of the best courses I ever had in my life.

DeVorkin:

So you opted to take that.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I mean, in fact it was a wonderful way to learn astronomy.

DeVorkin:

Now, by history she meant ancient history I take it.

V. Rubin:

Well, ancient to the present, I guess. I mean it certainly started way back. But you sort of learned how you learned that the Earth was rotating, and how you learned that we lived in a galaxy, I mean all the things that you sort of knew and would not really learn. You would not learn the history of them in an astronomy course.

DeVorkin:

Do you think the history is valuable?

V. Rubin:

I thought it was wonderful, even if you weren’t—no, I really loved it. As I said, I didn’t understand her interest in Mayan alphabets and things. I mean, I had waited for a long time to get to college to learn astronomy, and that part of it didn’t seem like—I mean, not that she taught it, but I knew that’s what she spent her research on. But the history I found very—so I think it was just that, that I found—I love reading, and I love reading most of all biographies, especially biographies of women. This is way off the subject, but about two months ago I opened the mail and I had a letter, I had a book and a letter from a woman whose name was Kim Todd, and I looked her up on the web and she looks like she’s twenty-five, but she’s probably thirty-five, and she teaches at Montana State or something, and she had written a book about someone whose name I can never remember, except her last name was Merian, M-e-r-i-a-n. I’m looking for my briefcase, because I got a postcard from her. So, I wrote her and thanked her. I adored the book. I’ll tell you about it in a minute.

In fact, for the Science magazine of June, late June, they asked ten or twenty people to—I have a three-line blurb about her book, and so she saw it and wrote me a note. I don’t see it. I think I emptied my briefcase this morning, and actually it showed up. It’s a book about a woman born in Germany in 16-something, and when she was very young, maybe just a child, her family moved to Holland. Her family were book makers and artists. I mean, they made books and they bound books, and she got interested at a very early age in butterflies, and how butterflies came out of caterpillars. She had a very interesting life, and she painted and made pictures of flowers, and sort of continued this.

Then she married someone who she ultimately left, and then she became a religious fanatic sort of, and then at the age of fifty she had two children. With one child she sailed to Surinam and lived in the jungle for five years or something, to watch how the caterpillars turned into butterflies. Nobody understood this. I mean, and she painted, and then she came home and went back, so she made many books. The Museum for Women in the Arts here has five of her paintings I learned, and I went, and I was very disappointed, because they were little paintings, but they are there.

Then the other daughter—the end is very fast. I mean, it’s sort of after she’s died. But you learn that the other daughter had a couple of kids and went to Surinam, lived there with a husband who also painted and did the same kind of stuff, and that family was one of the families that Peter the Great—were setting up St. Petersburg, and he was buying people to come. I mean, he populated it with—and they came. So, her children—and one of the last things you learn in the book is that Euler, the mathematician, married one of her grandchildren. I think it was a grandchild. It was so complicated. Euler’s father had thirteen children and then his wife died, and then he married her grandson, Merian’s grandson, and I really don’t even remember whether it was that child or whatever; it was close enough to be called a granddaughter. So, Euler, the mathematician, married.

But the book is fascinating, about this life of how she watches them and draws them.

DeVorkin:

And she was able to do it.

V. Rubin:

She came from a relatively—in fact, you learn in the first ten pages or something that women were not allowed to use oil paints.

DeVorkin:

That’s a new one.

V. Rubin:

I didn’t know that. The sentence is just there. She had to use watercolors.

DeVorkin:

Because she’s a woman. Wonders will never cease. That’s pretty amazing.

V. Rubin:

So I don’t know how I got to her, but reading.

DeVorkin:

We were asking about your becoming reflective in your writing. Was there a time that you felt that you had a voice, and that you had something to say generally?

V. Rubin:

That’s making it sound very important.

DeVorkin:

Well, you know, when did you get the National Medal of Science?

V. Rubin:

[19]93.

DeVorkin:

That was ’93. And we’re talking in the nineties. Was this partly people approaching you and asking you to do things, that led you to take on this responsibility?

V. Rubin:

It’s hard to know. I think one component was that I was finding it a little harder and harder to go observing. Once there were no kids in the house—I used to think it was complicated with kids, but it was almost more complicated leaving Bob [Rubin] in some sense. I mean, I did, I did go observing. Maybe I didn’t get enough observing time to do great, original astronomy. I didn’t see that the things I was doing were necessary to the astronomical world.

DeVorkin:

Was there a possibility of any gender issues going on to—you mentioned that you were always able to observe when you wanted to, or when you could get away. But was that now certainly true for all women in astronomy, or were there still barriers?

V. Rubin:

I don’t know. I think for the national facilities you had a fair chance, I mean if you had something interesting to do. I don’t think your gender mattered. Maybe it’s that people were getting into big programs, which I didn’t want to do, so much—. Telescope time was going to large programs. I don’t know whether it was any harder, or whether I just felt like—I just felt that what I was doing wasn’t terribly significant. I mean, maybe that’s putting it—

DeVorkin:

[unclear] the prizes and awards—

V. Rubin:

That’s not—

DeVorkin:

Certainly somebody thought it was significant.

V. Rubin:

Well, maybe it had been significant. I don’t know. I’m sort of making this up as I go along.

DeVorkin:

Well, let’s go back to something you had said before when I called you a cosmologist, and you corrected me. Ashley has a question here about the differences. Do you see a difference between doing astronomy and doing cosmology?

V. Rubin:

As an observer. I mean, it has to be as an observer, because theoretical cosmologists are these smart people who dream up a universe somehow.

DeVorkin:

You had this motion with your fingers. It looked like you were tearing apart tissue.

V. Rubin:

I’m dreaming a universe or something.

DeVorkin:

Oh, you’re dreaming up a universe. Okay.

V. Rubin:

Or something. Yes, I don’t know. I don’t think that matters much anymore. Maybe I’m foolish. No, I think when I go observing you see young women all the time. There are lots of young women, and they’re getting observing time. I mean, I don’t know what the statistics are. I suspect they’re—on the other hand, I saw, well, several things I will say.

I mean, the Medal of Science, this is [George W.] Bush’s fourth or fifth giving of the Medal for Science, and he has one woman in this, none preceding it. So, in four or five times—now, you might argue that you’re old by the time you get the Medal of Science or something, and so—but, okay. So, then I got this list of the people—the Gruber Prize has just been announced in cosmology, and it’s gone to the two guys that have done the supernova work.

DeVorkin:

The type-1a guys?

V. Rubin:

Yes, Brian [Schmidt] in Australia, and what’s his name at Berkeley [Saul Perlmutter], and their teams. So, there are about twenty teams, and Brian’s team, I think I’m not getting it backwards, has zero women out of twenty, about, and the Berkeley team has maybe half a dozen women. I mean, it looks pretty good. But to have a team of twenty people working, and none of them being a woman, and they’re young people—I don’t think he’s more than ten or fifteen years past his Ph.D., and presumably the people he knows and who have joined his team are somewhat the same age.

DeVorkin:

So you would expect there to be more balance.

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

Yes, that certainly is an issue. But that’s a very contemporary kind of issue. So, looking back to, again based on Ashley’s question, in the nineties when you started becoming more reflective, were gender issues becoming more important for you at that time?

V. Rubin:

Yes, probably, probably.

DeVorkin:

Were there people encouraging you?

V. Rubin:

No, I don’t think so. I really think, I mean if I was forced to make a judgment, which I hope is correct, it would be that I didn’t see where my astronomy was going that would be that important, really. I mean, partly because there were all these big teams. I mean, it was not unlike when I started out. You know, sort of I was looking for something I could do, and why I never thought of just going on with what I’m doing in November I don’t even understand.

DeVorkin:

But in recent times it must have been Bob’s condition?

V. Rubin:

Oh yes, of course it is. That’s right, I haven’t been observing since, yes, and that was just because I chose not to go away.

DeVorkin:

Absolutely. I certainly understand.

V. Rubin:

But then I really just got to the point that, if I can’t go observing I really can’t be—well, I couldn’t be an astronomer by writing these other little things, which is fun and I’m happy to do it, but I really decided—we have help in the house a few times a week, and I have a nurse that will come whenever I go away. So, this year for the first time I’m on the board of directors at Lowell. I still have a very warm spot in my heart for Lowell, because that’s where we started, and that’s two nights. I went up to visit Judy for two nights.

So, this is eight nights, well, it’s seven nights, but I’ll have to be away eight. So, I announced to the family—we have wonderful kids. I mean, they keep coming. In fact, three of them were on the West Coast last year, because we have a family at Princeton, but he was on sabbatical to Stanford, and we have two kids at California colleges, and Judy, and they just keep visiting. So, I’ve told everybody that if anybody wants to come during that time, they can. I mean, I’ll have someone in the house, but I hope some family members will show up. In fact, I’m doing it with Diedre Hunter.

V. Rubin:

I haven’t turned mine off, but nobody calls except Bob. Yes, Diedre is on an SF committee. Our friends are just wonderful, and every time she gets to town she comes to the house, Diedre Hunter. A few months ago, even six months ago we started talking about observing, and I described what I had been thinking about. I mean, I was re-reading part of [Walter] Baade’s book, and he talks about doing Andromeda, and he even says that, you know, he stopped cataloguing them, I don’t know, not because they ran out—these are the H-II regions—but I don’t know, he had enough or something. I’ve forgotten; it wasn’t that lame. And I started thinking, we stopped all our rotation curves where the slit length failed, and I thought—and then I went back to the papers in which I even say in one of the very earliest ones that I said nineteen years ago that we intended to go further.

So, I told her all this, and then didn’t do a thing. Then about two weeks before the proposals were done she asked me if I was really serious and still interested, before they were due, and I said yes. And she said, well, if I wrote the proposal she would do everything else. So, I wrote the proposal and sent it to her, and she asked a few very good questions, and we went back and forth. We decided we needed four days, and so we asked for five and they gave us seven, absolutely centered at new Moon, with a lovely letter about—I haven’t observed at Kitt Peak for a long time, because once we had the Carnegie telescopes I would go to Chile. So, I probably haven’t been there since the nineties at least, maybe at least ten years.

I got a charming note, charming letter, just wonderful, saying the telescope operators are fighting to see who will set us up. It really was wonderful.

DeVorkin:

How do you feel the National Observatory System visitor programs are working?

V. Rubin:

You have to know that I was on this awful review panel. That was so painful, it really was. You don’t know, I don’t think it’s public. We had thirty-two drafts.

DeVorkin:

Oh, my heavens.

V. Rubin:

The last few don’t count much, but—and everyone, some of them were 180 degrees from the one before. It was that hard to do.

DeVorkin:

Explain a little bit about this. I knew about the panel, but the structure of it, who called it?

V. Rubin:

NSF called the panel. We were advisory to NSF. So, the best part about it really was, once we submitted the report we were done. We didn’t have to figure out how to do this. And the panel had mostly astronomers, but a few phenomenal, I don’t know, someone from, I was going to say Bell Labs, or maybe Brookhaven, you know, or a financial manager or something. I mean, it turns out that the cost of running any telescope exceeds perhaps by a factor of four or five the cost of building it, over a forty-to-fifty-year lifetime. I mean, so you can’t just get NSF to give you the money. I mean that’s really—it boiled down to—I mean, having said all the nice words and everything, and looked into what you wanted, I mean we did a lot of work that may be vaguely important, but the important part is the money. So, you cannot build a telescope without figuring that in your run-out costs, and it was really just how to handle the money.

DeVorkin:

This is the recent senior management review, and you were part of that?

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes, yes, the senior, what was it, something review, I don’t even remember. For months and years, I had, you know, various papers and piles, and I threw them out. And I did it because I thought they would meet in Washington, and they did except for one visit, and that’s when I finally got hold of someone who would stay with Bob then. I mean, we met once in Boston, and it was just the kind of thing that I really wanted to be at. I mean, everybody on it had a lot to contribute, and everything people said was worth listening to.

DeVorkin:

Now, after it went through so many drafts—now, this is the one that included, you’re balancing operating costs with building new equipment. People want to build new huge telescopes, but others want to preserve ongoing, and this is where Arecibo issue is?

V. Rubin:

One of the big issues was the small telescopes.

DeVorkin:

What’s small today?

V. Rubin:

Less than 5 meters. Yes. Well, it’s Kitt Peak in a way. You know, they asked for messages, communications from the community, and you would get 300 letters from Arecibo. I mean, people really got galvanized, or their organization told them. But be that as it may, what really came out of all of that was that people want 1- and 2- and 3-meter telescopes, the long-term projects and the variables and all kinds—and then it turns out that they’re almost free compared to what the other expenses are. They don’t [require] night assistants. They’re at the very small end of that.

I think we all learned, and I think it was really a lesson for us. The people at NSF were wonderful, and I didn’t know them well. I’ve had very few dealings with NSF—Wayne Van Citters and his assistant.

DeVorkin:

Could that have been Eileen Friel?

V. Rubin:

Eileen Friel, both of them. Is she not there now?

DeVorkin:

She is, and she’s been bumped upstairs a more executive position.

V. Rubin:

Okay. They were both wonderful. In fact, I must say, but don’t quote me, I mean what I had heard about Wayne didn’t make him sound very glorious, but he, too, I was very impressed with them both, and they helped us a lot.

DeVorkin:

I know that astronomers have criticized the NSF for trying to reapportion the pie, doing the best they can, but not fighting hard enough in some astronomers’ views, for a bigger pie. Is this still the case?

V. Rubin:

It is, but initially it was in comparison with NASA. I shouldn’t say initially, but a lot of it came from people who compared it to what NASA gave astronomy, and then the NASA budget was cut very tightly in the last couple, so I’m not even sure—that’s very hard to know.

DeVorkin:

But how did you feel in the deliberations of this committee—why did it go through so many drafts? Was that one of the issues?

V. Rubin:

We kept learning. No, I think we just kept learning, because we met I don’t know how many times, maybe—it went from October to the following November. I mean, it was supposed to be done in March. We must have had a meeting every three months, so there must have at least been five or six meetings.

DeVorkin:

I remember at every AAS meeting there were big discussions, there were formal sessions.

V. Rubin:

Yes. And I think we just kept learning.

DeVorkin:

Did it create fissures and fault lines between different big-telescope people, small-telescope people, between East and West?

V. Rubin:

I think, in fact, you know, one of the recommendations was about the small telescopes. They formed a committee called ReSTAR, which has to do with—it’s very cute, but I don’t know what the words are, I don’t remember. And Katy Pilachowsky is chairing that, and they’re meeting in Washington in about a week, maybe Monday and Tuesday, and they’ve invited me to come, and I said I would. My feeling is that I don’t see much of the community, because I’m not traveling. So, I’ve been to the meetings in Washington before and after the thing. I don’t think it hurt, and maybe it even helped.

DeVorkin:

Well, would you could compare it to the Decadal Survey?

V. Rubin:

I would say, and I’ve been on Decadal Surveys, they have to stop what they’re doing, which is just listing everything they won, with no dollars attached. I mean, that’s part of the problem. I’m saying this as a person. I think one of our comments at the end, I mean we weren’t supposed to give comments about the future, but we did. We added another section, on the grounds that you just can’t keep asking for things. I mean, it’s shown that by 2010 some of the things they said should be done have not even been started, and so one of the things that several people said, and it may have been named, or maybe it was said, but it wasn’t said as a recommendation, was that maybe a committee like ours, a financial committee really, should meet every five years, or maybe it should meet as an arm of the Decadel report. There’s just no point in—I mean, somebody has to support the 10-meter telescopes that are up now, and they can’t forget them in doing the new things. I think we did actually recommend one big telescope and not two.

DeVorkin:

Is this public now?

V. Rubin:

Oh yes. It went public. You can get it on the web.

DeVorkin:

I’ll have to look at that, because I have not looked at that. I knew it was ongoing.

V. Rubin:

Well, I never looked at this things either. I hadn’t done something for a long time, but when they asked me I thought, it’s like the things I’m writing. I didn’t know Roger Blanford well. He was very good as the chair. He was very good partly because he worked very hard. I mean, he had a lot to do with everything.

DeVorkin:

Got in touch with all of the stakeholder communities?

V. Rubin:

Yes, he did.

DeVorkin:

I had a feeling that Bahcall also really tried to do that, too, for his Decadal Committee.

V. Rubin:

Yes, he was always very good.

DeVorkin:

But you see now the necessity of including the dollar amount?

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes.

DeVorkin:

Is it because things are getting so huge?

V. Rubin:

Probably, probably.

DeVorkin:

Does the JWST, the James Webb factor in?

V. Rubin:

We didn’t. I mean, the committee didn’t do it at all. We didn’t get involved in any way with Goddard.

DeVorkin:

Any major NASA projects, things like that, were just not part of it?

V. Rubin:

No, no. We were advisory to NSF, and we just took it as that. I mean, we weren’t like a Decadal.

V. Rubin:

Right, it wasn’t National Academy. That’s right, and it wasn’t looking at what kind of telescopes ought to be built really specifically. It was just looking. When you ask how did we—toward the end, some of it had to do with how much we put in it. And I didn’t do a lot. I kept up with everything, and I did the things I was supposed to do, but some people were doing the finances, and they really kept up with every penny. Often, we didn’t know enough, and we’d have to go back to NSF. I mean, we had to understand all the things that NSF does, and that’s also very complicated.

The net result is that we would go from doing very specific budgets to leaving all the finances out of the report. I mean, it was decisions. It was the ups and downs of what we include and what we don’t include, and understanding the budget, you needed a Ph.D. It was just awful. So, when we finally understood it and we put it all together, then we would sort of say, “Well, is that really worth going in it?” So, toward the end it was sort of major as to how it was written, even though we knew what conclusions we were going to make.

DeVorkin:

A more general question, but along the same lines. If you were to be asked, as I’m going to ask you right now, how comfortable are you with the state of health of the astronomical profession and the direction it seems to be going—is there an astronomical profession still?

V. Rubin:

I think I have to say I am comfortable. I don’t know what that means.

DeVorkin:

This whole issue of newer and bigger—

V. Rubin:

Yes, well, the whole sociology. Things have changed so enormously, where there are a hundred people on a paper, and yet what you get out of that—first of all, you spend a lot of money, and a lot of people get jobs, and you do get a lot of science out of it. I have the feeling that as one ages—I won’t make this personal—but as one gets older, you tend to think that the way you did things fifty years ago was better. I’ve seen it in my Grandparents sort of, and in my parents, and in myself, and I think my children when they’re fifty years older than they are now will think that it was better. So, I think it’s a deep sociological question, and I don’t think as an astronomer I even know enough.

I liked it when two people or one person went to a telescope, and you carried your plates. I do like the computers better. You know, you sat down, and you worked. I mean, my workdays were so different fifty years ago, let’s see, forty. Forty years ago, I was working here.

DeVorkin:

Just from the different tools, or your different responsibilities?

 

V. Rubin:

Well, in a sense my own responsibilities are to do my science, so that hasn’t changed. I would walk to work every day, and I could think about, what am I going to do today? I mean, I had plates to measure. I did everything in a linear way. I did Andromeda and then I wrote it up, and then I did the next thing, and nobody works that way today.

DeVorkin:

You never really had to write grants, did you?

V. Rubin:

No. In fact, when Carnegie decided that we could write grants, I argued against that very vocally. The president of the Carnegie Institution came in to visit me because she was so upset.

DeVorkin:

That was Maxine Singer?

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

Well, she certainly must have been able to appreciate what you were trying to say.

V. Rubin:

Yes, I think so, but she wanted money.

DeVorkin:

You were probably one of the people who could get it.

V. Rubin:

Well, everybody got it, but I did not. I was left alone. I don’t know if too many people had argued that way what would have happened. I said I would not do it. I thought there should be many ways of doing science, and if we got outside grants we would turn into what everybody else is doing, and it wouldn’t be unique. I gave her all the arguments I could, and, of course, I didn’t convince anybody.

In fact, I heard through a friend downtown at P Street, which is the Carnegie Headquarters, we call it P Street—I did have one or two—I used the Hubble telescope a couple of times, and you get money with that. They don’t ask you if you want money. You just get so much per hour. And I heard that it was noted at P Street that I had gotten grant money.

DeVorkin:

I understand the mentality. Of course, they would.

V. Rubin:

Yes, that came back to me. You know, there are a lot of rich people around. Now more institutions are going out for private money. It’s working the other way, and I really tried to argue, although I was hardly a financial expert at all, but that if Carnegie tried I believed it could find money, and one of its arguments would be that it did things its own way.

DeVorkin:

And really you felt you were alone in that.

V. Rubin:

So far as I know I was alone.

DeVorkin:

You probably couldn’t have taken that attitude if you were a junior staff member.

V. Rubin:

No. Well, but we don’t have junior staff members, or we didn’t. We don’t have tenure. We don’t have anything. But our entire staff is fifteen.

DeVorkin:

That’s the astronomical side?

V. Rubin:

No.

DeVorkin:

That’s everything?

V. Rubin:

That’s everything. That’s DTM. Yes, it’s always been, and it still is.

DeVorkin:

You know, I’ve never thought of it this way, but in a way, this is a version of the Institute for Advanced Studies.

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

It has a very small faculty.

V. Rubin:

Yes, that’s right, that’s right. And, in fact, until twenty years ago we had—well, we used to have two postdocs in astronomy every year. They would stay for two years, and there were two. Then people started getting grants. The truth is, I can’t tell you how many we have now, because people come, and people go, and I don’t know.

DeVorkin:

So the postdocs are a manifestation of the grants.

V. Rubin:

Many more. Yes, we still get one or two a year, and Jaylee Mead—I don’t know what the word is—made a Vera Rubin Fellowship, and we get a fellow who stays now for three years. But that’s going to march back and forth between East Coast and West Coast.

DeVorkin:

Who set that up?

V. Rubin:

She did. Well, she’s a trustee. That’s funny, because knew I knew her, ultimately, and they asked me if I would approach her. This was years ago, I mean ten years ago, and I said no. I saw her and we always enjoyed each other, but it was mostly professional, and I just didn’t want to— I didn’t want to be involved in asking a friend to join—and then I learned she was a trustee, so I was delighted, because it meant someone else had done that.

DeVorkin:

Yes. So then once she became a trustee, then that was all right?

V. Rubin:

Well, I still didn’t talk to her.

DeVorkin:

Oh, so it wasn’t through you at all?

V. Rubin:

No, no, no. That was a gift.

DeVorkin:

It was to honor you.

V. Rubin:

Yes, thank you. Yes. No, it is an incredible honor, and we have a charming young woman here now who is studying stars. Everybody else is doing planets.

DeVorkin:

Yes, planets. That’s what’s going on these days.

V. Rubin:

Yes, everywhere, everywhere. Well, Paul Butler is here, Alicia Weinberger Do you know the name Sarah Seager?

DeVorkin:

Sure. We had her as one of our speakers.

V. Rubin:

She just left. MIT made an institute for her or something. Yes, although she’s only an associate professor. I thought she would be a full professor. And they offered her a salary that was so high we couldn’t even begin to [compete].

DeVorkin:

She’s very active in the TPF [Terrestrial Planet Finder].

V. Rubin:

Oh, she’s very active in everything. And she’s had two children since she came here.

DeVorkin:

Great. That’s good.

V. Rubin:

She’s terribly—she left around Christmastime, terribly efficient. She’s scary.

DeVorkin:

We had a wonderful time. She was one of the speakers in our Exploring Space series, and that was years ago, as you were. It was when we started with the warm-ups, the interviews. And she later on, said that that was the best thing that ever happened, because she had no idea who she was speaking to, and this gave her a clue, so she had a good experience with us.

V. Rubin:

Oh, how nice.

DeVorkin:

Yes. Sara is certainly someone to follow.

V. Rubin:

That’s right, that’s right. Did I ever tell you I was offered the named chair that she has now?

DeVorkin:

No, because one of the questions is, you mentioned that you had never considered leaving here, even though you had had some offers.

V. Rubin:

Very few, but—well, oh, it’s amusing. I don’t know. Okay, I’ll start with MIT. The complicated one is Harvard.

DeVorkin:

Really.

V. Rubin:

Yes. So, they offered me—they sent me a letter out of the clear blue sky, before 1990, because I was in the other building. I know where I read the letter, the letter offering me the Ellen Swallow Richards professorship in astronomy, which was a five-year—and I would have been the first Ellen Swallow Richards woman holder. She was an early astronomer trained at Vassar, probably by Mariah Mitchell, and went to MIT at about 1890, and married a professor there, and she was sort of allowed to do things. One reads in stories about her that she always carried a needle and thread to sew on buttons for the— this is what you read in these kiddie books that drive me nuts. They don’t talk about her science.

But anyway, and I didn’t know that until I think she had left, when DTM put a blurb on their thing saying she was the Ellen Swallow Richards. So, they offered this to me, and I wasn’t really interested at all. But I thought I should at least go, I mean, and see them and visit them. So, I went and I knew Bernie Burke best of all. I mean, it was he that I had told here I wanted a job, and so he took me into, I guess it was in the Physics Department. MIT has the most scattered Astronomy Department you could ever imagine.

DeVorkin:

You mean physically scattered all over?

V. Rubin:

Well, but some of it is in physics, and some of it’s in astronomy, and some of it’s in geophysics, interplanetary work, and Alar Toomre is in mathematics. I think there were five very active.

Bernie Burke took me by the arm, and walked in to the chairman of the Physics Department where I would have been, and he started talking to me, and I told him I was not a physicist. And Bernie later told me that I was going to be the first holder of this chair, and the way it was going to work is that I would hold the chair for five years, and then they would take me on as a full professor and another woman would come. So that sounded nice. Bernie told me they had sold me to him on the grounds that I was really a physicist. [laughs]

DeVorkin:

Well, he would have known better.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Yes, of course. Well, he’s a physicist, he is. So, I only spent a day or two there, and you know, the longer I stayed the worse it seemed to me, because they were interested. The person I knew best, other than Bernie, was Alar Toomre, I mean, so there were people all over. I mean, there was nothing in it to appeal to me really.

DeVorkin:

He was doing galaxies.

V. Rubin:

Yes, and doing them in a very brilliant new fashion.

DeVorkin:

Using simulations.

V. Rubin:

Yes, mostly really mathematics. Over the years, and for the couple of years before that, Harvard had made very strange [approaches]—

DeVorkin:

This is Harvard, and not Harvard-Smithsonian?

V. Rubin:

No, this is Harvard I guess. They just sort of couldn’t decide what they wanted. At the present time I can’t give you a coherent story, because I’ve fortunately forgotten it.

DeVorkin:

Who would be the primary protagonist?

V. Rubin:

Probably a nice guy who was the chairman of the department, George Field, yes. I mean, he was the person I spoke to most.

DeVorkin:

He was, of course, the first director/chairman combined, of the Center for Astrophysics.

V. Rubin:

That’s right. Anyway, this is an aside, but the aside is that I walked into that chairman’s office and asked him to nominate Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin for the National Academy, and he said no.

DeVorkin:

You’re talking Harvard?

V. Rubin:

Yes, I’m talking Harvard. I ultimately went to Goldberg, and Goldberg nominated her. John Bahcall told me that when he became chairman of the Academy Astronomy Division, the first thing he had to do was take her name out, because she had died. Anyway, the point is, with these overtures from Harvard I decided if I was going to MIT I might just as well go to Harvard, so I visited Harvard also. This may have been in the late seventies even. I stayed most of a week, and gave talks. But Bob will know. He’s my source of everything I don’t know. Anyway, so I went to Harvard, and I don’t know. If I had wanted to go anywhere, that may have been slightly more appealing. I really didn’t like the way MIT was so chopped up. And I think Harvard, according to what I read in books, Harvard ultimately voted, presumably on me, and voted not to fill the position. But I wouldn’t have taken it anyway, and maybe they knew that.

DeVorkin:

And this was the only serious possibility?

V. Rubin:

Yes, they’re the only two offers I’ve ever had.

DeVorkin:

Or that you’ve ever considered, but even had. People must have said, “Would you consider?”

V. Rubin:

No, never. I don’t think women get many. The younger women now are smarter.

DeVorkin:

Smarter?

V. Rubin:

Well, yes. Even if they want to stay where they are, they apply for other things.

DeVorkin:

Oh, politically smart, yes, yes, okay.

V. Rubin:

When do you want to go see Bob?

DeVorkin:

That would be soon.

V. Rubin:

Okay, fine.

DeVorkin:

Ashley, is there anything you would like to cover right now, before we take a break and go see Bob?

Yeager:

Maybe one. Would you consider yourself a role model for present and future women astronomers?

V. Rubin:

Yes. In fact, I would say in all science. I hear from them. I went up to Danthee [phonetic] at the end of this, because I’ve gotten to know her, and she said, “Oh, I meant to say something about you,” when she was talking at lunch.

DeVorkin:

Oh, really?

V. Rubin:

Yes. Yes. And I was startled, because I don’t know what she meant to say.

DeVorkin:

You just went up to congratulate her?

V. Rubin:

Yes, and she said, “Oh, I forgot. I wanted to say something about you.” So, yes. I used to do more here, just because there were fewer women, and I got to know them all. Very often I would have them all come for a dinner or something. In fact, once or twice Maxine Singer came as president, and I had a few former postdocs in the area, like working at NSF, and I would call them. I mean, I was much more active. I haven’t done that lately, but I certainly try and be helpful. They really tend to come to me, some of them. Now there are so many, there are some I really don’t even know, and if you count the geophysics lab, which is also here—we have more female postdocs than male, all the time.

DeVorkin:

It seemed that way.

V. Rubin:

Yes, we do, but there’s one woman in astronomy, she’s the only one out of fifteen, and the geophysics lab has one out of fifteen, and she’s been here since—she’s much younger than I.

DeVorkin:

This is on the permanent appointment.

V. Rubin:

Yes. So, we don’t have a good record. Well, we don’t hire people very often, because people almost never leave. Sara’s leaving was unusual. We had two in astronomy, and we filled it with a very good young man.

DeVorkin:

I’ve been giving a few popular talks on women who changed the universe, the way we think about the universe. You’re one of them.

V. Rubin:

That’s lovely. Who are the others?

DeVorkin:

Well, we start with Caroline Herschel, then Henrietta Swan-Levitt – there’s no question that she provided the mechanism through which distances could be determined.

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes.

DeVorkin:

Then there’s Cecilia [Payne-Gaposchkin] with the hydrogen, and her subsequent work.

V. Rubin:

Yes, she is someone that never rose to what she could have done. I mean, over all the stories, that’s almost the worst. Okay?

DeVorkin:

Yes, yes. There’s your work, and then there’s Margaret’s. The reason I raise this is that I found after a talk I gave to astronomers, some came up to me rather upset with the credit I gave Margaret for that work. Yes, she had done the analysis, but it was really her grad student who did it, and the criticism later on ranged from how she treats her own graduate students, to how she typifies her own graduate education at Princeton under Peebles, to how the other people who’d actually begun the CFA survey were just sort of outdistanced. I haven’t talked to any of them.

So, I said, “Well, if you’re so upset about that, why don’t you write about it, or at least give me some evidence?” I’ve never gone back to Margaret to talk to her about it, because she’s in a very sensitive state.

V. Rubin:

Yes, she is.

DeVorkin:

And this is not a muckraking. But as far as the role of women in lead positions, as Margaret certainly was, and you know, how she used her MacArthur money, which was very consciously done to get the message out about the bubbles and voids, and it made her the spokesman. This is a story that at least I’d like to have reported in some objective way. I mean, I’ve interviewed Dave Latham for other reasons, and it’s clear he didn’t want to talk about it, so I didn’t push it. And I have not interviewed Mark Davis.

V. Rubin:

And what about Huchra?

DeVorkin:

I haven’t talked with Huchra. I’ve only heard indirectly that they don’t want another Smithsonian employee to interview John or Margaret about this.

V. Rubin:

Oh yes, I had never thought of that.

DeVorkin:

There is a complication there.

V. Rubin:

Well, I talk to Margaret a lot. I mean, I do.

DeVorkin:

She’s a wonderful person.

V. Rubin:

And she’s very complicated, and she has, you know, friends and enemies. Yes, she either has people that support her, or people that—although I’ve never heard these stories about her. I don’t think anybody has ever told me.

DeVorkin:

Well, that’s good. That means it must be very local to Cambridge.

V. Rubin:

I guess so. I mean, she certainly, I presume, wouldn’t tell me that.

DeVorkin:

You know, the person who was most passionate, and I don’t know his name, was the husband of a woman who was one of Margaret’s graduate students, and just said, “She drove her out of the discipline,” and all of this, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it’s really loaded. But it’s something that at least I’d like to at least better appreciate, if not understand.

V. Rubin:

I don’t know how you sort something like that.

DeVorkin:

It’s because the science is so important, and the nature of the large-scale structure.

V. Rubin:

I must say, I mean Margaret certainly is smart and has done a lot of interesting things other than that. It’s hard to be as lucky as she is. I think her more recent work on the stars escaping from the Milky Way, I mean, they’re very, very—it is, it is.

DeVorkin:

The concern here was also simulated by the issues regarding credit given over to Zwicky, the quickness, and your measured response, makes me think maybe that’s where we have to look with Margaret’s case, people wanting to deny her the credit that she deserves, and that is because of peer competition.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I mean, she’s much more sensitive than I am.

DeVorkin:

Oh yes.

V. Rubin:

I mean, if people didn’t mention her in their paper, she’d remember it probably till the end of her life, sort of. She certainly has had lots of enemies at Harvard.

DeVorkin:

Well, she didn’t get the professorship and she quit.

V. Rubin:

That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.

DeVorkin:

I hope that those records sometimes at least will be preserved, and I think they will.

V. Rubin:

Oh, I think they will. I just know her as an astronomer really, and we talk and we talk. Well, she certainly tells me about her problems, which often involve people.

DeVorkin:

The citations to Zwicky before and after your work still are puzzling and raise the question if it is a gender issue.

V. Rubin:

You know, do you ever wonder that you’re just putting too much value on these references? [citations]

DeVorkin:

Yes, that’s a good point.

V. Rubin:

Okay. It is interesting the way it’s going up, presumably. So, twenty, twenty-two, twenty-something, twenty people reference Zwicky in 2007.

DeVorkin:

Something like that, yes, and something like twenty-six did in 2006.

V. Rubin:

I mean it is certainly true that probably everybody that talks about dark matter references Zwicky.

DeVorkin:

Yes, but this is your citation rate [pointing to graph].

V. Rubin:

Mine is going down.

DeVorkin:

Yours is going down. Still, by any standards—

V. Rubin:

It still has more references than—am I right?

DeVorkin:

I think it has more total references, yes. Oh yes. Yes, yes, far more total citations. Well, your point about being the contemporary I think is one that I can follow up with and consider. But I also agree with you, I may be putting too much emphasis on this.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I mean, I honestly was telling you about this thing I’ve just written, and it’s not done yet because it was just going to the people that will try to fit it into Physics Today on Monday. I mean, they work fast. I sent them this a week or two ago, and they said it will be out in September. So, all five or six references are in, as I sent it, but I mean so it’s only I that was thinking, well, I can cut this down to three instead of six, for that, because I have like six or seven references altogether, and that was just one.

And I tell you truly that if I picked the three to take out, if I did it tomorrow it might be a different three. I mean, I would look for the earliest and the latest and someone else in between. It’s not a science. But I think Zwicky would stay in. But I don’t know why people don’t—I mean, his statement is pretty impressive, that the distribution of light bears no relation to the distribution of mass.

DeVorkin:

But Oort himself wasn’t a problematic character?

V. Rubin:

No.

DeVorkin:

I mean, you look at the balance of his career, he got recognition for everything that he did in a reasonable, normal way, like you are. Zwicky was very unusual, attracted iconoclasts, present-day iconoclasts who look and say, “See? See? See?” This is what I’m coming up with.

V. Rubin:

Is any member of his family still—he had daughters.

DeVorkin:

Oh yes, and they’re in communication.

V. Rubin:

There was an IAU meeting in Prague, and we went to see the Schmidt telescope, wherever it was. During that trip I sat on a grass lawn with Zwicky for perhaps four hours talking, and to this day I could not tell you—I mean, we must have talked about galaxies. But I mean, when I think of the opportunity—

DeVorkin:

And you without a tape recorder.

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

Now Zwicky, of course, would be attracted to Schmidt telescopes. He was so big on supernova searches.

V. Rubin:

Yes. But we both must have gone through the telescope, and then we sat down and didn’t—I don’t know what the other people were doing those hours. Yes, but I mean it isn’t great, because I have no recollection of what we talked about. I mean, we could have talked about dark matter then.

DeVorkin:

Really? But it was definitely Prague?

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes, it was definitely Prague. Maybe it was ’67. In fact, it was a mob scene at the dinner. It’s notable among people that went. Maybe it was ’67, which would explain why I didn’t have a memorable conversation. I could probably look this up. [Tape recorder turned off.]

DeVorkin:

Okay. We are now continuing the interview, and for the record, we are at your home.

DeVorkin:

This is the home of Vera and Bob Rubin, and again it’s David and Ashley doing the interviewing. In reading through the first two interviews, there were a number of points that came to Ashley’s attention about your marriage, your relationship, questions that we thought that future historians and even present historians would like to know more about.

Yeager:

One of the first questions I had was if you had ever talked about what your work was at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.

V. Rubin:

If I had?

Yeager:

Well, if you had discussed it. I didn’t know if maybe it was something secretive, because I know they wouldn’t let a woman into the lab, would they?

V. Rubin:

They wouldn’t let women spouses of employed men, yes.

B. Rubin:

So, no. First of all, the work I was involved in was not classified, even though there were parts of the laboratory which dealt with classified projects, so that was not a consideration.

V. Rubin:

It was real physics.

B. Rubin:

Apparently, from conversations we’ve had recently, Vera doesn’t seem to know much about what I was doing, so I guess we didn’t discuss my work at home particularly. I think we must have, but not at a very detailed level.

DeVorkin:

Why do you suppose that would be the case?

B. Rubin:

Why? Because she expressed surprise at the titles of some of my papers. We’ve been conducting our own historical report. Vera’s been after me to more or less provide something, some details to be submitted to the History of Physics Project of the AIP.

DeVorkin:

That’s right, which includes papers, the whole nine yards, great.

B. Rubin:

That’s right.

V. Rubin:

I’ve been working with Bob.

V. Rubin:

We have solicitations Virginia Trimble most actively, because she knows they don’t have Bob’s material.

DeVorkin:

Excellent. Okay.

V. Rubin:

No, they’re in on it.

DeVorkin:

So what have you being doing, basically?

B. Rubin:

Well, I’ve been sitting here most of the year with an old c.v. that I have, and looking at the papers, and using those as a crutch to jog my memory as to what I was doing, and some of the incidents that were involved along the way. So, they start really with my first papers.

V. Rubin:

Well, they start at Cornell.

DeVorkin:

So this is really driven by your research?

B. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

Okay. So, we’ve been interviewing Vera, and she is very clear on how wonderfully supportive you’ve always been for her work, and I would love to hear how you feel Vera has been regarding your work. Of course, you have to do it with her in the room, which isn’t fair.

B. Rubin:

No, I don’t think it matters. Our marriage has survived so far.

V. Rubin:

Fifty-nine years.

B. Rubin:

You have to remember that we’re a product of different times, and it never occurred to me to consider—well, we never considered going our separate ways in our work, in our studies, and being apart. And it never occurred to me that I would be the one who would follow Vera somewhere. We did consider, I guess, what the opportunities were for each of us, but I was basically ahead of her academically, as far as scheduling is concerned, so I went along with the conventional wisdom or practice that we would go to Cornell. At the same time I recognized Vera’s interests, and they became more or less paramount in decisions that we would make from that point on, and that’s basically the way we operated.

DeVorkin:

So your choice of La Jolla, for instance, over—what was the other choice?

B. Rubin:

The other choices were, well, I applied to the Institute for Advanced Studies.

V. Rubin:

Trondheim—

B. Rubin:

Let me back up. There was a program at the Bureau of Standards; basically it was to provide sabbaticals. So, I had—the choices which came up were the Trondheim, and this was because I guess at that point I had contact with some of the people in radiation physics at the Bureau of Standards, and they this visitor coming, and there was the possibility that we’d just trade residences. As it turned out, in that case this Trondheim family did move into our house. But the opportunities for astronomy clearly weren’t there that were at La Jolla. I think what happened in the case of the Institute for Advanced Studies, there was no interest on their part, Freeman Dyson in particular.

V. Rubin:

And then Freeman Dyson came to the house we were living in in La Jolla. Well, we went to La Jolla and we lived in this beautiful house overlooking the Pacific, and then one day there was a knock on the door and it was Freeman Dyson, who was coming to the Institute, and he was interested in renting this house. We were leaving. He called our four children brats—

B. Rubin:

Which was an insult.

V. Rubin:

He used the word brats. Bob tried to tell me—

B. Rubin:

I think with his English background, I don’t think it’s out of character—

V. Rubin:

But I never forgave him.

DeVorkin:

The parents can call the kids brats.

V. Rubin:

Well, we never did.

DeVorkin:

Well, it’s only if they deserve it.

B. Rubin:

And ours never did. So, I’m not sure that I can come up with the name of any other option we had at the time. I mean, there were other occasions where choices had to be made. For example, when it came time to leave the Applied Physics Laboratory, there was a breakup there on staff, and the falling of various people involved, and I was rather close to several of them, in particular Bob Hermann, Ralph Alpher, and let’s see, Shirley Silverman, and they all left in different directions more or less.

So, I sent out ten letters, I believe, and got a positive response from one, and this was at the University of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana, basically because the interest there was that my thesis work with Debye was concerned with the excluded-volume problem in polymer chains, and solution properties. So, the offer came, and we accepted, and we went. That’s why I ended up as a visiting professor at Champagne-Urbana for three years. That was the nature of my appointment.

DeVorkin:

And you all went?

V. Rubin:

We all went, and I kept my Georgetown job.

B. Rubin:

We had three children at the time.

V. Rubin:

That’s right, and our fourth was born there, and I had a calculator—

B. Rubin:

A Freiden.

V. Rubin:

—a big calculator.

DeVorkin:

So you continued your research.

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

And you had a leave of absence from Georgetown of some sort?

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes, whatever. And I was still paid. I mean, it was a job. I think I was working on the—I was analyzing eclipse observations to get, what, the shape of the Earth or something?

B. Rubin:

No, no, no, no. This was a lunar thing. It was an Air Force contract, which Father Heyden had snared.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I am one of those people who wrote a paper, I mean I wrote a first draft, I did the work, and I showed it to Father Heyden and it was taken from me and classified. I mentioned that. So, I did the work there, and I just kept track of my hours, and they paid me by the hour.

DeVorkin:

Had you made any contacts at Urbana?

V. Rubin:

They had very strict nepotism rules. I even approached the University High School, Uni High, and because of its affiliation with the university, that was also under the nepotism rule. I sat in on a relativity course by G.C. McVittie. We’ve been doing well together. Then about fifteen years later, when they were celebrating their hundredth anniversary, they had a monthly seminar. They invited people to come back, like Rosalyn Yalow, who had affiliation. So, they invited Vera Rubin to come back, and they said to me when they invited me over the phone, “You really didn’t have an affiliation with us, did you?”

And I said, “No, I was barely allowed on the campus.” That was an interesting visit, because I said I would go if I could have lunch with the graduate students, and maybe fifty graduate students showed up, of whom maybe twenty of them were male. I talked to them for two hours, and the talk was at four-thirty, and when I got there some of them came down and told me [after] I finished, and they told me horror stories of the women being—when they entered, they were told by other graduate students which professors not to work with, or they’d never get out. They called this the bluebeard effect; they’d never get out alive.

And I had dinner with the chairman of the department and about five other faculty couples that night, and I told them this story, and they said that was impossible. They did not believe me that that was said, and it turned out that one of the faculty members had divorced his wife, who I knew, and married a young, beautiful lady, and she had been there that afternoon. She had come to the lunch, and she could tell everyone that that’s really what was said.

DeVorkin:

This was not a nice atmosphere I take it.

V. Rubin:

No. The women there were really suffering.

DeVorkin:

Did you have that feeling during this two years that you were all there?

V. Rubin:

I went to McVittie’s class and that’s all I did. We knew a few women who had faculty husbands.

B. Rubin:

And there was one woman who was a wife of—

V. Rubin:

Oh yes, she was an astronomer.

B. Rubin:

No. I’m talking about Lyn Belford’s [phonetic] wife, Ginny.

V. Rubin:

Okay. I didn’t know her very well.

B. Rubin:

Certainly in the chemistry department I didn’t know any women. This was the physical-chemistry group. This was physical chemistry, in the Chemistry Department.

DeVorkin:

That’s really something. There wasn’t a large Astronomy Department there.

V. Rubin:

No, no. No, in fact, I mean I was a guest of the Physics Department when I went back. I don’t even know if they still had an Astronomy Department.

B. Rubin:

Anyway, so to get back to the story I was elaborating on, so we ended up in Urbana for two years, and then the question came up where we would go, and there were four options. There was Penn State, Michigan State, Bell Labs, and the Bureau of Standards. I had offers from all of them. So, we ended up back in Washington at the Bureau of Standards. I had contact with Kurt Shuler who was at the Bureau of Standards at the time, and with whom I had been working at the Applied Physics Lab, not very closely, but we had published papers together. He’s a real operator. So I ended up in the heat [phonetic] division under Charley Herzfeld.

DeVorkin:

Historians will want to know, was there any compromise here in your choice, given that you had four choices, and the others sounded pretty good, too?

B. Rubin:

Well, no. From my point of view there was no—the other places were isolated, from my point of view, as far as opportunities for Vera. The considerations were for Vera, even Bell Labs.

V. Rubin:

Yes, that’s correct.

DeVorkin:

You would have had Princeton, Rutgers, places like that in the area around Bell Labs.

B. Rubin:

Vera had a master’s degree, so this was to go on for graduate work.

V. Rubin:

No, that’s not right. I got my degree in ’54, and this was ’57.

B. Rubin:

Okay, sorry, but professional opportunities—

V. Rubin:

No, that was the decision—

V. Rubin:

—that he really made, or we made, he on the basis that there would be more opportunities—

DeVorkin:

For you down here.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I mean, Princeton didn’t welcome women. It’s true, and I don’t know that maybe Rutgers would have.

DeVorkin:

Hard to say.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I mean, he just thought that it was a bigger place. In fact, one of the places we talked about was NRL with Herb Friedman, and the Bureau of Standards even.

DeVorkin:

Yes, sure. Charlotte Moore was there.

V. Rubin:

That’s right, and I had worked with her, I think I mentioned it earlier, so I mean they weren’t universities, but it looked like we could both do well.

B. Rubin:

I don’t know what the situation was at Mass or its precursor.

V. Rubin:

That was NRL. That’s why I went to see Friedman.

DeVorkin:

That would be the clearest place that one would be interested. But what about the question of teaching? Was it an important consideration for either of your career activities or career paths that it includes teaching, because in both places—I mean, did you teach when you were at Illinois?

B. Rubin:

Yes, I did. I taught a course in undergraduate physical chemistry. It was a junior course, and a course in chemical thermodynamics, which was basically a Graduate courts, and some statistical mechanics, and [unclear]. The only other teaching experience I had was at Cornell as Debye’s assistant. He was an inveterate consultant and traveler, and he scheduled his lectures for, well, among other things, a Saturday morning. On those occasions when he couldn’t get back in time, I gave the lecture, so I had a lot of preparation. So that was the only experience I had.

I was not interested, really. That wasn’t a big part of my interests. In fact, I think I was the beneficiary of the times, in a sense, that I had a free hand in choosing my research problems and working on them without interference. The notion of a postdoctoral position had never entered my consideration earlier when we left APL, so I don’t know that I can add anything more to that.

DeVorkin:

It sounds pretty clear to me.

V. Rubin:

And I had not taught then.

DeVorkin:

Okay, your second question I think is a good one to ask now.

Yeager:

Okay. I did a little research and I saw that you both published a paper together at one time. Were you often working together, or did you—

V. Rubin:

How did you find that?

Yeager:

On ADS [phonetic].

V. Rubin:

The title of the paper was “The Earliest Recognition—

B. Rubin:

Observation—

V. Rubin:

—Acknowledgment of the Crab Nebula as a Recipient of the Supernova,” or something of the Crab Nebula. It’s the only thing we’ve ever done together. It came about because I was reading what’s-his-name’s book—

B. Rubin:

Joseph Needham.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Needham had a statement that Johann Adam Shall in 1627 took the telescope to China, and he discovered the nebulosity around the Crab Nebula.

DeVorkin:

Oh yeah?

V. Rubin:

And I knew that had to be wrong. And Bob was interested, got interested. I mean, we talked about it and we knew that was wrong. So, we went to the Library of Congress—do you want to tell this story?

B. Rubin:

No, you’re doing fine.

Yeager:

Well, no, you can correct her.

V. Rubin:

And he does, presently. We copied—I don’t think we took the book, but we copied some characters, or maybe we took the book, because it had the reference to Shall, who also had an oriental name once he got there. We went to the Oriental Library of Congress, and we walked up to the man and we said, “We would like to know if you have any books by this man.” I think we showed him the book.

He went to his little catalog and he said, “We have twenty-seven books by him.” We were not allowed in the stacks, so he said, “How will I know what I want?” And off the top of my head I said, “Well, there will be a picture of a telescope,” because I knew it was a telescopic observation. And he came out and handed us the book. It was one of these rolled up—

B. Rubin:

Scroll.

V. Rubin:

—a scroll thing, and in five minutes we had solved the mystery, although we didn’t read a word of 1620 Chinese. But there was the sketch, a picture of a star cluster that I recognized. I was trying to think of the name of which cluster. I recognized it from knowing what Galileo’s sketches had looked like. It was a cluster in the Constellation of the Crab. What’s the cluster there? In the Constellation of the Crab.

DeVorkin:

Oh, oh, oh, because I’m thinking Crab Nebula.

V. Rubin:

No, no, that’s right. No, you have to, that’s right, and that’s why I wasn’t able to get to it.

DeVorkin:

In Cancer. Praesepe? [phonetic]

V. Rubin:

Very likely, yes, and I just recognized that. So, I understood that Needham had confused the Constellation, the cluster in the Crab with the Crab Nebula.

DeVorkin:

This was Joseph Needham?

V. Rubin:

Yes, the one that has nine volumes.

DeVorkin:

That’s Joseph Needham. Wow, that’s surprising.

V. Rubin:

Yes, it is surprising. So, we copied this. They let us Xerox it, and we Xeroxed twelve, fifteen pages, and then we couldn’t find anybody who could read sixteenth-century Chinese. I mean, they said it was so different. We finally found someone at Goddard whose wife was oriental and an expert in sixteenth-century Chinese, and she read it for us, or she translated it. It was fascinating. I remember only one thing, although there must be papers somewhere, and that is the word for nebula she translated as the exhalation of dying corpuscles [phonetic].

DeVorkin:

Really.

V. Rubin:

Yes. Anyway, so we gave a joint paper at the AAS.

B. Rubin:

Vera’s the member, so she gave the paper.

V. Rubin:

I gave the talk, and in a minute I’ll tell you who the chairman was, and he found it very amusing. It was in the historical section. Anyway, then we wrote it up. That’s why I was startled for a minute, for a Carnegie yearbook. I mean, everybody found it very amusing, so it was a cute little story. Then the end of the story is, I wrote to Needham. In return, I got a postcard that was printed, and it said, “Professor Needham is very busy, and he will respond to your communication in—,” and it said, “—one week, four weeks, six months,” and his secretary had checked six months, and we never heard from him.

DeVorkin:

That’s an interesting insight into Needham. Fascinating.

V. Rubin:

I told Phil Morrison this, and Phil Morrison—did you ever visit Needham?

DeVorkin:

No.

V. Rubin:

Well, Phil Morrison said he did, and it’s a big room, and you look in the room and there is about a fourteen-inch path through the papers that are like waist high over the whole room, and you walk down this path and Needham is sitting at the end.

DeVorkin:

But you would think that with a postcard like that he would be better organized.

V. Rubin:

With that postcard, I don’t think I ever expected to hear from him, but I thought that would be a good thing to do, and at times I thought I needed a postcard like that.

DeVorkin:

But that’s a great story.

V. Rubin:

So he did a lot of detective work.

DeVorkin:

Has anybody else ever remarked, I mean like Bernie Goldstein or others talked to you about it?

V. Rubin:

I don’t think they know about it.

DeVorkin:

About this paper.

V. Rubin:

No. Well, there must have been an abstract in the BAAS.

DeVorkin:

Okay, we’ll follow it up.

V. Rubin:

It’s very funny, because when Bob was—Bob has a—I’m running out of words, I’ve been talking so long—a vitae which has his publications, but that wasn’t on it. We both noticed this, and I insisted that we find a reference and put it in. I’m delighted. I’m sorry we didn’t do more. Early on he was—you know, one thing I should have said was that—and I think it explains why he knows about what I do, and I don’t know as much about what he did—I mean, he always had colleagues.

When I was sitting writing my thesis, I had no one to talk to but Bob. When I went to Georgetown for graduate, having come with a master’s, I was never there during the day. The classes were at night, and so I had no one to talk to except Bob, and he really, I talked to him like a colleague. And I thanked him in probably every paper, but probably some of them should have had your name on them.

B. Rubin:

No.

V. Rubin:

Well, I mean, they could have.

B. Rubin:

Well, the difference was, I think, that in spite of the fact that you’re talking astronomy and thinking about problems that arise there, from my point of view in statistical mechanics, aside from the articles I don’t see that much of a difference. So, I don’t feel out of depth with them in some strange field. I mean, everything is very familiar, and the problems that come up were [unclear].

V. Rubin:

And my Ph.D. thesis was—in fact, I don’t know whether you know this name, Francois Frenkiel.

DeVorkin:

No. How do you spell the last name?

V. Rubin:

F-r-e-n-k-i-e-l. He was a refugee from the war who was Bob’s first boss at the Applied Physics Lab.

B. Rubin:

Well, he was in hydrodynamics, in turbulence.

V. Rubin:

And the first time he came to our house for dinner I cooked a chicken, and when we sat down he said he didn’t eat chicken. We later learned that he had lost, maybe at the early part of the war, he must have been quite young—as a youngster he had had a chicken, a pet chicken who had been slaughtered to be cooked, so he wouldn’t eat chicken. He never talked about himself. We learned that he had lost a wife and a couple of children. He was Belgian, and then he came to the Applied Physics Lab. I would go to talk to him at the Applied Physics Lab, and I was not allowed to go past the person at the desk, because wives were not allowed there. You know that. He ultimately objected, and he insisted, and I was allowed to go.

In fact, when Gamow first called me, one of the reasons was that he was about to give a talk at the Applied Physics Lab, and he wanted to know details of what I had done for my master’s thesis, and I asked him if I could come hear him. I don’t think I had ever seen him; I hadn’t known him, certainly, at the time. And he said no, because women, wives were not allowed in.

B. Rubin:

He was around in those days?

V. Rubin:

Yes. So, he could use my data, but I couldn’t come in.

DeVorkin:

Did you have a habit of reading each other’s research papers before submission, acting as the other’s editor or something?

V. Rubin:

Did you read my papers?

B. Rubin:

Some.

V. Rubin:

Occasionally. I don’t know that it was all the time. Did I ever read yours? Probably not. Many of them were very mathematical. Most of them were very mathematical.

DeVorkin:

What about your children, did they read—did you ever share your research with your children?

V. Rubin:

Yes. [laughter]

DeVorkin:

She says, sitting straight up in her chair.

V. Rubin:

Well, you haven’t seen our large dining-room table. We have a big dining-room table. We’ll have to go back, because we all worked there all the time. I think it’s two stories, or maybe I can make it into one. But anyway, our youngest son was in the second grade when I was writing a paper for the ApJ on something I did at DTM, a galaxy. I even remember, it was a double galaxy. I’m not sure these two episodes were identical.

But first of all, I held up a spectrum that I had mounted, a photograph of a spectrum, and he was down the table, and I held it up and I said, “Can you see this faint line right here?” you know, H-Alpha [phonetic].

And he said, “Well, a little bit, but why don’t you take a pencil and make it darker?” And I was just horrified. I mean, he was in the second grade, I remember.

DeVorkin:

Perfectly reasonable.

V. Rubin:

Yes. But then when I started using a computer, and you make everything as dark as you want it to be, all I could think of was how horrified I was. But then I made a sketch of the double galaxy, and one of them was a little fuzzy, so I put lots of fuzzes around it, and in the fuzz I wrote his initials.

B. Rubin:

You put his first name [unclear].

V. Rubin:

Did I? Yes, I guess I did. See, I need a helper. I wrote “Alan.” He took it to the second grade for show and tell when it came out in the Astrophysics Journal, and really for years, every time I come upon that paper, that issue, I look to make sure the name is still there. It’s funny, I can’t quite believe that it’s really there, but it was.

DeVorkin:

That’s really cute.

V. Rubin:

Yes. And I told someone about this, maybe a woman astronomer, or maybe a man, and they did something similar after I told them, but I don’t remember who that was.

B. Rubin:

Yes. But this was in the mold of Hershfeld.

V. Rubin:

Yes, who had these New Yorker cartoons of people with—

DeVorkin:

Oh, sure, the [unclear].

V. Rubin:

Yes, and we all knew that. I mean, you know, the whole family would look for these names.

DeVorkin:

That’s nice.

B. Rubin:

But there are other stories. He asked you, among other things, if you had to pay—

V. Rubin:

He did. One night at work, “Do you have to pay to work at DTM?” We were sitting around this table.

DeVorkin:

He evidently knew that you enjoyed it.

V. Rubin:

Well, they loved it. There used to be a big trash bin, and you know, they could pick up all kinds of electronic stuff that they didn’t know what it was, and we didn’t know what it was. They would come home and they would just take it apart. I mean, there was no object but to get all the little pieces, and you couldn’t put them back together.

One of our kids got a leather, cubic box, but made out of leather; it had leather bindings. I mean, you must have carried a dosimeter or some kind of measuring thing in it, and it was just in the trash, and this was in the family for years and years and years. Then he went off to college, and finally a different kid, a younger kid asked if they could have it. I mean, I think someone still has it, at least they did for a while.

DeVorkin:

Just neat-looking things that were in the trash bin.

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes, they loved it.

DeVorkin:

Did you ever take them in to show them Tuve’s cyclotron?

V. Rubin:

Probably not. Probably not.

DeVorkin:

It was not accessible, or not the sort of thing—

V. Rubin:

You mean the Van de Graff, the Van de Graff that went to the museum?

DeVorkin:

Well, no. I mean, there was a big cyclotron. Am I crazy?

V. Rubin:

No, there was a cyclotron.

DeVorkin:

Yes, in the bowels of that building next to the Van de Graff.

V. Rubin:

That’s right. When I came it was mostly apart. It was taken apart. The magnet went somewhere, maybe to the University of Pennsylvania or something. Yes, it was apart, and nobody really walked back there.

DeVorkin:

So other than that, how accessible were the different labs to the children?

V. Rubin:

How they were, our youngest kid, I guess he worked at the physics lab, with Marilyn.

B. Rubin:

Again the youngest.

V. Rubin:

—yes, spent a summer, and Dave I think worked with Tom Aldridge, yes, because he was going to go to geophysical lab [unclear] my colleague a geophysicist, and I’m not going to let a smart kid like him go to a geophysical lab instead of coming here, and both of them are geophysicists.

B. Rubin:

Geologists.

DeVorkin:

So the DTM was very accessible to the families, for the kids when they’re motivated?

V. Rubin:

Yes.

B. Rubin:

Well, and the middle son actually—

V. Rubin:

Oh yes, we have a real story. DTM got its first IBM computer. I don’t think anybody’s ever heard this story. Got an IBM computer when all the kids were still at home. There’s a ten-year span, and probably six years between the oldest and the third. We had four green books on how to use the IBM computer, and so one night I brought home the first book, and the next night I brought home the second book, and the next night I brought home the third book, and the next night I brought home the fourth book, and this was a true story.

Of the kids, only the third one read each one, and on the fifth night, Friday, he came to DTM and he played 10,000 baseball games. He wrote a program. He took the statistics out of the Washington Post on singles, doubles, home runs, and he learned from that one thing that you put your best batter up first, or maybe it took him a while, because the get up was the time. So, he did that for about four months, four or five months, and then his stupid mother one day said, “You know, I’m not sure you should be doing this. Maybe you should ask the director.” Why do you do things like that? I mean, why did I do something like that? So, he asked the director, I don’t remember how, and the director said no.

DeVorkin:

Was this a little 1620 or 1411?

V. Rubin:

IBM, it was an 1130. Boy, how I got that out. See, I can’t remember people’s names, but okay, it was an 1130.

DeVorkin:

This could be mid-’66 to ’68 sometime?

V. Rubin:

Yes, probably. So, he was born in ’56, so he was more than ten, but maybe not more than twelve or thirteen. So, it must have been near the summer. Anyway, so he did a lot of things. He got a job. He got a job at the George Washington University Hospital.

B. Rubin:

There was a program run in Bitster [phonetic], where the kids would take an examination.

V. Rubin:

That’s right. They had a Saturday morning program, and someone spoke every Saturday morning for maybe eight weeks, and then you took an exam, and if you got a high enough score you got a job.

DeVorkin:

That’s a great program.

V. Rubin:

Yes, it was. It was run by the American Heart Association or something, down on H Street, near 18th or 19th. It probably doesn’t exist anymore. He got a job digitizing—

B. Rubin:

Where he was writing a program to—

V. Rubin:

For heart scans or something.

B. Rubin:

There was a question of how you write, communicate.

V. Rubin:

Oh yes. He was going directly—

B. Rubin:

He was working on a compiler—

V. Rubin:

To do these things. One day he came home and at dinner he said he saw—

B. Rubin:

Meany’s

V. Rubin:

Yes, Meany’s—he had a heart attack in the—yes, George Meany.

DeVorkin:

AFL-CIO?

V. Rubin:

Yes, that’s right, that’s right. And we said, “I don’t think you’re supposed to talk about things like that.” Then Bob found someone at the Bureau of Standards—oh, and then here’s an interesting story for—you’re never going to finish, between the two of us. The kids were going to high school, public high school, and he had a math teacher who was very good and knew that he was very interested in mathematics, and he said to Carl, he said, “Oh, I have a friend who’s a mathematician. I’ll ask him to send you something,” you know, give you a problem or something.

And I came home one day at three o’clock, and Carl was home ahead of me, and he had spread out all over the table papers about mathematics, and the return address was, the header on all of them was the Institute for Advanced Studies. And he wrote a paper in high school which he had published. He determined the next number in some big series.

DeVorkin:

I have to ask this. Given that he had scientists as parents, okay, does he work in your shadow in some way? Do your kids, do you feel, have you ever had that issue around the table?

B. Rubin:

Yes, we have. Vera has the story to tell. She was at one of the National Academy meetings talking to some mathematicians, and she was introduced as Carl Rubin’s mother.

V. Rubin:

I am all the time. I mean, I don’t think that’s hindering him.

DeVorkin:

So your kids have transcended that.

V. Rubin:

Yes, they really have. The geologists are in—in fact, once every five years someone comes up to me at the National Academy meeting and says, “I can’t tell you how much we’re enjoying having your son with us.” And I have to say, “I’m sorry. You’ll have to tell me which son.”

DeVorkin:

That must be wonderfully gratifying.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I have no way of telling. They’re all doing interesting things. They’re all in—

DeVorkin:

That’s wonderful, just wonderful. Let’s back up in your marriage a little bit, and get to your courtship.

Yeager:

I was wondering if you would be comfortable sharing any stories or interactions you had when you guys were dating, like when you knew you were attracted to each other, or when you knew that you would marry.

V. Rubin:

You can answer that one. [laughs]

B. Rubin:

Well, what do you have this—first we should say, our parents introduced us. Our parents were living in southeast Washington in Trenton Terrace, I guess for different reasons. They had come from different directions. Vera’s parents knew someone who was, I guess, involved in building the formation of Trenton Terrace, and I guess Vera’s mother ended up actually having a good job in the office.

V. Rubin:

This was a new apartment development at the end of the war, when housing had been very [unclear].

DeVorkin:

This is Philadelphia?

V. Rubin:

No, this is Washington.

B. Rubin:

This is Washington in southeast, and in case it’s unfamiliar, Trenton Terrace was for a while in the news all the time as the seat of [unclear].

V. Rubin:

Recently. This was four years later.

B. Rubin:

And in my case, my parents had moved to Baltimore from New York when it got too tough in New York in terms of work. At the time the war started they were both, at least initially my mother ended up working in Washington and commuted from Baltimore every day. She ended up as the executive secretary of the head of the National [unclear], Taylor, who later became, I guess, a governor of North Carolina. My father not much later also got a job with the Navy Department as an illustrator. He was an artist. He had worked usually in New York, supporting his family on salary from the WPA. When that gave out they moved to Baltimore, where my aunt’s husband had a tie factory, so he was working in the tie factory until he got a job in the Navy Department as an illustrator.

DeVorkin:

So he was an illustrator for the tie factory as well?

B. Rubin:

No, no, no. He was cutting—

V. Rubin:

We used to laugh about that. He didn’t paint pictures for ties, but that came later in the tie business.

B. Rubin:

Anyway, so they both ended up in that city, and then I guess through my aunt in Baltimore she also had links to this family running the Trenton Terrace operation, so we got an apartment there as well, my parents did. At this point I was a student at Cornell, either at Cornell or I was still getting out of the Navy B-12 plan. So, the mothers met and one told the other, each told they had a child in college, and they’d be home during the summer, so they arranged a meeting. So that was the summer of 1947, and I was a student at Cornell, and Vera was at Vassar. I guess was it around November that we sent them a letter?

V. Rubin:

October. Like the ninth, I think. I went to a football game at Cornell with Bob.

B. Rubin:

So we decided to let them know what plans were, which was to get married in the summer of ’48.

DeVorkin:

Between the time you met and that letter, you must have had contact.

B. Rubin:

Yes, on weekends.

V. Rubin:

Well, we had the summer. We met each other in Washington.

DeVorkin:

Did you go places on dates here in Washington?

V. Rubin:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

Where did you go?

V. Rubin:

To the movies—

B. Rubin:

Baseball games.

V. Rubin:

I took Bob to baseball games. I loved baseball and he didn’t. He had a seersucker striped, you know, it was just a jacket. [Interruption, not transcribed.]

V. Rubin:

And the man behind us at the baseball game spilled ashes on it, and a hole was burned in it, and then I learned later from Bob that he had borrowed it from a cousin or something. [laughs] But we survived. So, by the end of the summer I guess we really knew we wanted to get married.

B. Rubin:

It was a very pleasant place down there, before the drugs moved in.

V. Rubin:

Yes, there’s a little stream. It sort of faced a little stream.

DeVorkin:

Really. Where would it be today in terms of which street, how far?

V. Rubin:

Near Anacostia Avenue. Every time we read where the worst part of the District [of Columbia] is, it’s—

B. Rubin:

And St. Elizabeth’s, so it’s way beyond 12th, 15th Street.

V. Rubin:

Yes. If you want more stories, I’ll tell you another story about our meeting. My father worked at the Agriculture, Department of Agriculture; no, maybe the navy. He was an electrical engineer. He would walk to the end of the bus station, which was up on Anacostia Avenue, up a hill, up a couple of blocks, and he would always save a seat for another friend of his who lived below us in this apartment. One morning the only seat left in the bus—

B. Rubin:

The friend was frail, medical problems.

V. Rubin:

Yes, he had medical problems, and my father would go early because the bus would be sitting there, and he’d save a seat. One morning another man got on the bus and walked to this empty seat and said he was going to sit down, and my father said he was sorry, he was reserving this seat for his friend, and this other man got angry, and he got so angry that ultimately my father invited a woman to sit down on the chair.

Then the two mothers met, and they decided that on this night the families would meet after dinner with their two sons. So Bob’s mother came with her husband and two sons. They knocked on the door and my father opened the door and invited them in, and then he went into the kitchen and he said, “That’s the man I had the fight on the bus with.” [laughs] How’s that for a story?

And my mother said, “Don’t you dare say a word about it.” So that’s how we met.

DeVorkin:

That’s wonderful.

Yeager:

Okay. Were there any characteristics or quirks that attracted you to him, or him to you?

V. Rubin:

Yes, I think my first question was whether he knew Richard Feynman. Well, Feynman had come to Vassar when I was a freshman, I think. There was some kind of a science thingy, meeting. I think the northeastern colleges had an undergraduate science program, and he came and he gave a talk, and, of course, everybody fell in love with him. I mean, he didn’t try not to make it possible.

DeVorkin:

Did you know Feynman?

B. Rubin:

Yes.

V. Rubin:

He said he was studying under Feynman.

DeVorkin:

Oh, that’s even better.

V. Rubin:

Yes, that’s what I said. I told people about that time, “Though I didn’t marry Feynman, I married Bob instead.”

DeVorkin:

So Feynman and Debye, that’s quite a faculty there.

B. Rubin:

Yes. And there was Bethe.

V. Rubin:

And Morrison.

DeVorkin:

God, that’s an incredibly strong department.

B. Rubin:

And there was Kirkwood in chemistry, Campbell Kirkwood. He was in the Chemistry Department. In fact, it was he with whom I expected to do my graduate work, but Kirkwood didn’t know that, and he left without telling me, so I had to settle for Debye ultimately.

DeVorkin:

What about the fact that you were both in science? Was this an asset or a concern?

V. Rubin:

Oh, sure. No, to me it was an asset, yes. I mean, I asked him if he knew Feynman, when he said no and he came from Cornell, I might have lost interest. I don’t mean that seriously.

B. Rubin:

I’ll never know whether it was an asset for me or not. If Vera hadn’t been in science, my choices would have been different from—they could have been.

DeVorkin:

You can’t say.

V. Rubin:

No, but that was important to me. It was important, yes. In fact, the other—I also said I would never marry anyone who couldn’t play the piano better than I could, and Bob doesn’t play the piano at all.

DeVorkin:

So you’re the piano player.

V. Rubin:

Yes, yes, I mean. I really meant that, because I wished I played better, so I thought, well, I’ll just have to marry somebody who’s a better piano—

DeVorkin:

My wife’s father auditioned his wives, and made sure that they could accompany him—he was a cellist—on the piano, because that was part of the arranged-marriage process then.

V. Rubin:

Well, Judy’s daughter is getting married in five weeks, and she’s marrying a mathematician type.

B. Rubin:

Cognitive science.

V. Rubin:

Yes, and he plays the piano beautifully, and he composes at the piano. So I said—

B. Rubin:

Finally.

V. Rubin:

—finally.

DeVorkin:

What about the quirks on the other side? Not quirks, but characteristics.

Yeager:

Yes, things that stuck out.

B. Rubin:

I don’t know that I went around looking at people in that sense.

V. Rubin:

We were awfully young.

DeVorkin:

You were young, and you were set up by your mothers, and you were comfortable with this.

V. Rubin:

Yes. I had a husband and a college degree before I was twenty. I was close to twenty. I was still nineteen. I mean, that’s pretty young.

DeVorkin:

Yes, it is young. That’s why you can call it almost sixty years?

V. Rubin:

Fifty-nine. We’ve had our fifty-ninth anniversary.

DeVorkin:

That’s great. Did you feel that we needed to know more about what kind of support Vera had during Cornell? I don’t recall whether we talked about how you were supported at Vassar and then Cornell.

V. Rubin:

You mean financially?

DeVorkin:

Financially, yes.

V. Rubin:

I had a scholarship to Vassar, yes.

DeVorkin:

But for the graduate work—

V. Rubin:

Well, I was assisting in the graduate astronomy.

B. Rubin:

Well, that was as my assistant, too, for open houses.

V. Rubin:

But most of my work at Cornell was in physics, I mean in the Physics Department.

Yeager:

I was thinking, what was one of the most important things you remember about your wedding day?

V. Rubin:

I remember getting a phone call from Bob. We both had jobs in Washington for the summer. He worked at the Bureau of Standards, I worked at the NRL, and I called them about a week before our wedding, because I was supposed to start work that week, and asked them if I could delay coming in a week or something, and they said no, and I said, “Oh, that’s too bad, because I’m getting married,” and they said, “Okay.” So, I had the week off. Bob was still working. So, we were getting married at, I don’t know, five o’clock.

It’s a long story, but I’ll ignore the long story part. He called me up and he told me he was in the public library. He had left work early, at noon, and he didn’t know what to do with himself till the time of the wedding, so he was downtown. We were getting married downtown, so he went to the public library and he called me there, because he had nothing to do. You must have found a book to read.

B. Rubin:

I must.

DeVorkin:

This was a family wedding, wasn’t it?

B. Rubin:

Well, that’s the other part of the story.

V. Rubin:

I graduated from Vassar on the seventeenth of May, and our wedding was to be August twenty-second. Bob has already told you that we looked at this apartment house, and apartments were very scarce. I had, like one of my closest friends, it was her family that owned this apartment building, I mean a big complex, and within about a week of getting home I got a call from her telling me that her aunt, who was sort of the general manager, was going away for the summer, and we could have her apartment if we wanted it.

So that evening I went out and called Bob, because I didn’t want to call from our house and ask him if he wanted to get married earlier, instead of the twenty-second of August, because we both had jobs in Washington for the summer. And he said, “Of course,” I guess. I mean he certainly said yes.

So, I went home and told my parents we wanted to get married earlier, and my father said, not to me but I heard him say it to my mother, “Everyone will say she had to get married.” So, for a year we used the already printed invitations for scratch paper, and we had twelve people at our wedding.

B. Rubin:

Families.

V. Rubin:

Bob’s and ours, and a couple of grandmothers, and my sister.

DeVorkin:

Was it in a temple?

V. Rubin:

No, it was in the—

B. Rubin:

Statler Hotel on 16th and [unclear].

V. Rubin:

We had a rabbi. We got married there, and we spent the weekend there. I had won a prize at Vassar for physics, a $75 prize, and that paid the hotel bill, and then we went back to work on Monday morning.

DeVorkin:

Wow. We’ve come an awfully long way. But there were a few questions going back to the old early interviews, and Ashley thought that we needed more information on Goldie Back.

V. Rubin:

Oh, Goldie, okay.

DeVorkin:

Why was she so influential on you?

V. Rubin:

Yes, her name was spelled B-a-c-k, but it was pronounced Bock. Well, when we moved to Washington I was about ten and she was my mother’s closest friend in Washington. My mother had known her in Philadelphia. I think they’d been high school friends. I always thought she had gotten an engineering degree at Penn, but having learned more about her since her death, I learned that they wouldn’t give her an engineering degree, because they wouldn’t give women anything. So, she got some kind of a teaching degree, but she had studied engineering.

Well, I don’t know. She was married to a mathematician who was himself an extremely interesting person. They were both very—they were, I was going to say the only scientists I knew. I mean, my father was an engineer, but he never talked about his work. I never knew what he was doing. I had a sister, so there were two girls. He played with old automobiles all the time, and I really never knew what he was doing. I mean, it just wasn’t discussed. I just was not part of that. I mean, I baked with my mother all the time.

Then I just got very interested in astronomy, and she and her husband had a convertible car, and they would actually drive me and my sister into Virginia where the sky was dark and we could watch the stars. She did a lot. I just adored their attitude. He had math papers all over the house, and they grew vegetables. You know, it just seemed like such a wonderful way to live, so I just admired them enormously.

DeVorkin:

That helps. Okay. Well, we’ve gone an awful long way. Thank you so much.

V. Rubin:

You’re good listeners.

DeVorkin:

Bob, is there anything you would like to add, at this moment anyway?

B. Rubin:

No.

Yeager:

May I ask one question?

V. Rubin:

Certainly.

Yeager:

Okay. I had one question for you. This was something I thought was interesting. I guess it was you that insisted she go back to school, is that correct, to get her Ph.D.?

B. Rubin:

Yes.

Yeager:

Why was that so important for you to do that for her?

B. Rubin:

Well, I could see that was something that she wanted to do, and she was very unhappy with the life leading when we were in Washington early on, first in an apartment and then in our own house. It was clear that something would have to be done. That’s it, basically.

DeVorkin:

Nothing more traumatic than that? No knock-down, drag-out fights?

V. Rubin:

No, none at all. No, no, we really never fought. Everything was settled very easily. And my parents helped enormously. I have written some of this. Do you know how I got to Georgetown and that school at night? He drove me and my mother came. I mean, it was a Mickey Mouse, but everybody was interested in making it work.

B. Rubin:

And over time details changed, but the same objective remained. The details of the operation changed. Ultimately Vera learned how to drive. [laughter]

DeVorkin:

Well, thanks again.

V. Rubin:

Well, thank you both. Good luck to you, Ashley. I understand you are going to MIT.