My Mother, the Scientist

One day in 1964 she found herself preparing to hurl the dish drain through the kitchen window and decided to get professional help. "I was incredibly lucky," she remembers, "to find a shrink who was enlightened enough to urge me to try to get a job. I didn't think anyone would hire me, but I did what he told me to do." She applied to Lamont-Doherty Observatory and, to her astonishment, received three offers. She chose to work part-time, studying the relationship between the solar wind and the magnetosphere. Soon she would be among the first to announce that the magnetosphere-the part of space in which Earth's magnetic field dominates and the solar wind doesn't enter-was open-ended, with a tail on one side, rather than having a closed-teardrop shape, as had been widely believed. She was off and running.

My mother introduced me to physics when I was about 14. I was crazy about bluegrass music, and learned that Ralph Stanley was coming to town with his Clinch Mountain Boys. Although Mom did not share my taste for hillbilly music, she agreed to take me. The highlight turned out to be fiddler Curly Ray Cline's version of "Orange Blossom Special," a barn burner in which the fiddle imitates the sound of an approaching and departing train. My mother stood and danced a buck-and-wing and when, to my great relief, she sat down, she said, "Great tune, huh? It's based on the Doppler effect." This is not the sort of thing one expects to hear in reference to Curly Ray Cline's repertoire. Later, over onion rings at the Rockybilt Cafe, she explained: "When the train is coming, its sound is shifting to higher frequencies. And when the train is leaving, its sound is shifting to lower frequencies. That's called the Doppler shift. You can see the same thing when you look at a star: if the light source is moving toward you, it shifts toward blue; if it's moving away, it shifts toward red. Most stars shift toward red because the universe is expanding."

I cannot pretend that, as a boy, I liked everything about having a scientist for a mother. When I saw the likes of Mrs. Brady on TV, I sometimes wished I had what I thought of as a mom with an apron. And then, abruptly, I got one.

It was 1971 and my mother was working for NASA at Ames Research Center in California. She had just made an important discovery concerning the solar wind, which has two states, steady and transient. The latter consists of puffs of material, also known as coronal mass ejections, which, though long known about, were notoriously hard to find. My mother showed they could be recognized by the large amount of helium in the solar wind. Her career was flourishing. But the economy was in recession and NASA's budget was slashed. My mother was a housewife again. For months, as she looked for work, the severe depression that had haunted her years before began to return.