Maura Shapiro, 2021 AIP Center for History of Physics Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: University of Pittsburgh

I am a graduating senior at the University of Pittsburgh and will have degrees in both Physics and Communication & Rhetoric. I have loved astronomy for as long as I can remember and currently lead an undergraduate astronomy research group, STEPUP, confirming exoplanet transits for NASA’s TESS mission. In addition to physics, I love history, traveling, and being outside, hiking, biking, and practicing yoga. I am extremely excited to combine my interests in physics, history, and communication as this year’s Center for History of Physics and AIP Archives intern. Though I haven’t completely given up on my dream to be an astronaut, I want to leverage my communication and physics background to make science more accessible to the general public through outreach or policy.

Internship

Host: American Institute of Physics

Project

Abstract

For one hundred and fifty years, credit for discovering the heat absorption properties of carbon dioxide and water vapor was awarded to the famous Irish physicist, John Tyndall, and his 1859 experiment. It was not Tyndall, however, who concluded three years earlier, “an atmosphere of this gas [carbon dioxide] would give to our Earth a high temperature.” Born in 1819, Eunice Newton Foote was an amateur scientist, inventor, and suffragette. Interested in the climate of the geologic past, she recreated different atmospheric conditions in glass jars and measure temperature change when exposed to the sun’s light. Today, amidst record-breaking heatwaves, droughts, and floods, we experience her conclusion first hand, as climate change impacts our daily lives. Despite her pioneering contributions and prophetic conclusion, her work was ignored and her name forgotten. This talk will discuss her work, the factors that contributed to suppressing her discovery, and my experience researching her for teaching guides and a Physics Today Online article.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Week 1: Meet and Greet

Hi audience and welcome to my journal entry! Since you don’t know me yet, and since I was once a campus tour guide, allow me to introduce myself and then we’ll start with an ice breaker.

Please read the following in the peppiest, most rehearsed, yet slightly tired tone possible:

My name is Maura, like-Laura-with-an-M, and I’m originally from Arlington, VA, a city best known for its cemetery. I was a Physics and Communication & Rhetoric double major because I’m a nerd and love to talk about it. The University of Pittsburgh was founded in...

Now for our ice breaker: I think highs and lows of the week are appropriate. I’ll go first! Wow, this is really tough... my high would have to be meeting everyone (virtually) and my low is my apartment flooding. Audience, feel free to respond in the comments with your highs and lows!

The internship started Tuesday, after a much-needed long weekend from my summer break. It launched with an intern orientation complete with a show-and-tell ice breaker. Later, I met with the staff of the Center for History of Physics and Niels Bohr Library & Archives. Everyone was amazing to talk to, and despite the exhaustion of hours on Zoom, I had a really incredible day.

Wednesday, I was briefed on my role: to make teaching guides about women and underrepresented groups in physics and to do outreach for the guides and potentially the NBLA more broadly. I really couldn’t think of a better job for me, researching and communicating about the story of physics. As much as the equations and derivations are important to physics, so is the history of how people came to those equations. Physics doesn’t happen in a vacuum (despite what the Physics 1, air-resistance-free, projectile motion problems may have you believe) and understanding the context for each discovery may help not only entice more humanities-focussed audiences, but also instill the idea that science is not about a straightforward solution but a combination of successes and failures.

The idea that physics couples beautifully with humanities was reinforced Thursday, when the interns had a meet and greet with Dr. David Helfand who is committed to empowering non-scientists to understand scientific knowledge and thought processes. I really enjoyed the discussion we had about science communication, science misinformation, and academia more broadly.

By Friday, I was more settled in my role and had begun my research in earnest. I attended a meeting for a reading group on the history of physics that discussed science racism and eugenics. It made me more committed to the importance of understanding historical context for science as we addressed how widespread the ideas surrounding eugenics were, scientists’ critique of other scientists, and the social responsibility scientists, commentators, and historians have in discussing racism and classifying it.

In the age of addressing and renaming statues, streets, and buildings after problematic figures we discussed the scientific celebrity and the naming convention of equations after each figure. Robert Millikan was an unapologetically racist eugenicist. Because of this, CalTech is changing the names of buildings that honor him and other problematic scientists. Still, the Millikan oil drop experiment that measured the electric charge of an electron known by his name to every student who took an introductory electricity and magnetism course. The questions follow, should discoveries be tied to one person, especially a morally flawed one? Naming a discovery for one scientist ignores the potentially hundreds of years of foundation to the discovery and collaborations along the way. If we decide to detangle Millikan’s experiment from his name, do historians force the change by reclassification and relabelling?

This has been a busy but exciting week and I can’t wait for next week!

Week 2: Finding Foote the Woman who Discovered the Greenhouse Effect

This week flew by. Despite the stifling heat of my unairconditioned apartment and the jarring thunderstorms that punctuated almost every afternoon, I found myself absorbed in my research.

I selected my first teaching guide subject: Eunice Newton Foote, who, despite discovering the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide in 1856, was forgotten by science and history until 2011. In her paper, Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays, she wrote about carbon dioxide over a century before we started taking global warming seriously. She concluded “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” and she was right. Likely because she was a woman, at a time when many women were unable to own property, let alone vote, her work was not publicized or published in journals the way her male contemporaries were.

In addition to being a scientist and inventor, Foote was also a women’s rights activist. She attended the revolution-sparking Seneca Falls Convention, signed the Declaration of Sentiments, and was even on the editorial committee for publishing their notes.

I am so excited and honored to be able to tell her story. Until recently, there was very little information about her which makes my work more challenging, but perhaps all the more important. I can’t help but wonder if Eunice Foote would have been a household name if her research had been treated with the same respect as other, male scientists. It is a thrill to piece together someone’s life and work from assorted documents, finding surprising details or surprising sources. As someone who has occasionally (rarely) conducted an unofficial online investigation of an acquaintance, this is more rewarding. I get to uncover details about Foote’s life by sorting through scans of reprints of newspaper clippings that have been buried by Google’s algorithm. I couldn’t think of a more fun way to spend these hot summer days!

Eunice Foot’s signature is 5th on the Declaration of Sentiments, along with many leaders of the women’s rights movement. Her husband, Elisha Foote, also signed the document.

Week 3: It’s nice to see you in person...

This was a great week, so I’ll just skip to the highlight: I visited AIP in person! I am from the D.C. area and was already planning to make the trek back for Father’s Day weekend, when I decided to come down early and visit the offices Friday. For the first time in over a year, I dressed-up as an adult and attended a meeting in slacks instead of pajama-bottoms. I felt every bit a D.C. young adult, commuting while listening to NPR.

I had such a blast meeting two of my mentors in person. Corinne, my boss from NBLA gave me a tour of the building, making sure to point out all the locations where, “in normal times”, AIP would provide free food. I particularly loved the library with huge windows, and of course, a giant room full of physics and physics history-related books. She let me run wild in there, plucking books from the shelf like a kid in a candy store. I found early editions of my old physics textbooks and reading sections of the most intriguing books.

Corrine pulled some of the rare books for me to read, everything from old books teaching physics through fairy tales to published correspondence of Galileo preaching the importance of the freedom of science (written in Latin, so unreadable to me, but still impressive).

My teaching guide on Eunice Newton Foote, the woman who discovered the greenhouse effect in 1856 but did not receive credit for it until 2011, has now become three guides. What can I say? Between her discovery, the implications of her work, and her activism, she is simply too interesting to fit in just one lesson.

Lunch, like every other part of the day, was great. We ate with Brad and Kayla from SPS team as well as Dr. Jack Hehn, former AIP Director of Education and founder of the internship program. We had a great and lively conversation where I accidentally revealed one of my more embarrassing stories (getting asked to leave the high school band) and learned more about the programs and the people who work there.

It was great to get a taste of a semi-normal internship experience and I am so grateful for everyone who worked during the new federal Juneteeth holiday to make it possible.

Week 4: Making New Friends

This week, I remarked on how social the internship is. Despite being virtual, I feel that there is a community of interns and colleagues. The intern game-night Zooms have been surprisingly fun and though Zoom fatigue is real, I’ve always left our meetings excited for the next one! NBLA and CHP also have social Zoom events and it has been really nice to participate in those as well, getting to know the other people I would see if this was a “normal” year.

I’ve even been able to make a real, in-person friend because Madison Brewer, the Physics Today intern, also goes to the University of Pittsburgh and lives in the city! We started a weekly tradition to get coffee and do our work together (ok, it’s only been two weeks, but hopefully it will continue). It has been really great to get to know her through this internship and it has been nice to have a support system for getting through slow Mondays or afternoon Zoom meetings. Though we’ve had classes together at Pitt, we never really got to know each other, probably because most of those classes have been online. I’m grateful that I have the opportunity now to get to know her, and her roommates who are also physics majors.

Week 5: Laura Bassi

This past week was fun because I was able to dive in fully to my Laura Bassi guide. Laura Bassi was born in 1711, Bologna, Italy, and went on to have a successful career as a physicist. She was the second woman to receive a degree from a European university and the first to be appointed a professorship. At the time, Italy had embraced the notion of the “exceptional woman,” a woman who had outstanding intellect, a quality they perceived to be masculine. Because of this (and because Bologna was desperate to restore its reputation as a scientific destination), Bassi was embraced and celebrated for her exceptional qualities. Intellectuals traveled from all across Europe to study with her and learn from her in the emerging field of experimental physics.

I should note, celebrating a woman because she has qualities similar to a man is far from feminist, and there was still raging debate on whether women should receive education beyond home-related duties. Even Bassi struggled to combat limits placed on her because of gender. Her professorship was a largely honorific role that had her performing her brilliance to the public instead of teaching. Controversy and gossip surrounded her decision to marry because, at the time, learned women were supposed to remain pure and devoted to their studies. On the other hand, rumors spread about her attending all-male scientific gatherings as a single woman. She married another scientist and they often worked together on experiments. Through sheer will and perseverance, as well as the patronage of Bologna’s cardinal who later became Pope Benedict XIV, she was able to transform her role as she wanted. She started her own school and eventually was appointed the chair of the University of Bologna’s Experimental Physics Department.

I am excited about my teaching guide! Not only is Laura Bassi such an interesting person, but the guide itself I think will be fun. The premise is to turn an elementary school classroom into Laura Bassi’s school and perform simple physics experiments that would be similar topics to those explored by Bassi and her students. At the end, students will receive a diploma from her school!

Week 6

Thursday we had our virtual picnic. It began with an interesting talk by Rush Holt, former US representative and AAAS CEO. It was really interesting to hear his perspective as someone who has been part of science policy. He discussed how science policy is the way it is: after the scientific advancements of the second world war, the US, namely the science advisor to FDR, Vennevar Bush, believed science needed to stay funded and supported by the government. He made very poignant points about science literacy, how sometimes the science of elite scientists only matters if the public can understand it. He used COVID as an example, the incredible scientific advancement of the vaccines only matter if people are willing to take it. It is a sort of “if the tree falls in the forest argument” that science can only help people who believe science can help them. For the public to believe science can help them, they have to feel empowered by science, that they have the tools to understand it. This is the job of science communicators: to make science not only digestible, but to include the public in the scientific process. Not only is science held back when people are hesitant to approach problems empirically, but so are many other aspects of policy. After this, intensely philosophical talk and discussion, we played games. My mentor, Audrey, was kind enough to attend and it was fun to get to know her more outside work.

In other news this week, I concluded my Laura Bassi teaching guide: replicating her 18th century experimental physics classroom in elementary school classrooms, complete with a diploma! I have started reaching out to the researchers for my Physics Today article about Eunice Foote and it has been really cool to talk to the people whose work I spent so much time reading. I am super excited for this article, I hope you all read it!

Week 7: Outreach

This was probably my busiest week at work to date. I finished the teaching guides (basically, those things never really feel finished) and now am working on the “outreach” portion of my internship. Now that I’ve researched Eunice Foote and Laura Bassi to exhaustion, it’s time to share that knowledge with the world--and advertise the teaching guides in the process. For this, I’m writing an article for Physics Today Online, editing Wikipeadia pages, and writing a blog post for NBLA. Though on paper it does not seem like a huge project, everything I’m doing is new to me and just getting started is intimidating.

For writing the Physics Today article about Eunice Foote, I interviewed two of the researchers whose work I had been reading. Just talking to them, one was literally a knight, was intimidating although they were nothing but kind and helpful. Now, I want to make sure I do them and their work justice, as well as Eunice Foote. I now, unreasonably, consider Euncie to be a close, personal friend and understand why people get so invested in celebrities’ lives. Despite my nerves, I am really excited for this article. Many articles take an approach where the historians are the agents, uncovering materials about Foote, but I want Foote to be the agent of the story, she deserves it. Because little is really known about her perspective and her personal beliefs, I will instead supplement with the kind of world-building that science fiction novels do: what was 1850s science, who was important, how did people communicate, what was happening politically. Then it will be fun to introduce characters and science. Well, a very specific kind of fun.

The Wikipedia editing has been really rewarding. Though it is scary how easy it is to edit the Wikipedia pages, adding to public knowledge in this way feels really important. So far I’ve only made small changes, adding citations or linking Foote and Bassi’s pages to other pages. Still, it feels like I am taking part in righting the historical wrong of women not being included in the story of science. After my first day of edits, NPR ran a segment about Jess Wade, a physicist at the Imperical College London who, for the past three years, has been making Wikipedia pages for women in science every day. It was really inspiring to hear from her and also a sort of full circle moment because I have read many of her pages!

Week 8: The Article

I wish I had more interesting updates to tell but I spent all week on one goal: writing the Physics Today Online article. Since the interviews had been conducted, I spent my time transcribing, fact-checking, writing, and, most importantly, editing. I wrote for three days straight, blasting my favorite classical music (mainly Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Dvorak’s 5th Symphony, Grieg’s Peer Gynt, and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet). I alternated from a writing trance, fingers flying across the keyboard, typing faster than I could think, and absolute burnout, struggling to get a single sentence on the page, rewarding each line with a sip of coffee. By Friday, I had finished the story but it was more than twice the length it was supposed to be. After a full day of edits, I had cut just 500 words but was more than ready for the weekend. This experience has more than tripled my respect for the Physics Today intern, Madison, who does this every week.

Unfortunately, my weekend was not for decompressing because I moved out of my Pittsburgh apartment back home to Virginia. It’s odd writing this blog entry from my childhood desk. The plus side, of course, is the coffee at this house is already made by the time I wake up. It was sad leaving Pittsburgh, the city I had lived in for the past four years, and of course, this means no more coffee with Madison while we work, but it is good to be home.

Week 9: Big News

I considered holding off on some news to give this blog post a surprise ending, but I’m too excited and too impatient. So, the big news: I accepted a job with NBLA to co-make and co-host a physics history podcast! This is my dream job for so many reasons: I love podcasts, I love physics history, and I love working at AIP! It also gives me time to finish all the projects I will not be able to see through by the end of this internship. I’ll be honest, the interview process was slightly awkward, answering questions like, “tell me about your experience with archival research,” and I recited the work that they know I do. Still, I couldn’t be happier or more eager to start!

In other internship news, my “Which Physicist Are You” article for the NBLA blog, Ex Libris Universum is going well. Volunteers in NBLA worked with me to find our favorite physicists, profile them, and write about them. I met with people from web design and marketing to make a cool graphic and now that the tree diagram is drafted, I’ve forced all my friends and family to take the quiz. No spoilers here, but I am a Benjamin Banneker. This project has been really fun to learn about more physicists and work with people in NBLA that I don’t normally get a chance to! I even led a planning meeting which was sort of surreal. I can’t wait to see a finished graphic and to see which physicist everyone is!

Week 10: And I’m Out

Today was the closing symposium. I remember two weeks ago I was shocked that our abstracts were due. The next week, I was surprised we had to have our presentations in. This was the fasted summer of my life, and maybe one of the most pivotal. I enjoyed being able to share some of what I learned about Eunice Newton Foote with a larger audience as my friends and family were sick of hearing about her. One of the speakers said this internship is about exposing us to the different opportunities a physicist has and that resonated with me. I knew I wanted a career tangential to physics but I did not know how much I would enjoy my summer of physics history work and I am so excited that I will be able to continue doing that.

I am so grateful for my mentors who supported and encouraged me the whole program, Corinne, Audrey, and Joanna, as well as the rest of the staff at CHP and NBLA who made me feel welcomed. I am of course grateful for Brad, Kayla, and Mikayla who facilitated the internship and created a fun environment for all of our activities. It has been amazing to get to know all the other, incredible, interns and I learned so much from all of them. On that sentimental note, it’s been a blast and I look forward to another year at AIP!