She has an asteroid named after her. A mountain. A street, postage stamps, a couple of science labs and a whole university block. Plus several awards for top scholars, a biography by Dame Christine Cole Catley and a stage play, both called Bright Star.
Beatrice Tinsley is rated alongside Ernest Rutherford and William Pickering as one of our three greatest scientists. Yet most New Zealanders have never heard of the UK-born, New Zealand-raised cosmologist, who became the first female professor of astronomy at Yale University and a leading expert on the evolution of galaxies. After an academic career of only 14 years, the brilliant young woman died of melanoma, aged 40. Who knows what she might have discovered had she survived?
Born prematurely in the freezing winter of 1941 during the bombing of Chester, baby Beatrice was already up against the odds. Her community contributed coal to keep the nursery warm enough for the infant. It was an appropriate start to a life that in many ways was a race against time.
The Hill family, with three daughters, moved to New Zealand when she was 5, first to Christchurch, where her dad was an Anglican curate, then New Plymouth, where he eventually became mayor. At age 9, Beatrice was already excelling in school, and outside, too. She was doubly gifted in mathematics and music, playing violin and piano, and threw herself into the study of astronomy, which she came across in the Junior Oxford Encyclopedia.
Excellence in advanced physics at New Plymouth Girls’ High School led to a scholarship to Canterbury University, where she was a tutor as well as a student. She was also a violinist in the National Youth Orchestra and a chamber music group.
Winning all the prizes on offer throughout her university career, Beatrice Hill was into her MA study when she married postgraduate physics student Brian Tinsley. But in a foretaste of things to come, she found that, because of anti-nepotism rules, she could not expect any full-time work at the university as long as her husband was employed there. She had to make do with teaching high school science, tutoring undergrads and picking up short-term contracts to fund her own research.
Moving to Dallas for Brian’s job, Beatrice found the nearest university teaching her subject was a 600km round trip away. Still, she completed a five-year degree in just two, then typed her doctoral thesis with her adopted son playing in his cot beside her. By the time a daughter followed, she had to hire a housekeeper to allow time to read scientific papers. Her husband was clearly too busy travelling for his own career to help with minding the children.
After a decade with her own work on hold, Beatrice made the distressing decision to divorce Brian and leave her children to relocate. A gifted educator, she encouraged the next generation of scientists at Yale and wrote more than 100 papers before dying within six years, of melanoma.
For an intermediate-age readership, Maria Gill neatly tackles the feminist issues that defined Tinsley’s short career and the implications of her early death, and illustrator Hughes captures the ups and downs of her life, most poignantly the distress of the mother faced with giving up her children.
A black mole on the side of her leg, ignored too long, was to end the brilliant career of a New Zealander who in her short life made a monumental impact on our knowledge of the cosmos.
Beatrice Hill Tinsley: Queen of the Cosmos by Maria Gill and Alistair Hughes (Upstart Press, $24.99) is out now.
