Science journalist Anne Saker describes the Chandrasekhar Limit as a range of possibility where if a planet has enough stability in its magnetic force and its gravitational force, it can sustain life. This Nobel Prize winning discovery changed the field of fluid dynamics. Though it was named after theoretical physicist Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, he credited his computer, Donna Elbert, "for without her part, there would have been no substance.” Dean Regas chats with Anne Saker to learn more about Donna Elbert's astronomical legacy.
Send us your thoughts at lookingup@wvxu.org or post them on social media using #lookinguppodcast
Additional resources referenced in this episode:
- Donna Elbert and the Table on Page 208
- Hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability by Chandrasekhar, S. (Subrahmanyan), 1910-1995
- On the Imperturbability of Elevator Operators. LVII (Parody Research Paper mentioned in episode)
- Her work helped her boss win the Nobel Prize. Now the spotlight is on her, UCLA Magazine
Episode Transcript:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: The Yerkes Observatory was closing. Wait, what? Okay. Not exactly. But maybe. The Yerkes Observatory, home to the largest refracting telescope in the world, established in the 1890s, owned by the University of Chicago, was going to be sold off.
[Lisa Otto, Geneva Shore Report]: Today is March 8th, 2018. I'm Lisa Otto with the Geneva Show Report. We are out here at Yerkes Observatory, the beautiful Yerkes Observatory with a little update on the whole closing or possible closing of Yerkes. Now this is big news all around the lake. Everyone seems to be talking about it and a lot of people are upset about it.
Dean Regas: Well, this was the headline when I got a call to write an article about it for Sky and Telescope Magazine back in 2018. I quickly found out it was complicated. You can't just sell an old observatory. Well, not easily. And you couldn't bulldoze it either.
When I dove into the history of the Yerkes Observatory, I found a lot of major astronomers had passed through its doors. George Ellory Hale. Edwin Hubble. Nancy Grace Roman. Carl Sagan. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Was it all going to be lost?
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up. The show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
My guest today is Anne Saker, freelance writer and amateur astronomer who has a tale from the Yerkes observatory to share.
So I ended up writing two articles about the Yerkes Observatory. The first was titled The Not Quite Closing of the Yerkes Observatory, how a group of residents and amateur astronomers proposed to take over the renovation and operation of the facility.
[Lisa Otto, Geneva Shore Report]: So yeah, here you have it. Yerkes Observatory. A wonderful property, a wonderful piece of land, wonderful building, just beautiful and an icon here on Geneva Lake. We don't want to lose it. We want to see it utilized and preserved.
Dean Regas: But it wasn't a sure thing. And the wrecking ball was still kind of hanging around. So, the follow-up article, one year later, was entitled The (Almost) Re-Opening of the Yerkes Observatory. Things were looking good, and the transfer was looking like it was going to happen from an aging research facility to a 21st century educational cultural center.
Well, I visited Yerkes five times since those articles, and I'm happy to say the new organization has brought it all back and then some.
[James Groh, TJM4 News]: I am standing in front of one of the most important observatories in American history. It's the Yerkes Observatory near Geneva Lake and Williams Bay. After being closed for the past five years, it's open to the public again.
Dean Regas: The Yerkes Future Foundation will actually celebrate its fifth anniversary in September. You never know where a news story, an article, or a book will take you. For me, I kind of got so close to this story and developed a love of that observatory in Wisconsin. I visit every year just to see what's going on or what's new.
My guest today has probably experienced the same thing, writing articles for decades on all sorts of subjects in the universe.
Anne Saker: Hi, my name is Anne Saker. I'm a freelance journalist and an amateur astronomer.
Dean Regas: Well, Anne, thanks so much for joining me today.
Anne Saker: I'm just thrilled that I pestered you to do this, Dean.
Dean Regas: Oh, not at all. So here we are. You find a passage in a 1961 book entitled Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability. Oh man. Riveting title. And on page 208, there's a mention that sent you and others before you on a journey.
Anne Saker: Correct. The table that was on page 208 of that seminal work was mathematics that was done not by the author of that book, the Nobel Laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, but by his assistant. Her name was Donna Elbert. And at the time, the term used for someone like Donna Elbert was, “computer”. It was a job title, not a description of an inanimate object.
She did all the math and she made a breakthrough on that table that was very quietly hidden. And people read over it for 60 plus years.
Then about six or eight years ago, a postdoctoral researcher in fluid dynamics came to UCLA and she was going to break the mystery of the table on page 208. What she discovered is that the table on page 208 describes a limit, sort of a range of possibility where if a planet has enough stability in its magnetic force and its gravitational force it can sustain life.
It's not a precise instrument. It's not perfect. There's a lot of debate about it, but as the author Susanne Horn described it, it gives searchers for planets a tool that can help you divide, as it were, the wheat from the chaff. So, it's extraordinary. Nobody had ever come up with something like that before.
Dean Regas: So yeah, hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability. Tell a little more about why this was such an important thing.
Anne Saker: Because Chandra, and that was the name that he used for everything, everyone, Chandra, had come to understand that fluid dynamics could tell you a lot, not just about how fluids worked on Earth, but how fluids worked in the universe.
So that's where this guy's brain was in the fifties and sixties trying to look at how fluids operate on other planets.
[Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar]: I had a driving ambition to accomplish in science. One only had to have the audacity to ask the question, and the method was there to solve it. It’s a marvelous feeling.
Anne Saker: That same math, that same science can be translated to what's going on in earth. Dr. Horn, who did the postdoctoral research, said that everybody in fluid dynamics reads this book. You have to read this book and understand it, but she said, everybody just kind of read right over Donna Elbert's name.
And what made it important to Dr. Horn was that Chandra himself noted the importance of this breakthrough in the book, which is rare for a principal researcher to give that level of credit to his computer, but Chandra did that in all his work. In the 30 years that he and Donna Elbert worked together. He put her name at every chance he could get because she was that critical to his work.
Dean Regas: Well, it's a great article. It's in Sky and Telescope Magazine that you wrote about this, and I have to admit, I'd never heard of Donna Elbert before this. Tell me about her early years, where she grew up and did she grow up basically in the same town as the historic Yerkes Observatory?
Anne Saker: She was born in a house two blocks from the observatory, and she stayed there until she was 90. Her nieces told me wonderful stories about what an extraordinarily accomplished woman she was. She did not get a college degree until much later in life. She was the daughter of the town barber. She wanted to be a fashion designer, but of course barbers don't make a lot of money. So, she couldn't go to college, and her little brother kept teasing her that girls don't go to college.
Anyway, her father came home one night from the barbershop and said, hey, Chandra was in my chair today, and he has a job. So, Chandra and Donna conducted a job interview. Chandra went to the high school to check Donna's grades to make sure she could do the math, decided she could, hired her, and they worked together for 30 years.
She not only did the math, but she corrected his math and made it more beautiful. He would hand her a stack of calculations that he had done over a weekend and she would process them through what was called a merchant mechanical calculator, where you would actually like punch the numbers in and crank the crank to make the machine do the calculation. And she did all that work for him for years.
Dean Regas: Well, they're an interesting combo. I mean, Chandra himself was probably very much a stranger in a strange land being in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. Was Donna also kind of in a unique spot, being at the observatory? Was the observatory welcoming for her? Was she part of the team right away, or was there some stuff that she had to go through first?
Anne Saker: That's an excellent question, Dean. She acknowledges in her own writing about working with Chandra that it took her a while to learn how to type and learn how to use the calculator and understand the math that he wanted her to do. She was 22 and he was 38, so, you know, there was obviously a time when they had to get used to each other, but her nieces said they very quickly found a working pattern.
She was the one that his students went to when he had been maybe a little too brusque with them and she would say, well, you know, he can't really help it. And I don't think she meant that in a condescending way. I think she understood that his brain was not on planet Earth. His brain was elsewhere. And if he sounded harsh to you, don't take it personally.
But she was so famous for saying he can't help it, that one of Chandra's graduate students actually wrote a parody paper using Chandra's form of language and the way he would write about things and diagram things. And the parody paper actually offers a credit to Miss Canna Helpit, for all of the calculations on a certain page.
So even when they're making fun of her and making fun of him, they do it in an extraordinarily respectful and loving way.
Dean Regas: That's a good line for all astronomers. They cannot help it. They cannot help it.
So, Donna has a career elsewhere, returns to Williams Bay to live out the rest of her years in the same house. Why do you think that she was so lesser known than maybe some of the folks that we know about from like the Hidden Figures movie and things like that?
Anne Saker: Well, the Hidden Figures, that's a very good point because there's obviously a very important similarity between Donna and Katherine Jameson and the women who worked for NASA. But all of American astronomy, all of the observatories in America had women like Donna Elbert doing the math.
The last of them really didn't leave their jobs until about the sixties. So this was a really important, and frankly, I think probably undervalued ingredient in American astronomy. The levels of work of women who were very much like Donna, they did not necessarily have college degrees.
Eventually, Donna did earn a college degree in fashion design. She earned an art degree because she was a fashion designer. She spent a summer at the Pratt Institute. That was where her mind was. She was, color and shape and pattern, and it was a very interesting melding of minds, her and Chandra.
Dean Regas: Well, it's a great article and I know that you have this combination of backgrounds as being a writer and reporter for a long time, also into science writing, also into amateur astronomy. What was your job in previous lives, you know, as a writer and reporter?
Anne Saker: Well, I was a newspaper reporter for 40 years. And I spent the last seven and a half years at The Cincinnati Enquirer as a journalist, though, I have always, from my very early days, seen myself as a generalist.
I always saw myself as the explorer of all curious things. I'm interested in everything. And like you, I was 10 years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and I was hooked. And when I retired two years ago, I reached out to Sky and Telescope kind of blindly and pitched some stories and they said, well, we're not really interested in that, but we do have a job.
And I said, what's that? And they said, we would like to write about astronomers and people who have been working in and around astronomy who never really got their due. So she threw me a list and Donna Elbert was the second name on that list. And so that's kind of what got me into this. And I love doing these stories about people who are passionate about anything but especially passionate about the stars.
As you know Dean, as you encourage everyone all the time to look up, there is magic and an incredible narrative just waiting for you. Even if you're in light polluted Cincinnati. There's lots of cool things to see. If we can get out of our screens and look up into the night sky, I think we'd be happier and healthier as human beings.
Dean Regas: Well, Anne, thanks so much for chatting today. This has been great learning more about Donna Elbert, early astronomy and all the things of keep looking up. You embody it very well.
Anne Saker: Oh, thank you so much, Dean. It's great to talk with you. I just love talking about this, so thanks so much for squeezing me in.
Dean Regas: Well, talking with Anne about the subject and the career journey these astronomers and computers took, man. What it must have been like working in the field of astronomy 50 or even a hundred years ago. That just excites my imagination and of course triggers my long lost history degree.
For the Yerkes Observatory, change has come so quickly and I make my pilgrimage to Yerkes every year just to see the ornately decorated building, the massive dome, and see what new ways they're engaging with the community. Because, yeah, Yerkes is a historic observatory, but it's also a research facility. It's also open to the public. So you could catch a glimpse of what's inside, behind the scenes, seeing what astronomers did past and present.
[Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar]: If you look at my scientific record, how do I judge? I think one of the motives of science is to leave some kind of memorial behind oneself. People can make or break discoveries and be remembered for that. But there is a more modest role a scientist can play to assemble material which would be helpful to others and be of some permanent value.
Dean Regas: Looking up what Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017. Ella Rowen produces and edits our show and wants me to totally borrow the 64 foot long telescope from Yerkes, you know, just for the summer. I can't see why not.
Jenell Walton is our vice president of content, and Ronny Salerno is our digital platforms manager. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran. Our social media coordinator is Hannah McFarland and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. I'm Dean Regas. Keep looking up.
