Barbarina says she wishes people would just stick to evidence like this. Yet she herself answers insult with insult—in the course of our three-hour conversation, she variously calls her father’s critics, by name, “a loser,” “a jerk,” “a disgusting thief,” “a big baby.” And she counters hearsay with hearsay. Fritz Zwicky, she says, was “very decent, kind,” a doting father who took her to tea when her mother and two older sisters went shopping, and who used the “spherical” epithet only twice, and even then only regarding Swiss politicians.
“A lot of people don’t know my father was a lot of fun,” she says. “We laughed all the time when we were together.” Sometimes he took her to work with him. “I recall that everyone at Caltech would scatter when Daddy and I would walk down the hallway of the astronomy building,” she says. “These people would scatter.” Out of fear? Respect? No, she says, out of shame, envy, awe. “Mediocrities felt very uncomfortable around him because they knew that they couldn’t meet that standard. It’s like in the light of God—man can’t stand in the light of God, almost. It’s not quite that,” she adds quickly. “Obviously he wasn’t a God figure.” She believes one of his greatest discoveries, though, is: Barbarina, a born-again Christian, says of dark matter, “I think it’s the Lord.”
If my morning with Barbarina convinces me of anything, it is that a daughter’s idealization of her father may be no more objective than everyone else’s demonization. Still, she has a point. Her crusade raises a question that scholars must often confront but readers of popular science rarely get to consider: What effect does personal reputation have on a scientist’s ability to do science?
“He was way ahead of his time,” says University of Chicago theorist Michael Turner, “and if you’re way ahead of your time, you’re a crackpot.” But to his colleagues, Zwicky wasn’t just a crackpot; he was a crackpot with a notorious reputation. Even Zwicky, in an oral history, spoke of his “abrasiveness,” recalling how a colleague once told him he was “treating people too abruptly, too roughly, and it would be better not to be that rough.”
“He would confront them,” Barbarina herself volunteers, regarding her father’s behavior toward colleagues. “?‘Well, this theory is wrong. This is a bunch of crap.’ And they couldn’t stand that.”
Saul Perlmutter, the University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist who 10 years ago was one of the discoverers of dark matter’s even more baffling partner, dark energy, argues that Zwicky’s reputation today might lack historical context. “A lot of the heroes are curmudgeonly characters,” he says. “And there’s a real reason for it. There’s a strong tradition that it’s so hard to tell when people are fudging a result, there are so many ways to not get the right answer, you really have to be tough. You have to give people a hard time.”
But did Zwicky give people a harder time than his contemporaries could stomach? Go into the Caltech archives and read or listen to the oral histories of Zwicky’s contemporaries, as I do on the afternoon of my visit with Barbarina, and you’ll find not only the sources of many of the stories and quotes that have followed Zwicky beyond the grave, but hints of how much his reputation may have compromised his science while he was alive and working. “There’s no doubt that he had a mind which was quite extraordinary,” said Jesse Greenstein, the late, longtime director of Caltech astronomy during Zwicky’s years there (and a frequent object of Barbarina’s scorn), in his oral history. “But he was also—although he didn’t admit it—untutored and not self-controlled.” Greenstein was close to the Zwicky family in those days, according to Barbarina; nevertheless, he reported that “I fought with him perhaps 10 times a year.” Because of Zwicky’s personality, Greenstein said, Ira Bowen, the director of the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories, “had troubles” with Zwicky and “tried essentially to institute a censorship of Zwicky.”
Six decades later, who can actually know what happened around a dinner table on a mountainside in Southern California, let alone in the fragile egos of those gathered there? What if, as Barbarina suggests, we do stick to the purely factual: the science her father did during his nearly half-century at Caltech? Those contributions are enough to guarantee Fritz Zwicky’s place in the historical record, says Virginia Trimble, a historian of astronomy as well as an astrophysicist at the University of California at Irvine. “Science is a self-correcting process,” she notes. “If you live long enough and did something of long-term value, you will eventually get credit for it.” But, she adds, “sometimes much of the credit comes too late for the originator to appreciate.”
What effect does personal reputation have on a scientist’s ability to do science
For Zwicky, the credit that came during his lifetime was primarily for his observations—his supernova and galaxy surveys. Credit, however, eluded him for his theories, those gossamer figments that ultimately require empirical validation. Sometimes credit didn’t come because, as far as we know, he was wrong: his idea that “tired light” and not an expansion of the universe might be the cause of the lengthening of wavelengths from distant galaxies, or his insistence that galaxy clusters didn’t belong to superclusters. And sometimes it didn’t come because the evidence that would support his theories wouldn’t be available for decades: gravitational lensing, dark matter, and neutron stars (whose discoverer won the Nobel Prize in Physics the year Zwicky died).
But the credit is coming now. “He is extremely well appreciated in astronomy,” Turner says. Rubin, the doyenne of dark matter researchers, has often lectured and written about Zwicky’s prescience, and she says she does so to establish an accurate record of the science. And as one scientist recently posted on an astronomy Web site, “Some days I think that whatever it is in astronomy, we ought to just call it the Zwicky whatever and be done with it.”
“This is surely as it should be,” says Trimble, who knew and liked Zwicky when she was a grad student at Caltech in the late 1960s, “that we remember our heroes for their best, not their worst.” From a historian’s perspective, Fritz Zwicky’s notoriety is more likely to disappear from the historical record than his science is. Maybe not within Barbarina’s lifetime. Maybe not even within the lifetime of her son, Christian Alexander Fritz Zwicky, the teenager to whom she hopes to entrust her crusade, she says over dinner on the evening of our interview, nodding across a restaurant table toward him. (He nods back, eagerly.) But one day.
And that’s a fact, sort of.
