I want you to try something for a second. Just
imagine you are standing outside on a completely
clear, like perfectly dark night. Oh, that's
the best kind of night. Right. And you look up
and you are just overwhelmed by the sheer number
of stars. I mean, billions of them, galaxies
swirling. It feels like you are looking at literally
everything there is to see. Yeah, it's a profound
feeling. It really is. But what if I told you
that everything you are looking at, every star,
every glowing cloud of gas, every planet, is
basically just a rounding error? Wow, a rounding
error. Yeah, like what if 90 % of the universe
is actually completely invisible to you? It's
a profoundly humbling thought. I mean, we are
so visually oriented as a species that we naturally
assume what we can see is... Well, all that exists.
Right. The cosmos, however, doesn't really care
about our assumptions. It definitely doesn't.
So today we are going on a deep dive into the
notes, research, and primarily this really comprehensive
Wikipedia article detailing the life of a woman
who completely shattered those assumptions. The
American astronomer Vera Rubin. Exactly, Vera
Rubin. And our mission today isn't just to talk
about how she, you know, provided the very first
persuasive evidence for dark matter. Though that
is huge. Huge. But we are also going to look
at how she spent her entire life battling and
frankly defeating systemic barriers in the scientific
community. And she did it all with an incredible
amount of grace, relentless curiosity, and just
an absolute refusal to accept the word no. Yeah.
Her story is, I mean, it's a masterclass in why
we have to question the things everyone else
just takes for granted. Okay, let's unpack this,
because her story starts in a way that is just,
it's so incredibly relatable. It really is. It's
Washington, D .C., around 1938. She's 10 years
old, and she's just staring out her bedroom window
at the stars. Like so many kids do. Right. And
she and her dad, his name was Pete Cooper, they
actually built a crude cardboard telescope together
so she could track meteors. That is such a beautiful,
vivid image to start a career. Like just a kid
with a cardboard tube. And there's a quote from
her about that specific time in her childhood
that I think really gets to the core of her personality.
Oh, yeah, the one about the questions. Exactly.
She said, quote, even then I was more interested
in the question than in the answer. I decided
at an early age that we inhabit a very curious
world. I love that. That right there is the pure
essence of a scientific mind. It's not just about,
you know, memorizing facts from a textbook. Right.
It's about being fundamentally comfortable with
the unknown. Exactly. The problem was that the
world she inhabited wasn't quite ready for her
question. No, it really wasn't. She goes to high
school and she has the science teacher who literally
advises her to avoid a career in science and
become an artist instead. Which is just, and
unfortunately, that was just the first of many
institutional roadblocks she would run into.
Yeah. I mean, when she tried to enroll in the
graduate astronomy program at Princeton, she
was completely barred. Just flat out barred.
Completely. Yeah. And not because of her grades.
or because of her aptitude, solely because of
her gender. Which is crazy. And incredibly, Princeton
maintained that policy of excluding women from
their graduate astronomy department until 1975.
1975, that is wild to think about. I mean people
were wearing bell bottoms and they still wouldn't
let women study astronomy. It's absurd. But she
clearly didn't let it stop her. In 1948, she
became the only astronomy graduate from Vassar
College. Which was an all -women's school at
the time. Great, with a really strong history
of astronomy, actually. Then she goes on to Cornell
for her master's, where she actually worked with
heavyweights like Richard Feynman. Talk about
a scientific titan. Seriously. And eventually
she goes to Georgetown for her PhD. But I was
reading through the notes about her early career
and I have to admit the media coverage of her
work Completely threw me off. Oh, I know exactly
what you're gonna say. I was physically frustrated
reading it Yeah, the 1950 presentation at the
American Astronautical Society meeting is a perfect
example of what she was up against. It's infuriating
So she's at Cornell and she compiles this data
showing early observations of deviations from
the Hubble flow, right? Which, just to make sure
we're all on the same page, the Hubble flow was
basically the prevailing idea at the time that
everything in the universe is just smoothly expanding
outward together. Sort of like dots drawn on
a balloon being inflated. Perfect analogy, yeah.
So she proposes that galaxies actually have an
orbital motion. It's highly controversial. Her
advisors are hesitant, but she gets permission
to present it. Right. Now, keep in mind, she
is not even a member of the society, and she
had just given birth to her first child three
weeks ago. Three weeks. Three weeks. And how
does the Washington Post cover this highly technical,
groundbreaking presentation? Oh, it's so bad.
They run a front page headline that reads, Young
Mother has Own Theory of Universe. They completely
sidestep the physics. They reduced a brilliant
scientific mind to a novelty act. Young Mother.
as if she just like cooked up a theory of the
cosmos between warming bottles. What's fascinating
here is why the scientific community also reacted
so negatively to that early work. Okay, why?
Well, it wasn't just the rampant sexism of the
era, though that was obviously a massive suffocating
factor. Sure. It was that her data fundamentally
challenged the prevailing scientific belief of
the time. In 1950, the establishment preferred
the idea of a neatly ordered, predictable universe.
The balloon expanding evenly. Exactly. The Hubble
flow model was clean. Rubin comes along and says,
actually, no, things are moving in a much messier,
more complex way. And people don't like having
their neat models disrupted. They hate it. And
her paper wasn't even published. But it seems
like she learned a really critical lesson from
that rejection. Which was? Well, if you are going
to propose a controversial theory that disrupts
the neat models, You can't just have a good argument.
No, you need proof. You need undeniable bulletproof
data. And to get data that no one else has, you
need to be able to see things that no one else
can see. Right. And to do that, she needed a
revolutionary piece of technology. Which brings
us to 1965. Yes. By 1965, she was at the Carnegie
Institution of Washington, and she teamed up
with an instrument maker named Kent Ford. Kent
Ford. Yeah, and Ford had developed a device called
an image tube spectrograph. Now from what I understand,
this was essentially a highly advanced image
intensifier, almost like night vision for a telescope.
That's a great way to think about it. But before
we get into what she found, how does looking
at a smear of light through a spectrograph actually
tell an astronomer how fast a star is moving?
I think we need to explain that. Okay, it comes
down to the Doppler effect. Yeah. Specifically
redshift and blueshift. Okay. Think about how
a police siren sounds when it drives past you.
Oh, like the wee -wee -wee -wee sound changing
pitch? Exactly. As it moves towards you, the
sound waves get compressed, so the pitch sounds
higher. Right. As it drives away, the sound waves
stretch out and the pitch drops. Well, light
does the exact same thing. Wait, really? Light
waves compress? Yes. If a star is moving toward
us, its light waves compress and look slightly
more blue. If it's moving away from us, the light
waves stretch out and look slightly more red.
OK. So by measuring exactly how red or blue the
light from a specific star is, she could calculate
its exact speed and direction. That's the mechanism.
And Ford's new spectrograph was incredibly sensitive.
Which changed the game. Totally. Before this
instrument, Astronomers were mostly limited to
studying the bright, obvious centers of galaxies.
They simply couldn't get clear readings on the
faint, dusty outer edges. Because the light was
just too weak. Exactly. It's like, imagine trying
to understand the full population of a country,
but your map only shows the brightly lit downtown
of the capital city. You're missing everyone
in the suburbs and the countryside. Right. Kent
Ford's instrument basically turned on the streetlights
for the rest of the continent. So she points
this new instrument at the Andromeda galaxy,
which is relatively close and bright, and she
starts measuring the speeds of the material on
the absolute outermost edges. The suburbs? The
suburbs of Andromeda. And she makes a discovery
that completely breaks the rules of physics as
they understood them. Yeah, she discovers what
are called flat rotation curves. OK, flat rotation
curve. To understand why this was so earth shattering,
we have to think about the basic rules of orbital
mechanics. Take our own solar system. Okay. The
planets closest to the Sun, like Mercury, move
incredibly fast because the Sun's gravitational
pull is strongest there. Makes sense. The planets
further out, like Neptune, move much, much slower.
Basically, the further away from the center of
mass you are, the slower you should be moving.
But that is not what Rubin found in Andromedo.
No, it isn't. She found that the stars on the
outermost edges of the galaxy were moving just
as fast as the stars close to the center. Exactly.
The rotation curve wasn't dropping off. It was
completely flat. Which presents a massive physical
impossibility based on the visible matter in
that galaxy. Massive. OK. To make this intuitive
for you listening, I like to think of it as a
playground merry -go -round. Oh, I like this
analogy. Right. So if you get a bunch of kids
on a merry -go -round and you spin it incredibly
fast, what happens? Chaos. Total chaos. The kids
on the very outer edge are going to fly off into
the sandbox unless they are holding on for dear
life. Right, they need a strong physical force
to hold them in place. Exactly. And for galaxies,
that holding force is gravity. The gravity generated
by all the mass, the stars, the gas, the dust,
is what keeps those fast -moving outer stars
from just flying apart into deep space. That
analogy perfectly highlights the problem Ruben
uncovered. Because there wasn't enough stuff
to hold them, right? Exactly. When she calculated
the amount of visible stuff in the Andromeda
galaxy, there simply wasn't enough mass to generate
the gravity needed to hold those fast -moving
outer stars in place. Not even close. Her calculations
showed that galaxies must contain five to ten
times more mass than we can actually observe
through light. Five to ten times more. But wait,
I have to play devil's advocate here. Go for
it. So instead of assuming her math was wrong
or her telescope is broken, or maybe our fundamental
understanding of how gravity works was just slightly
off, the scientific community eventually just
accepts that 90 % of the universe is made of
invisible ghost matter. It does sound crazy when
you put it like that. It seems like a massive
leap to make, just to make the math work. It
absolutely was a massive leap and the scientific
community fought it tooth and nail. Right. Ruben's
data was utterly bulletproof. She didn't just
have one data point. No, she didn't just look
at one galaxy. She looked at dozens of them.
And she kept getting the exact same flat rotation
curves over and over again. Wow. She eliminated
every other possibility. If her math was right,
and our understanding of gravity held true, which
all other observable physics suggested it did,
then the only logical conclusion left was that
the galaxy was filled with something massive
that did not interact with light. And this invisible
mass became the first truly persuasive evidence
supporting the theory of dark matter. Yes. And
just to clarify, dark matter wasn't a brand new
concept she invented out of thin air, right?
Right. Because the sources mention a physicist
named Fritz Zwicky had proposed it back in the
1930s. Right. Zwicky had coined the term decades
earlier based on how whole clusters of galaxies
were moving. But his ideas were largely ignored
or considered too fringe, partly because the
data back then just wasn't precise enough. So
it was just a hypothesis, basically? Pretty much.
It was Rubin's meticulous, undeniable data on
individual galaxy rotation, using that cutting
edge spectrograph that finally forced the scientific
establishment to accept that the universe is
dominated by something we literally cannot see.
She looked where no one else could, and she found
the missing 90 % of the universe. She really
did. And what's so fascinating is that she deliberately
chose to look there. In the 1960s, everyone in
astronomy was obsessed with quasars. Oh, quasars
were the hot new topic. They were, but she intentionally
avoided them. She wanted to stay away from the
crowded, like highly competitive, ego -driven
areas of astronomy and just quietly do her work
on the quiet outer reaches of galaxies. And by
trying to avoid controversy, she ended up triggering
one of the biggest revolutions in the history
of astrophysics. The irony is amazing. It is.
That willingness to explore the unglamorous,
ignored corners of the sky led to even more discoveries
that challenged the status quote. Right, like
counter rotation. Our sources note that she discovered
that in some galaxies there are stars and gas
that actually move in the exact opposite direction
to the rotation of the rest of the galaxy. Yeah.
Which, wait a minute, I have to pause here. If
a galaxy is essentially a giant spinning disk
of material, how on earth can part of it be spinning
backwards? It seems impossible. That completely
defies logic. Well if we connect this to the
bigger picture, It makes perfect sense, but it
required a total paradigm shift in how we viewed
the lifespan of a galaxy. OK, explain. Before
this, the prevailing theory was that galaxies
were basically born perfectly formed, spinning
in one direction, and they just stayed that way
in isolation. Just giant lonely pinwheels. Right.
But the discovery of counter rotation provided
the very first solid evidence for galaxy mergers.
Mergers, like galaxies actually crashing into
each other. Precisely. It proved that galaxies
are messy. violent entities. They grow over billions
of years by colliding and consuming other smaller
galaxies. Oh, wow. Yeah. So if a massive galaxy
absorbs a smaller galaxy that happens to be spinning
in the opposite direction, the core material
of that smaller galaxy will retain its momentum
and continue to counter rotate within the larger
one. So she essentially found the forensic evidence
of ancient galactic collisions. That's exactly
what it is. That is wild. And she didn't stop
there. She and Kent Ford also discovered something
called the Rubenford effect. Or large -scale
streaming. Right. The sources say they found
that entire groups of galaxies were moving in,
quote, bizarre anisotropic ways on a massive
scale, like 100 million light years across. Yeah,
a massive scale. What does anisotropic actually
mean in practice here? Anisotropic just means
they weren't moving uniformly in all directions.
Imagine watching a massive flock of birds scattered
across the sky and suddenly a huge chunk of them
all dart to the left instead of flying randomly.
Oh, I see. If entire clusters of galaxies are
moving together in one specific direction rather
than just expanding outward evenly, it means
there is some unimaginably massive gravitational
force out there in the dark pulling them. Which
completely broke the idea of a perfectly uniform,
smooth universe. Shattered it. It seems like
she had a habit of being right when the entire
establishment said she was wrong. She made a
career out of it. But the resistance she faced
wasn't just in the pages of scientific journals
or debates over data. The barriers were literal
and physical. Very physical. We talked about
Princeton barring her from enrollment earlier.
But the story of the Palomar Observatory in 1965
is just iconic. Palomar was the premier observatory
in the world at the time. the absolute peak of
astronomical research. So she applies to be the
first female astronomer permitted to observe
there. Yeah. And she is reluctantly granted access.
Reluctantly being the key word. Right. But the
director pulls her aside and says, look, your
time on the telescope is going to be extremely
limited because we don't have a women's bathroom
in the building. Which? Thesaurus' note was a
remarkably common ruse back then to keep women
out of professional spaces. A completely fabricated
excuse. So what does she do? She cuts a skirt
out of a piece of paper, walks over to the men's
room door, tapes it over the stick figure of
the man, turns around and says, now you have
a ladies' room. I love that so much. And then
she just goes straight to work. It is a brilliantly
pragmatic solution. to an absurd manufactured
problem. Definitely. And sadly, it wasn't an
isolated incident. Throughout her career, she
faced this constant drumbeat of sexism. Yeah.
When she was at Georgetown, which is a Catholic
university, she wasn't even allowed to meet her
own advisor in his office because women weren't
permitted in that specific part of the building.
It's infuriating to even picture that. Like,
you can unravel the mysteries of the universe,
but you can't walk down this hallway. Literally,
yes. But she managed to navigate all of it, and
she did it while raising a large family. She
had four kids. Four kids. There's a detail from
a 1963 report on Vassar alumni that noted she
fulfilled the quote, utopian aim of being a full
-time professional without handing her children
over to someone else. Yeah, she did a ton of
her analytical work from home while raising her
kids. And get this, all four of her children
grew up to earn PhDs in the natural sciences
or mathematics, every single one of them. That
speeds volumes about the environment she created
in her home. Her children later recalled that
she made a life of science appear desirable and
genuinely fun. Which is how it should be. She
didn't just break barriers. She modeled a way
of living that integrated her deep passion for
the universe with her love for her family. Here's
where it gets really interesting to me. It's
a profound irony. Let's hear it. Here's a woman
who spends her nights mapping the invisible hidden
mass of the universe. And by day, she is simultaneously
working tirelessly to make the hidden demographic
of female scientists visible to the world. Oh,
that is a great way to put it. She was an absolute
force for women in astronomy. Absolutely. In
1981, she was elected to the National Academy
of Sciences, but she was only the second woman
astronomer ever elected. The first being her
colleague, Margaret Burbitch. And despite earning
that incredible honor, she said the consistently
low number of women elected each year was the
saddest part of her life. That really stuck with
me. Yeah, she didn't just pull the ladder up
behind her once she made it. She advocated constantly
for more women to be placed on review panels
and academic search committees. She knew from
firsthand experience how much brilliant talent
was being actively squandered simply because
it didn't look like the traditional male -dominated
establishment. Which brings us to a topic that
we really can't avoid when talking about Vera
Rubin, especially since her death in 2016 at
the age of 88. Right. And that is the Nobel Prize.
The big one. Now, we are going to look at this
impartially based strictly on what the sources
say, because there is a massive debate here.
There really is. In the decades since she passed,
many have argued passionately that she was blatantly
snubbed for the Nobel Prize in physics. Some
argue this was primarily due to her gender. Which,
given her history, is a valid suspicion. Exactly.
Other prominent physicists have argued it was
simply an egregious oversight or a glaring omission
by the committee, perhaps because they were debating
exactly which specific scientific principle to
award, since dark matter itself remained mysterious.
It's still a theoretical particle, essentially.
Right. But regardless of the underlying reason,
the debate itself has become a huge part of her
modern legacy. The Nobel conversation is loud,
but if you look at the posthumous honors she
actually has received, you could argue they are
much more fitting for someone whose eyes were
always on the stars. Oh, definitely. The biggest
one, literally, is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory
in Chile, which is set to be fully operational
in 2025. That is massive. It is. This isn't just
a commemorative plaque. It is a massive, cutting
-edge observatory specifically dedicated to the
ongoing study of dark matter and dark energy.
Not to mention, she is being honored on a 2025
U .S. quarter. Oh, right. NVIDIA just named their
next generation GPU architecture Rubin after
her. I saw that. She has an asteroid named after
her and even a ridge on Mars. Honestly, she is
everywhere now. Through all of this, I think
it's vital to understand her personal philosophy.
Tell me more. Well, the sources mentioned she
was Jewish and she saw absolutely no conflict
between science and religion. Oh, that's interesting.
She viewed religion as a moral code and a history
and science as the tool to understand our role
in the physical universe. She wasn't doing any
of this for the accolades or the fame. So what
does this all mean? I think the best way to summarize
her perspective is with her own words. She once
said, quote, don't worry about prizes and fame.
The real prize is finding something new out there.
Yeah, that gets right to the heart of her core
belief. Knowledge is most valuable when it is
understood and applied. Her legacy isn't just
the discovery of dark matter evidence as monumental
as that is for physics. Her legacy is also every
single young girl who looks through a telescope
today. Because Vera Rubin was the one who wedged
the observatory door open for them and absolutely
refused to let it close. From a crude cardboard
telescope looking out a bedroom window in DC
to a massive state -of -the -art observatory
on a mountain in Chile bearing her name, what
an absolute titan of science. Truly. Well, thank
you for coming on this deep dive with us today
to explore the life of Vera Rubin. We hope you
enjoyed exploring the visible and invisible universe
with us. Before we go, I want to leave you with
one final detail from the sources that we haven't
touched on yet because it really emphasizes just
how far ahead of her time she was. Back in 1954
when she was finishing her PhD dissertation under
George Gamow, her final conclusion was that galaxies
in the universe come together rather than being
randomly distributed across space. Wait, like
galaxy clusters? It's exactly like galaxy clusters.
But in 1954, that idea was considered so controversial
and so far outside the accepted smooth universe
models that it was completely ignored by the
scientific community. You're kidding. No, it
sat in an archive for two full decades before
the rest of the world finally caught up, gathered
enough data, and accepted it as undeniable truth.
Two decades. So the next time you look up at
that dark night sky, I want you to ponder this.
How many world -changing ideas are sitting ignored
in an archive somewhere right now simply because
the timing was slightly wrong? or because the
person who discovered it didn't fit the establishment's
mold. Wow. The invisible universe isn't just
out there in the dark matter. Sometimes it is
hidden right here on Earth, just waiting for
us to finally open our eyes.