Bertrand Russell on power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge, a poetic tribute to Jane Goodall, stitching a supernova in needlepoint, and more

Bertrand Russell on power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge, a poetic tribute to Jane Goodall, stitching a supernova in needlepoint, and more. NOTE: This message might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](. If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( – it's free. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. 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[Bertolt: An Uncommonly Tender Illustrated Story of Love, Loss, and Savoring Solitude Without Suffering Loneliness]( long before researchers began to illuminate [the astonishing science of what trees feel and how they communicate]( the human imagination has communed with the arboreal world and found in it a boundless universe of kinship. A seventeenth-century gardener wrote of how trees [“speak to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons.”]( Hermann Hesse called them [“the most penetrating of preachers.”]( They continue to furnish [our lushest metaphors for life and death](. Crowning the canon of arboreal allegories is [Bertolt]( ([public library]( by French-Canadian geologist-turned-artist Jacques Goldstyn — the uncommonly tender story of an ancient tree named Bertolt and the boy who named and loved it. From Goldstyn’s simple words and the free, alive, infinitely expressive line of his illustrations radiates a profound parable of belonging, reconciling love and loss, and savoring solitude without suffering loneliness. The story, told in the little boy’s voice, begins with the seeming mundanity of a lost mitten, out of which springs everything that is strange and wonderful about the young protagonist. He heads to the Lost and Found and walks away with two gloriously mismatched mittens, which give him immense joy but spur the derision of the other boys. “Sometimes people don’t like what’s different,” he observes with the precocious sagacity of one who knows that other people’s judgements are about them and not about the judged, echoing Bob Dylan’s assertion that [“people have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.”]( But the little boy is unperturbed — a self-described “loner,” he seems rather centered in his difference and enjoys his solitude. Unlike the other townspeople, who are constantly doing things together, he is content in his own company — a perfect embodiment of the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky’s [advice to the young](. Most of all, the boy cherishes his time with Bertolt — the ancient oak he loves to climb. After seeing a smaller nearby tree cut down and counting its rings, he estimates that Bertolt is at least 500 years old, inching toward [the world’s oldest living trees](. From Bertolt’s branches, which he knows with the intimacy of an old friend, the boy observes the town’s secret life — the lawyer’s daughter kissing the motorcycle bad-boy, the Tucker twins stealing bottles from the grocer and selling them back to him, Cynthia the sheep feasting on a farmer’s corn. There above and away from the human world, he befriends the animals who have also made a home in Bertolt. He especially cherishes taking shelter in Bertolt during spring storms. He nestles into Bertolt’s branches, which “sway and creak like the masts of a big ship,” and marvels at how the wind presses flattens the reeds against the ground. In winter, as he rolls his solitary snowball up the hill, the boy dreams of spring and its promise of kissing Bertolt’s barren branches back to lush life. He relishes the first signs of the season and exults when the trees begin to bloom. And bloom they do — the lime, the elm, the cherry, the weeping willow. All except Bertolt. The boy waits for days, then weeks, his hope vanishing with the passage of time, until one day, with the same precocious sagacity, he accepts that Bertolt is dead. There is great subtlety in this confrontation with death — a death utterly sorrowful, for the boy is losing his best friend, and yet devoid of the drama of the human world, almost invisible. He observes that while it is unambiguous when a pet has died, a tree “stands there like a huge boney creature that’s sleeping or playing tricks on us.” If Bertolt had been struck by lightning or chopped off, the boy would have understood. But that a loss so profound can be so undramatic, so uneventful, seems barely comprehensible. It is this penetrating aspect of the book that places it among [the greatest children’s books about processing the subtleties of loss](. Since a burial is impossible, the boy, longing to commemorate Bertolt in some way, eventually dreams up a plan in that combinatorial way in which we fuse our existing experiences into new ideas. We see him running out of the Lost and Found with a box of colorful mismatched mittens, loading them onto his bike, and racing up the hill toward Bertolt. With steadfast determination, he climbs the giant trunk, the vibrant load strapped to his back, and begins methodically clipping the mittens to Bertolt’s barren branches with clothespins. In the final scene, amid the respectful silence of Goldstyn’s unworded illustrations, we see Bertolt half-abloom with mittens. Like Christmas ornaments, like Tibetan prayer flags, they stand as an imaginative replacement for the leaves and blossoms that Bertolt’s fatal final spring failed to bring — not artificial, but realer than anything, for they are made of love. The almost unbearably wonderful [Bertolt]( comes from Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse [Enchanted Lion Books]( publisher of such intelligent and imaginative gems as [Cry, Heart, But Never Break]( [The Lion and the Bird]( and [This Is a Poem That Heals Fish](. Complement it with the Japanese pop-up masterpiece [Little Tree]( — a very different yet kindred-spirited arboreal parable about the cycle of life. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Sarah Jones Performs an Astonishing Chorus-of-Humanity Tribute to Jane Goodall]( In 1957, young Jane Goodall landed in Africa and set out to [turn her childhood dream into a reality](. “I am living in the Africa I have always longed for, always felt stirring in my blood,” she [wrote to her mother]( when she finally arrived in Nairobi on her twenty-third birthday. In the groundbreaking work that ensued, Goodall overcame towering odds, facing dismissal and outright attack from the scientific establishment — she was ridiculed for insisting that chimpanzees have complex consciousness and [accused of being unscientific]( for giving the chimps she studied names. But [like Rachel Carson]( a generation before her, she persisted and, through her persistence, transformed our understanding of the natural world and our place in it — no scientist since Copernicus has done more to counter our anthropocentric delusions than Goodall. Her work paved the way for the paradigm-shifting [Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness]( which finally recognized — half a century after Goodall began her work in Tanzania — that non-human animals are also conscious beings. Goodall was one of the scientists honored at [The Universe in Verse]( which I hosted at Brooklyn’s nonprofit cultural center [Pioneer Works]( — the celebration of science through poetry that also gave us Neil Gaiman’s [feminist poem about the dawn of science]( and astrophysicist Janna Levin’s sublime performance of [Adrienne Rich’s tribute to women in astronomy](. Playwright and actor [Sarah Jones]( beloved for her one-woman shows exploring various dimensions of social justice and human dignity with tremendous subtlety and insight, performed an excerpt from Campbell McGrath’s poem “Jane Goodall (1961),” found in his Pulitzer-nominated masterpiece [XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century]( ([public library]( — a suite of gorgeous poems celebrating each year of the century through a particular person, event, or discovery that left an indelible mark on humanity. Special thanks to photographer [Allan Amato]( for the heroic feat of bringing Jones’s genius to life on camera on impossibly short notice and with immense generosity of spirit. Please enjoy: Our century, our life and times, will be remembered not for its artistic glory or triumphs of technology but for its incalculable losses, for rain-matted bodies at makeshift markets on the road to Kisangani, civets, dik-diks, monkeys, anteaters, elephants, apes, dead animals, vanished species, the earth’s ravishment by humankind, our kind, by you and by me. Even as we recoil at the thought of ancient savagery, cannibalism in some tribal past, medieval tortures, our great-great-grandparents’ embrace of slavery, so the future will hold us accountable for this holocaust against our brothers and sisters. What makes us human makes us fellow creatures, creeping things, fauna of a fragile terrestrial biosphere, neither more nor less. All lives are consequential, there is no hierarchy of consciousness or intellect. To feel the warm, oxygenated exhalation of the jungle is to know life as the planet intended it, morning fog above the forest is the earth’s imagination made literal, hovering and nourishing. Great trees are more humble and profound than we could ever be… […] Chimps are our veiled reflection in time’s mirror, rough drafts, pots drawn early from the kiln. In a universe of vast unlikeness, a universe of voids and atoms and protozoa, we are first cousins, next of kin. What makes us human makes us forked branches on evolution’s zygotic tree. Of course giving them names was wrong […] sentimental, anthropomorphic, unscientific, but isn’t that what we do, name the world, create order in our heart’s image? As surely they gave to me a name composed of odor, posture, uncouth movements, my skin of repetitive khaki cloth, my long pale hair, a name composed of habits, and habitation, She Who Lives in the Strange Hard Nest, She of the Bananas and Eggs, She Who Swims, She Who Watches from the Peak, who sees our life in the forest as it has been for millions of years, who bears witness to the abyss of its annihilation, she who comes to write our epitaph, or to save us. The full poem is found in the wholly fantastic [XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century]( which includes poetic homages to such cultural revolutionaries as Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Frida Kahlo, Simone de Beauvoir, Bob Dylan, Georgia O’Keefe, Nelson Mandela, and more. For more of Jones’s unparalleled genius, subscribe to her podcast, [Playdate with Sarah Jones]( in which Sarah and her characters probe the mysteries of art and life with some of the most interesting creative people of our time. For an intimate tour of the mind and spirit from which that genius springs, hear her [Design Matters conversation]( with Debbie Millman. Other highlights from The Universe in Verse can be found [here](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Bertrand Russell on Power-Knowledge vs. Love-Knowledge, the Two Faces of Science, and What Makes Life Satisfying]( “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life,” the Nobel-winning English polymath Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) [wrote in his memoir]( at the end of a long and intellectually invigorating life — a life the echoes of which reverberate through some of the most defining ideas of our time. But Russell first formulated this animating ethos in his 1931 treatise [The Scientific Outlook]( ([public library](. On the surface, this remarkably perceptive and prescient book can appear to be a critique of science, which may seem surprising coming from Russell — in addition to being one of the twentieth century’s most lucid and influential philosophers, he was also a mathematician and logician himself, whose incisive writings on [critical thinking and “the will to doubt”]( have rendered him an enduring patron saint of reason. But beneath such a surface impression is enormous depth of insight and a timeless, increasingly timely clarion call for nuance in distinguishing between the sort of knowledge driven by a greed for power and the higher-order wisdom that makes and keeps us human. In this light, although science is the book’s subject, its object is to examine the most elemental potentialities of the human spirit — our parallel capacities for good and evil — and to illuminate the means by which we can cultivate a nobler and more humane humanity. Bertrand Russell Writing in a golden age of science, just as quantum mechanics and relativity were beginning to reconfigure our understanding of reality, yet well before the invention of the atomic bomb shed light on the dark side of science as a tool of power, Russell issues a poignant and prescient admonition about the uses and misuses of science. Reflecting on how these illuminate the largest questions of what it means to be human, he writes: Science in the course of the few centuries of its history has undergone an internal development which appears to be not yet completed. One may sum up this development as the passage from contemplation to manipulation. The love of knowledge to which the growth of science is due is itself the product of a twofold impulse. We may seek knowledge of an object because we love the object or because we wish to have power over it. The former impulse leads to the kind of knowledge that is contemplative, the latter to the kind that is practical. […] But the desire for knowledge has another form, belonging to an entirely different set of emotions. The mystic, the lover, and the poet are also seekers after knowledge… In all forms of love we wish to have knowledge of what is loved, not for purposes of power but for the ecstasy of contemplation… Wherever there is ecstasy or joy or delight derived from an object there is the desire to know that object — to know it not in the manipulative fashion that consists of turning it into something else, but to know it in the fashion of the beatific vision, because in itself and for itself it sheds happiness upon the lover. This may indeed be made the touchstone of any love that is valuable. Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from [The Well of Being]( Nineteen years later, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Russell would list this love of power among [the four desires driving all human behavior](. But despite its hijacking for practical purposes of manipulation, he argues, science in its truest form originates in this wellspring of love for its object. (Many decades later, pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, who confirmed the existence of dark matter, would echo this notion in a somewhat surprising and rather lovely remark: [“I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly… I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.”]( And Frida Kahlo would shine a sidewise gleam on the same idea in her exquisite reflection on [how love amplifies beauty]( Nearly a century before astrophysicist Janna Levin depicted science as [“a truly human endeavor,”]( Russell writes: Science in its beginnings was due to men who were in love with the world. They perceived the beauty of the stars and the sea, of the winds and the mountains. Because they loved them their thoughts dwelt upon them, and they wished to understand them more intimately than a mere outward contemplation made possible. “The world,” said Heraclitus, “is an ever living fire, with measures kindling and measures going out.” Heraclitus and the other Ionian philosophers, from whom came the first impulse to scientific knowledge, felt the strange beauty of the world almost like a madness in the blood. They were men of Titanic passionate intellect, and from the intensity of their intellectual passion the whole movement of the modern world has sprung. But step by step, as science has developed, the impulse of love which gave it birth has been increasingly thwarted, while the impulse of power, which was at first a mere camp-follower, has gradually usurped command in virtue of its unforeseen success. The lover of nature has been baffled, the tyrant over nature has been rewarded. Russell cautions that this shift from what he calls “love-knowledge” to “power-knowledge” is the single greatest hazard in the future of science, which is implicitly inseparable from the future of humanity. To protect science from such a shift, he suggests, is not only our duty but our only means of protecting us from ourselves. Half a century before Hannah Arendt’s insistence that [asking unanswerable questions makes us human]( Russell writes: When science is considered contemplatively, not practically, we find that what we believe, we believe owing to animal faith, and it is only our disbeliefs that are due to science. When, on the other hand, science is considered as a technique for the transformation of ourselves and our environment, it is found to give us a power quite independent of its metaphysical validity. But we can only wield this power by ceasing to ask ourselves metaphysical questions about the nature of reality. Yet these questions are the evidence of a lover’s attitude toward the world. Thus it is only in so far as we renounce the world as its lovers that we can conquer it as its technicians. But this division in the soul is fatal to what is best in man. As soon as the failure of science considered as metaphysics is realized, the power conferred by science as a technique is only obtainable … by the renunciation of love. Yet Russell is careful to call for the necessary nuance to prevent his central point from being misunderstood or even turned on itself: It is not knowledge that is the source of these dangers. Knowledge is good and ignorance is evil: to this principle the lover of the world can admit no exception. Nor is it power in and for itself that is the source of danger. What is dangerous is power wielded for the sake of power, not power wielded for the sake of genuine good. Art by JooHee Yoon from [The Tiger Who Would Be King]( James Thurber’s 1927 parable of the destructiveness of power for power’s sake In another passage of astonishing political prescience, Russell writes on the cusp of the Nazis’ rise to power and speaks across the decades to our own time: The leaders of the modern world are drunk with power: the fact that they can do something that no one previously thought it possible to do is to them a sufficient reason for doing it. Power is not one of the ends of life, but merely a means to other ends, and until men remember the ends that power should subserve, science will not do what it might to minister to the good life. But what then are the ends of life, the reader will say. I do not think that one man has a right to legislate for another on this matter. For each individual the ends of life are those things which he deeply desires, and which if they existed would give him peace. Or, if it be thought that peace is too much to ask this side of the grave, let us say that the ends of life should give delight or joy or ecstasy. In a sentiment which Kurt Vonnegut would come to echo decades later in his [verse about the secret of happiness]( Russell adds: In the conscious desires of the man who seeks power for its own sake there is something dusty: when he has it he wants only more power, and does not find rest in contemplation of what he has. The lover, the poet and the mystic find a fuller satisfaction than the seeker after power can ever know, since they can rest in the object of their love, whereas the seeker after power must be perpetually engaged in some fresh manipulation if he is not to suffer from a sense of emptiness. I think therefore that the satisfactions of the lover, using the word in its broadest sense, exceed the satisfactions of the tyrant, and deserve a higher place among the ends of life. Art by Carson Ellis from [Du Iz Tak?]( Looking back on his own life as a lover of the world, Russell reflects on what it would take to harness the power of science for the true ends of the good life: When I come to die I shall not feel that I have lived in vain. I have seen the earth turn red at evening, the dew sparkling in the morning, and the snow shining under a frosty sun; I have smelt rain after drought, and have heard the stormy Atlantic beat upon the granite shores of Cornwall. Science may bestow these and other joys upon more people than could otherwise enjoy them. If so, its power will be wisely used. But when it takes out of life the moments to which life owes its value, science will not deserve admiration, however cleverly and however elaborately it may lead men among the road to despair. The sphere of values lies outside science, except in so far as science consists in the pursuit of knowledge. Science as the pursuit of power must not obtrude upon the sphere of values, and scientific technique, if it is to enrich human life, must not outweigh the ends which it should serve. In a passage of especial poignancy in today’s context of a power-greedy government antagonistic to science and reliant on the propaganda of “alternative facts,” Russell adds: The purpose of government is not merely to afford pleasure to those who govern, but to make life tolerable for those who are governed… It must become an essential part of man’s ethical outlook to realize that the will alone cannot make a good life. Knowing and feeling are equally essential ingredients both in the life of the individual and in that of the community. Knowledge, if it is wide and intimate, brings with it a realization of distant times and places, an awareness that the individual is not omnipotent or all-important… Seven decades before philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s timeless treatise on [the intelligence of the emotions]( Russell concludes: Even more important than knowledge is the life of the emotions. A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value. These things the scientific manipulator must remember, and if he does his manipulation may be wholly beneficial. All that is needed is that men should not be so intoxicated by new power as to forget the truths that were familiar to every previous generation. Not all wisdom is new, nor is all folly out of date. Nearly a century later, [The Scientific Outlook]( remains an immensely insightful read. Complement it with astrophysicist Janna Levin on [what motivates scientists]( and philosopher of science Loren Eiseley on [the relationship between nature and human nature]( then revisit Russell on [freedom of thought]( [what “the good life” really means]( [why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness]( [the nature of time]( and his [remarkable response to a fascist’s provocation](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Stitching a Supernova: A Needlepoint Celebration of Science by Pioneering Astronomer Cecilia Payne]( “The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer,” astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science, wrote in a beautiful 1878 diary meditation on [the needle as an instrument of the mind](. “I am an instrument in the shape of a woman,” the poet Adrienne Rich channeled Caroline Herschel a century later in her [sublime ode]( to the world’s first professional woman astronomer, who [spent her mornings in needlework](. But nowhere is this strangely fertile intersection of needlepoint and astronomy more striking than in a forgotten labor of love by the English-American astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900–December 7, 1979) — the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy at Radcliffe-Harvard and the first woman to chair a Harvard department. Cecilia Payne, Harvard College Observatory In her autobiography, [Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections]( ([public library]( Payne recounts that she first fell in love with astronomy as a small child, when she saw a meteorite blaze across the sky. Her mother, wheeling young Cecilia in the pram, explained what the celestial sighting was and made up a rhyme to help the little girl remember it: As we were walking home that night We saw a shining meteorite. The seed planted that night blossomed when Payne won a scholarship to Cambridge at the age of nineteen, plunging herself into the sciences. After attending a lecture by the great astronomer and mathematician Sir Arthur Eddington on his solar eclipse expedition confirming Einstein’s theory of relativity, she experienced “a complete transformation of [her] world picture,” as she recounted in her autobiography, and resolved to become an astronomer. But although Payne completed her studies at Cambridge, she was not awarded a degree — the university wouldn’t accredit women until 1948, nearly half a century after [Austrian universities began admitting women](. Disheartened by her prospects in England, Payne applied for a fellowship at the Harvard College Observatory — home to the [Harvard Computers]( the trailblazing women who made major astronomical discoveries decades before they could vote — and went on to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, now part of Harvard. In her 1925 doctoral thesis, Payne theorized that stars were made primarily of hydrogen, which rendered it by far the most abundant element in the universe — a landmark discovery illuminating the chemical composition of the cosmos. But when her dissertation was reviewed, a male astronomer persuaded her not to publish her conclusion because it challenged the era’s accepted theories. When that same astronomer changed his mind and came to the same conclusion himself four years later, he published it in a paper barely giving Payne credit for the discovery — a misattribution that persists to this day and is, of course, far from singular in the history of science: The same fate befell Beatrix Potter’s [revolutionary theory of lichen reproduction]( mathematician Sophie Germain’s [work on elasticity]( and, perhaps most notoriously, astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s [Nobel-costing discovery of pulsars](. Cecilia Payne by Rachel Ignotofsky from [Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World]( Still, Payne went on to become a tremendously influential astronomer, whose discoveries — particularly regarding the composition of stars and the structure of the Milky Way galaxy — have shaped our understanding of the universe, and whose prolific popular writing about astronomy has enchanted generations with the mysteries of the cosmos. In the final years of her life, exactly half a century after earning the world’s first Ph.D. in astronomy, Payne did something wonderfully unexpected: She crafted a stunning yarn-on-canvas needlepoint depiction of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, or Cas A, on the request of her friend John R. Whitman. He had been captivated by an X-ray image of the supernova taken by an MIT astronomer, another friend of Whitman’s, which appeared in a cover story on supernovae in the December 1975 issue of Scientific American. Cover image: X-ray map of the Cygnus Loop, the remnant of a supernova that exploded in the constellation Cygnus some 20,000 years ago. Whitman proceeded to print his needlepoint design on the largest civilian computer in New England, a machine used for guiding satellites and calculating massive sets of astronomical data. Enlisting the era’s cutting-edge technology in this intersection of art and science, he handed the needlepoint schematic to Payne, who gladly set to work. Whitman’s needlepoint instructions ([Harvard University Archives]( Cecilia Payne’s needlepoint schematic ([Harvard University Archives]( [Reporting on the project]( planetary scientist and historian of science Meg Rosenburg quotes Whitman: I met with Cecilia to inquire if she might have any interest in producing the first example of my design. She looked at me with her penetrating gray eyes, normally focused on stellar distances, and exclaimed that, yes, she would be delighted to create the Cas-A needlepoint. I was overjoyed. There is something immensely touching about Payen’s gesture and its fusion of the grandest and the most intimate scales of existence, the astronomical and the deeply human: Here is one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century embarking upon a meticulous craftsmanship project, using an ancient art form to celebrate science and delight a beloved local friend by immortalizing an astronomical event that had taken place hundreds of years earlier, thousands of lightyears away. Cecilia Payne’s embroidery of supernova remnant Cas A ([Harvard University Archives]( But perhaps Payne undertook the project in no small part because supernovae in particular had a special personal significance for her, as reflected in this poetic recollection from her memoir: The Bee Orchis was growing in the long grass of the orchard, an insect turned to a blossom nestled in a purple star. Instantly I knew it for what it was… I was dazzled by a flash of recognition. For the first time I knew the leaping of the heart, the sudden enlightenment, that were to become my passion. I think my life as a scientist began at that moment. I must have been about eight years old. More than 70 years have passed since then, and the long garnering and sifting has been spurred by the hope of such another revelation. I have not hoped in vain. These moments are rare, and they come without warning… They are the ineffable reward of him who scans the face of Nature. My first sight of the spectrum of Gamma Velorum, the realization that planetary nebulae are expanding and not rotating…. the bright-line nature of the supernova spectrum, these are some of the moments of ecstasy that I treasure in retrospect. Detail from Cecilia Payne’s embroidery of Cas A ([Harvard University Archives]( Cecilia Payne’s yarn ([Harvard University Archives]( With her penetrating gray eyes and her steadfast aged hands, Payne completed her needlepoint of the supernova in 1976, exactly forty years after the publication of her pioneering paper “On the Physical Condition of the Supernovae” (which was, incidentally, instrumental in dropping the hyphen from super-nova as it was originally spelled and advancing the modern spelling. In fact, Payne was something of a hyphen revolutionary — shortly before the publication of the paper, she had married the Russian astrophysicist Sergei I. Gaposchkin and changed her surname to Payne-Gaposchkin, becoming one of the first generation of professional women to hyphenate instead of adopting the husband’s surname.) Complement with artist Judy Chicago’s [iconic needlework celebration of women’s history in art and science]( then revisit Dava Sobel’s fascinating [chronicle of the Harvard Computers]( and artist Lia Halloran’s [cyanotype tribute to women in astronomy](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. [Donate]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Our mailing address is: Brain Pickings :: NO UNSOLICITED MAILINGS, PLEASE. 47 Bergen Street, 3rd floorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences](