And astronomy, for the morphological method, was only the start. In the years to come Zwicky proposed an engine that would allow vehicles to travel through the earth, perhaps for the purpose of defeating the Soviets in underground warfare. He urged “an overall morphological attack on the problem of smog” in Los Angeles, including a tax on single-passenger cars.
Later on, he vowed to write an autobiography, to which he had already given a title: Operation Lone Wolf. Instead, in 1971 he self-published a Catalogue of Selected Compact Galaxies and of Post-Eruptive Galaxies. He might have found an academic press willing to publish it—his previous six-volume catalog of galaxies was indispensable—if not for the introduction. In 23 score-settling pages, Zwicky called his colleagues “scatterbrains,” “sycophants and plain thieves” who “have no love for any of the lone wolves who are not fawners and apple polishers,” who “doctor their observational data to hide their shortcomings and to make the majority of the astronomers accept and believe in some of their most prejudicial and erroneous presentations and interpretations of facts,” and who therefore publish “useless trash in the bulging astronomical journals.”
Here was the stuff of campus legend. Furthermore, the February 1974 issue of the Caltech house organ, Engineering and Science, contained a lengthy pursuit of the facts behind one persistent Zwicky rumor. Did his students once bamboozle him by creating the perfect, if fictitious, student—a composite of graduate students who secretly took an undergraduate exam and accomplished the seemingly impossible in a Zwicky course, a grade of A? According to one account, they did, in the third quarter of the 1931–1932 academic year. And they did so, the surviving members of that class variously told the magazine, to counteract Zwicky’s “intense pride in being correct” and to avenge his “intense, almost sadistic pleasure in picking on a hapless student” through “caustic comments as to his mental deficiencies and how easy the problem was.” In a sidebar, the editors noted that they had intended to talk to Zwicky. But on February 8, before they had the chance to get his side of the story, Fritz Zwicky died.
Barbarina Zwicky and I have agreed to meet at the Athenaeum, the legendary faculty club (Einstein stayed here) on the Caltech campus. It is here that her side of her father’s side of the story begins, for it was here, in 1987, that she bought a book at the gift shop, Richard Preston’s First Light, about the 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar, and started to read the section about her father.
“Zwicky began referring to Baade as ‘the Nazi’....He regarded most of the other Palomar astronomers as fools, and Walter Baade as a cretin....He would swear torrentially at night assistants, using scientific terms laced with obscenities....He referred to Baade and the others as spherical bastards—‘They are spherical,’ he said, ‘because they are bastards every way I look at them.’...Hands shaking, Baade whispered to colleagues that he believed Zwicky was going to murder him.” Never mind that Preston called her father “a true genius.” Fritz Zwicky, he also wrote, was “mad.”
“Just sitting there in the Athenaeum parking lot, I couldn’t believe it. It was the most vile, slanderous, vicious, vicious attack against my father,” Barbarina says now. She has driven us from the Athenaeum to the nearby home of her son’s paternal grandparents, where she has covered the dining room table with photographs, letters, books, pamphlets, and other memorabilia. “Awful, awful, awful.” Twenty years later, her voice still trembles at the memory. “It was the most terrible thing, what this man did.”
She began exploring her legal options. She recalls her lawyer’s warning to her: “?‘You know, they can sue for costs, and that could be $50,000, $100,000.’ That’s fine....No cost to me....I would do it again. It was worth the moral effort. It was the right thing to do, and it was in defense of my father. And I thought it would caution any future authors.” In the end, she learned that “decedents really have no legal rights,” she says. “It’s just a free-for-all where he can be viciously attacked.”
Black Holes and Time Warps, by Caltech physicist Kip Thorne, 1994: “In the 1930s and 1940s, many of Fritz Zwicky’s colleagues regarded him as an irritating buffoon.” The Perfect Machine, by Ronald Florence, 1994: the “spherical bastards” quote again. The Whole Shebang, by Timothy Ferris, 1997: “He touted more goofy notions than his colleagues could abide”; the “spherical bastards” quote yet again. The Extravagant Universe, by Harvard astronomer Robert Kirshner, 2002, quoting from memory what Zwicky would say when the two of them had offices down the hall from each other at Caltech: “In 1933, I told those no-good spherical bastards that supernovas make the neutron stars. Now they find these damn pulsars and nobody gives me the credit.”
“I catch what I can,” Barbarina says. “It’s like you have a cockroach.” She begins slapping her hand down on a stack of her father’s files. Slam! Slam! Slam! She slumps. “I have no idea how these people can sleep at night. They’re without conscience.”
Well, not quite. As she says later, “I’m their conscience.” She complained all the way to Washington, D.C., to get the Carnegie Institution to add a portrait of her father to a local exhibit on Pasadena’s role in the history of astronomy. When Vassar College promoted a lecture by billing Vera Rubin, one of the pioneering dark matter astronomers of the 1970s, as the “discoverer” of dark matter, Barbarina sent me an e-mail: “I will certainly call my attorney on Monday, and have him write a letter to Ms. Rubin, stating that any and all potential public claims to my father’s work will be equally publicly challenged by me.”
When Barbarina heard that a certain astronomer had ended a lecture by repeating some stories about her father, she dropped the astronomer a note. Barbarina paraphrases what she wrote: “You don’t know what I look like. I’m going to be coming to your lecture, and I’m going to listen to your colorful anecdotes and lies about my father, and I’m going to get up and confront you.” She shakes her head. “They don’t think there’s a family behind all of this?”
Among the items she has gathered on the table this morning is a sheaf of letters her father wrote to her at boarding school in Switzerland. In one he asks what she wants for her birthday. In another he inquires after her algebra and geometry studies. A third, on the occasion of her confirmation, is philosophical in tone, a father imparting to his daughter his thinking on what is important in life. The letter draws on the morphological principle that everyone is unique and irreplaceable and advises Barbarina to not be distracted by what others think or do or say, to master the mundane stuff of ordinary life, but to not lose sight of the importance of experiences that might reveal her true genius. He signs the letter affectionately, as he nearly always did in his correspondence with his youngest daughter.
