The Stargazer

To her neighbors in La Jolla, Calif., British-born Margaret Burbidge is an attractive woman in her 40s with a quiet, self-effacing manner. To her fellow scientists, she is also one of the foremost astronomers in the world, the wife of Physicist Geoffrey Burbidge, and the explorer of stars, galaxies and quasars. Yet, for all her success, the female half of the scientific team of B^2 (B square)--as their colleagues call the Burbidges--has faced many of the difficulties usually experienced by women who dare to venture into the male-dominated world of science.

Daughter of a chemist, Mrs. Burbidge developed an early interest in the stars. At the University of London, her work with telescopes so impressed her professors that they appointed her acting director of the school observatory. There, she caught the eye of Geoffrey Burbidge, who was also studying at the university. They were married six months later.

In the early 1950s, the Burbidges decided to go to the U.S., where the skies were much better for stargazing than in cloudy Britain. He won a fellowship at Harvard, and she a grant to work at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis. The result: they had to postpone joint housekeeping in the U.S.

In 1955, Burbidge received a Carnegie fellowship in astronomy at Mount Wilson Observatory, but since these awards were not then available to women, Mrs. Burbidge had to take a job as a researcher at nearby Caltech. There was also a more serious problem. As a woman, Mrs. Burbidge found that she could get precious observing time at Mount Wilson Observatory only if her husband applied for it and she pretended to act as his assistant. Recalls Mrs. Burbidge: "It was my first exposure to the discouragement women scientists encounter in the U.S."

At first the Burbidges accepted this arrangement. Then one day Mrs. Burbidge was refused use of an observatory truck to haul her scientific gear up the mountain. That did it: the Burbidges formally protested the antiwoman rule--and won.

New Explanation. Mrs. Burbidge's persistence paid off scientifically, too. Out of her careful spectral observations of a varying abundance of certain elements in stars, the Burbidges and their collaborators, Nuclear Physicist William Fowler and Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, were able to develop what has become known as the "B^2 FH" theory (after the final initials of its four proponents). It provided a totally new explanation of how elements are formed in the fiery nuclear furnaces of stars.

In 1957, the Burbidges joined the University of Chicago. Because of old nepotism rules, the university could not officially employ two members of the same family. "The irony of such rules," says Mrs. Burbidge, who had to settle for an unsalaried appointment while her husband was named a fully paid associate professor, "is that they are always used against the wife."

At the University of California in San Diego, where the Burbidges have taught for the past decade, Mrs. Burbidge tries to give all the time and counsel she can to women students. "In view of their situation," she says, "they need every encouragement." Together with the late Nobel laureate in physics Maria Goeppert Mayer--who died last month--she has also been pressuring the university to hire more women. A few months ago, she unexpectedly rejected the distinguished Annie J. Cannon Prize, given by the American Astronomical Society for notable work by women in astronomy. "Because of the small number of women in the field," she told the society, it would "not be surprising if we all in our turn are selected for the prize."

To many women, the right to sit on a freezing mountain inside the observer's cage of a moving telescope, perhaps five or six stories above the ground, is at best an unenviable privilege. But Mrs. Burbidge continued observing well into her sixth month of pregnancy; her only child, Sarah, 15, perhaps prenatally influenced, insists that she will never follow her mother's example. Margaret Burbidge has forsworn traditional domesticity. Except on rare occasions, the Burbidges dine out. Asks jovial Geoffrey Burbidge: "What's wrong with restaurant food?"

Recently named the first woman director of Britain's famed Royal Greenwich Observatory, Mrs. Burbidge will now be spending many months in England. Yet the Burbidges are convinced that their careers and marriage can accommodate to the honor. As a start, Geoffrey Burbidge plans to spend a year's leave in Britain. "As always," says Mrs. Burbidge, "we will each concentrate on what we do best: Geoffrey will do the theorizing and I will do the observing." Then, after a brief pause, she adds with just a trace of wistfulness: "The only problem will be to find the time to get together to share ideas."

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