Physics – Optics
Scientific paper
Dec 2003
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003baas...35.1463g&link_type=abstract
Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, v. 35, no. 5, p. 1463-1466
Physics
Optics
Scientific paper
On the 21 October 2002, with the death of Jesse Greenstein, many of us in astronomy lost a beloved adopted father and astronomy lost one of its most influential leaders of the postwar era. Truly a giant is gone; it is easy to say that they don't make the likes of Greenstein, Spitzer, and Scharwarzschild any more, but it is unfortunately only the truth. The field has changed and grown enormously in the more than 50 years spanned by Jesse's career with no small part of this traceable directly to his efforts.
His growth was shaped very much by world events. He enjoyed a quite comfortable childhood; he was born on 15 October 1909 to successful immigrant parents, Maurice and Leah, who indulged his early interests in astronomy, radio, and science in general; these interests were to remain with him the rest of his life. As a boy he thought physics dull and chemistry exciting, though later he was to be influential in the transformation of astronomy into astrophysics in this country. He was something of a prodigy, entering the Horace Mann School for boys (an excellent private high school) at age 11 and Harvard at age 16 (in 1926). He met and became close friends with Cecilia Payne, with whom he shared cultural and scientific passions. She was certainly the greatest female astronomer of the era but largely shunned and ignored by her colleagues. Thus began a curious ambivalence in his relationship with women in the field; in fact and in action he was highly supportive but much less so in word. He graduated with a BA in astronomy in October 1929, on the eve of the stock market crash. He stayed for one more year and obtained a Master's degree, prevented by ill health from a planned one-year visit to Oxford.
His family had always assumed that he would forego his interest in research and take his place in the family's successful business and real estate endeavors and the seriousness of the market collapse impelled him, very much against his will, to do just that. He proved himself to be a capable manager, able to deal with difficult times and circumstances, and the family business prospered. However, his itch to be an astronomer did not falter, and in 1934, when he was convinced that the family business would survive without him, he returned to Harvard - over the objection of director Harlow Shapely who tried to persuade him that the field had advanced too far in his four-year absence for him ever to catch up!
This same year he married his childhood sweetheart Naomi Kitay, whom he ever after affectionately called 'Kitty.' Naomi nourished the already-strong humanist streak in Jesse. Interested in, and passionate about, art and the theater, life in general, and whatever it was that absorbed her interest at the moment, she was a wonderful foil for Jesse's self-deprecatory and sometimes depressive moods. She died a few months before Jesse did; they had been married 66 years.
At Harvard he pursued a very successful and prescient thesis on the scattering of light by interstellar grains, begun perhaps partly in an endeavor to alleviate his failure during a Master's research project to recognize the existence of dust absorption and reddening in the face of quite convincing data. His last days at Harvard were premonitory of things to come in his career. He and Fred Whipple wrote a paper attempting, quite unsuccessfully, to explain Karl Jansky's detection of strong radio emission from the center of the Galaxy as thermal emission; this was long before the existence of magnetic fields and relativistic electrons were even suspected. The problem was to wait 15 years for a solution. But Jansky's, and later Grote Reber's, observations resonated with Jesse's early interest in radio and presaged his later decisive support for radio astronomy in the U.S.
In 1937 he was awarded a NRC fellowship, which he took to Yerkes Observatory. Attracted by the innovative and productive group assembled there by Otto Struve, he flourished. Still working on dust and the interstellar medium, he began a long and productive collaboration with theorist Louis Henyey. He also began his career in stellar spectroscopy at Struve's urging and did the first analysis of the peculiar hydrogen-poor object upsilon Sagittarii, thus beginning a love affair with peculiar stars and their compositions which was to last the rest of his career.
During the war he and Henyey, as well as a number of other astronomers, managed to stay at Yerkes, largely putting aside astronomical research to work on the war effort. He and Henyey learned optics in the face of great difficulty (modern optical design techniques at the time being almost exclusively both proprietary and German) and produced many optical designs for the military, among which is the beautiful wide-angle, Henyey-Greenstein camera.
After the war Jesse became very interested in, and supportive of, the vast changes to the field wrought by the technological developments during the war, including infrared detectors, photomultipliers, sensitive radio receivers, and rockets. Astronomy clearly stood on the threshold of a new and wonderful era, which he was determined to help usher in.
The astronomical community had already recognized Jesse's genius and in 1948 he received an invitation he could not possibly refuse. He was invited to come to Caltech to build a department to do science with the soon to be completed 200-inch Hale telescope, by far the largest and most ambitious telescope project to that date. The family (there were now two sons, George and Peter) moved from the little town of Williams Bay, Wisconsin to the bustle of postwar Pasadena, California. One may well ask whether anyone, given an opportunity of this magnitude, could have failed to be great but the answer, I am certain, is that it would have been very easy indeed. It took all of Jesse's hard-won ability as a manager, his wonderful personal touch, his ease with moneyed supporters, and above all his unimpeachable scientific and personal integrity to build what is universally recognized as one of the finest departments in the world. The arcane political arrangements with the Carnegie Institution, which ran Mount Wilson and would later run both Mount Wilson and Palomar jointly with Caltech, were hammered out with Jesse's guidance before he had a chance to build the department. In the beginning the only two astronomers at Caltech were Jesse and Fritz Zwicky; Zwicky was a genius but personally incredibly difficult and Jesse was very much alone in navigating the difficult political waters.
His view of the way to build the department, which time has certainly vindicated, was to hire the best international theorists he could find. He was convinced they were the smartest people being trained at that time and convinced as well that the lure of the great telescope would transform them into capable observers who would soon understand their data from an astrophysical perspective. This was wildly successful. He built a postdoctoral program around stellar abundance determinations, funded by the Air Force and aided by the many military contacts he had made during and after the war. He managed, in his tiny department, to lure the most able students in the field. The list of names among the early students and the ``graduates" of the abundance project is a who's who of astronomy: Allan Sandage, Helmut Abt, George Wallerstein, Halton Arp, Wallace Sargent, Leonard Searle, to name only a representative few.
His own research continued unabated; he returned to the subject of dust with Leverett Davis and, in 1951, they proposed the magnetic alignment mechanism to explain interstellar polarization that survives essentially unchanged to the present - certainly one of the longest-lived theoretical results in the field. At Caltech's Kellogg Radiation Laboratory, there was much interest in the nuclear reactions that provide stars their energy and potentially result in observable abundance changes. This work fit hand-in-glove with Jesse's interest in stars of peculiar abundance and he forged close scientific ties with the Kellogg team
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