Regarding Parnassus

Editorial Regarding Parnassus " It's tough to make predictions " , averred Lawrence 'Yogi' Berra, " especially about the future ". The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, said the same. This edition considers, in our small way, the past, present and future. How we did things in the past needn't influence how they're done in the present; and how we practise now shouldn't dictate the future direction. In 1912, at the Harvard College Observatory, a prodigiously talented lady named Henrietta Swan Leavitt noted that distant stars, Cepheid variables like Polaris, pulsated with a regular beat. Furthermore by comparing their relative brightness, she could calculate where they were in relation to each other. From this, she devised the term 'Standard Candles' 1. In 1913, Vesto Slypher, working at the Lowell Observatory, detected a red shift in distant stars and realised that they were moving away from us 1. Consequently Edwin Hubble, utilising these standard candles and red shifts, postulated two things: the universe was much bigger than had been supposed, and that it was expanding 1. In 1936, George Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, mathematician and physicist, posited 'A Day Without Yesterday' 2 as part of his Fireworks Theory. The universe, he calculated, had burst forth from a primeval atom, or singularity. Lemaitre, also suggested that there should be smouldering remnants of the explosion still out there-cosmic rays. No one paid much attention. In 1948, George Gamow in his landmark 'Alpha Beta Gamma' paper 3 (surely one of the cleverest titles ever published), speculated that these residual traces would now be microwaves. His paper was also almost universally ignored. Nearly 20 years later, Arno Penzeus and Robert Wilson, researching at the Bell Antenna in New Jersey, and unaware of Gamow's paper, were bothered by a ubiquitous hiss detected by the antenna despite all their efforts to eliminate it. It was, of course, the final piece of the puzzle-microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang. For this they won the Nobel Prize in 1978. Penzeus and Wilson connected the dots between Let's return to Miss Swan Leavitt. Her occupation in Harvard was merely that of a computer; that is someone who studied photographic stellar plates and from them made computations 1. She was unusual, and not merely because of her stellar intellect. Her gender placed her in a regrettable minority of influential scientists. Marie Curie was another and was the first woman to …