Q&A: Virginia Trimble on 50-plus years in astronomy

Virginia Trimble stumbled into astronomy. Archaeology, her field of choice, wasn’t offered to undergraduates at UCLA. She had to declare a major, she says, and “my father informed me that I’d always been interested in astronomy.”

Trimble earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and physics in 1964 and then a PhD in 1968 at Caltech, where she was among the first female students. She recalls being only the second woman who was assigned observing time at Palomar Observatory, in 1965. “At the time a woman couldn’t legally lift up the 48-inch Schmidt plate holder because it weighed more than 40 pounds. But we bent that rule a little,” she says. “The barriers fell as I approached them, so I never found disadvantages to being a woman in science. And there were a lot of advantages.”

While pursuing her undergraduate degree, Trimble was featured in Life magazine, in a 1962 piece titled “Behind a Lovely Face, a 180 I.Q.” Life was doing an issue on California, “and somebody from the magazine went to UCLA’s student honors program and asked for a coed who was photogenic and doing some serious subject,” she says. “They thought of me.” While growing up in Los Angeles, she had also done voice-overs and appeared in advertisements and movie crowd scenes.

Trimble’s research has been wide-ranging. Two things may surprise people, she says: “My publication list now exceeds 850, and they are mostly sole-author.” For much of her career she split her time between the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Maryland, where her physicist husband, gravitational-wave experimentalist Joseph Weber, was on the faculty.

PT: Why did you go to Caltech for your PhD?

TRIMBLE: I didn’t know they didn’t take women, and the undergraduate adviser for astronomy majors at UCLA told me I should apply. In the 1960s a handful of women were accepted under “exceptional circumstances,” which tended to mean package deals with their husbands, or students who came with new faculty from other institutions. I was the first woman admitted in astronomy on my own. My exceptional circumstance was that I had a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, which didn’t let me stay where I’d been an undergraduate. Apart from UCLA, Caltech was the only place that had an astronomy graduate program within driving distance from my parents’ house.

PT: How did you like Caltech?

TRIMBLE: I thoroughly enjoyed it. When I started graduate school in the fall of 1964, I was not quite 21. My first semester, I couldn’t join the student gatherings for pizza and beer.

The work didn’t come easily. I flunked the qualifying exam the first time. I’d expected it to cover the material we’d had in course work, but it didn’t. The guys had kept track of qualifying questions in a little notebook they shared. But I fell outside the social system because I was a girl.

PT: Still, you say there were advantages to being a woman in astronomy. Can you give some examples?

TRIMBLE: I could get to know anyone I wanted. I’m probably the only living physicist to have danced a Viennese waltz with Eugene Wigner. At conferences, some guy was always willing to feed me or buy me a drink, so I didn’t have to budget for food. That doesn’t happen anymore—the girls have to pay for their own meals at meetings.

And I posed for Richard Feynman when he was learning to draw. I got $5.50 for two hours each Tuesday night, plus all the physics I could wish for.

PT: What was your next career move?

TRIMBLE: Let me tell you something important. When I got my degree, there was no such thing as the American Astronomical Society job register. You had no way of knowing what jobs were available. You were told by your department what things you would be considered for. It was an old boys’ network. The job register is better for everyone. There is no doubt about that—and it made a real difference for women and minorities.

The positions the Caltech faculty were willing to recommend me for were either one-year faculty replacements or computer jobs. They still didn’t think I was in for the long haul, just as in those days first-year female grad students weren’t considered for NSF fellowships.

I spent one year at Smith College as a replacement for the woman they really wanted, and then went to England on a NATO fellowship.

PT: How did you meet Joseph Weber?

TRIMBLE: At a symposium in Texas in 1970, I had asked Joe a question. He snubbed me just royally. I thought, “Aha! Somebody who snubs an attractive woman who asks him a serious question would be good husband material.” He was already married.

Not long after that, his wife died. He was coming out to California to give a lecture, and he wrote and asked if he could take me to dinner. [The astronomer] Vera Rubin had described me to him: “She goes to lots of meetings and always looks elegant.” In fact, I picked him up at the airport, and by the end of the weekend he had asked me to marry him.

For 28 years, Joe and I spent January to June at Irvine and July through December at the University of Maryland. We were appointed as visitors at each other’s institutions every year. His tenure was always in Maryland, and mine was always in California. It was a good choice for the two-career problem.

PT: What have been your most significant scientific contributions?

TRIMBLE: Because I have never focused on one topic for any length of time, I haven’t deeply affected any part of astronomy. But my most cited papers are reviews of the origins and abundance of chemical elements and of dark matter. My research contributions have included measuring the gravitational redshift of white dwarfs; determining the distance to and energetics of the Crab Nebula supernova remnant; calculating the evolution of massive, low-metallicity stars; and attempting to calculate the statistics of binary-star orbit properties. My colleagues probably know me best for 16 years of annual summaries in astrophysics, which attempted to corral everything important done each year. And much of what I have done since 1985 involves history and scientometrics.

PT: It sounds like you have broad interests.

TRIMBLE: Yes. And I never competed for funding. I’ve never had a graduate student or postdoc of my own. People who do acquire postdocs and graduate students have to focus. But if you are an independent scholar with a job, you can work on whatever you think is interesting that week.

PT: Was your department fine with that?

TRIMBLE: Well, once you have tenure they can’t fire you. But they are not overly pleased with it. I moved up the hierarchy at Irvine very slowly compared with other faculty.

PT: What drew you to scientometrics, and what have you done with it?

TRIMBLE: I wanted to know which telescopes are most productive and why. If you are going to be on committees that decide what gets built, you need to know what has worked in the past.

The first time I did it, the largest telescopes were 4 meters. It turned out that the telescopes that produced the most papers and the most citations were not quite the obvious ones. I came to the conclusion—and I’ve done the same thing more recently with bigger telescopes and radio and space facilities and it’s still true—that the single most important thing is the community of users. If it’s too big, nobody ever finishes an important project, and if it’s too small, observers pile up the equivalent of pieces of glass in their desk drawers. Now that most observing is remote, the situation has changed, but it’s still the case that there is something about the right-size community of users.

PT: You have made donations in your late husband’s name and in your father’s name. What motivated you to make those contributions?

TRIMBLE: My first significant donation was made in anger, and maybe all of them since then have been too. I told Spencer Weart [then director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics] that I would bet them the cost of their next oral history if they had gotten [any audio recordings of] Weber. Joe had just died in 2000, and he was without doubt the pioneer of gravitational radiation detection. So Spencer dug up about five minutes with him, about his groundbreaking work on masers and lasers. Nothing about his work on gravitational radiation. I got out my checkbook, wrote a check for $10 000, and gave it to Spencer.

I also gave the American Astronomical Society money to fund the Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation. The rules are that it goes to one person. It has to be someone who has developed something and made it work and it can’t be a computer program.

Then, when I sold my parents’ house, I phoned a couple of places and asked about naming opportunities for around $100 000. The Center for History of Physics said they would endow a lecture series. I’ve also looked for naming opportunities at other times for less money, and gotten library carrels or shelves at the Niels Bohr Library named for distinguished senior friends.

PT: How has your nearsightedness and inability to recognize faces—prosopagnosia—affected your career?

TRIMBLE: When I was a kid, my Uncle Roy was an avid amateur astronomer. I was supposed to look through his telescope and admire things, but all I saw was a blur. But by the time I was doing astronomy, telescopes could be focused even for my extremely nearsighted eyes. And the part of the brain most folks use to recognize family and friends, I have had available to remember spectra of white dwarfs, details of the Crab Nebula, and so forth.

But my poor eyesight undoubtedly played a role in my social development. I never learned what it is about one person’s face that is different from another’s. Not recognizing people has been a social problem all my life. I don’t recognize half my colleagues. It’s sometimes socially embarrassing, so I smile a lot at meetings. Over the years I’ve developed ways of dealing with this. Next to someone in the registration line, you say, “What are you working on now?” And usually what they are working on plus the voice is enough for me to identify them.

PT: What would you say to people just entering your field now?

TRIMBLE: In astronomy and most of physics now, people work in much larger teams than they did 50 years ago. The world of science now needs a different set of skills. It needs people who can work on teams and be both leaders and followers. It needs people who are prepared to focus for at least a few years on a specific topic, because it takes that long to bring things to fruition. You have to be either a real polymath or, more likely, part of a team that collectively is a polymath. It needs a different mental attitude. Sharing information is collaboration now; it’s not cheating or plagiarism.