Earlier this fall, I traveled to the summit of Mount Wilson, California, a peak in the San Gabriel Mountain Range that overlooks Los Angeles. The mountain is significant because it is home to the Mount Wilson Observatory, one of the most historically important astronomical stations in the world.
I went there because I was researching a piece on Henry Norris Russell, an influential astronomer of the late 19th and 20th century who consulted on projects at Mount Wilson. That piece—despite my overkill efforts at reporting (reading dusty tomes of astronomy, back issues of Scientific American, traveling to Mount Wilson)—attracted significant ire from the scientific community, mostly due to the fact that my source base minimized the role of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in determining the sun’s composition as primarily made of hydrogen. In fact, like many scientific breakthroughs, the question of the sun’s composition was a more complicated story of discovery, and for many decades Russell was solely credited with this breakthrough, failing to cite the pioneering work of Payne-Gaposchkin. The article’s comments clarify that story and scientific lineage; I appreciate that my readers took the time to lay out what I missed.
While humbling, I recognize that writing about science can often be a difficult balance—either you simplify the narrative to make it accessible—or you painstakingly try to please the scientists, and thereby lose the lay reader.
Or—as I learned in an unusually long afternoon session atop Mount Wilson—the storyteller can bore you to tears. And that leads me to my baffling experience with a tour-guide we’ll call “Telescope Jack.”
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