Once upon a time … that’s how I’ve begun to think about Dr. John Aloysius O’Keefe III, and his career as an astrophysicist. I have stories about him in my head that are quite clearly mixed up. He went to Harvard as an undergraduate and tangled with the head of the Astronomy Department there, as a graduate student. This tangle did NOT involve canals on Mars, although Percival Lowell, who did believe in those canals, was involved with Harvard. However, he died in 1916. His brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, was president of Harvard until 1933, but even so, was still not the man Dr. O’Keefe tangled with, being gone by 1933. 

The real head of the Astronomy Department at this time was Harlow Shapley. I mentioned him in an earlier post…

…another story about Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin and Shapley, her boss. The realization of moments where he had been wrong in the Debate [of 1920, how big is the universe] had just been made clear by some new discovery. He told her that he had been wrong because he had trusted the data of someone else, “because he was my friend.” Payne-Gaposhkin promised herself never to make the mistake of confusing friendship with correct data.

9/22/23 People my father knew

On Monday, September 26, 1938, Time Magazine published a short article called ‘Science: Unpredictable Stars’. Two brief stories were included, one of them about the findings of John O’Keefe, of Harvard Observatory, the subject of this post. O’Keefe, a graduate student at that moment, was trying to explain the behavior of the star, R Coronae Borealis. Some variable stars are quite predictable in their changing brilliance. R Coronae dims and brightens unpredictably. O’Keefe hypothesized that the star, known to have a lot of carbon, was ejecting material from time to time, as our own sun does. The carbon cloud would cause a tremendous dimming of the light from the star. Eventually the cloud would dissipate and the light would return. 

Shapley was also working on variable stars and had a different theory about the dimming and brightening. As the story goes, he didn’t appreciate his student being in Time Magazine with a theory that was completely different from his own. Over the long haul, O’Keefe was right about R Coronae and Shapley was right about variable stars that have a regular cycle rather than an irregular one. The current vocabulary on the subject of variable stars includes “intrinsic” variability, which means the actual luminosity of the star changes vs. “extrinsic” variability, where the actual luminosity does not change, but something (like a carbon cloud around it) causes it to look different.

The ultimate effect of all this was to send O’Keefe away from Harvard to graduate school at the University of Chicago, whose observatory was in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. There he met a girl …

O’Keefe continued to work on astronomy, and ultimately ended up at NASA at its beginning, giving him the right to be called a NASA Pioneer Scientist. Herewith a story from those days. 

When John Glenn was orbiting the earth he reported seeing little green flecks, that appeared in his viewer from time to time. Dr. O’Keefe was one of those who studied the issue to figure out what Glenn was seeing. O’Keefe finally asked Glenn what was going on, right before the green flecks appeared. Welp, Glenn having answered the call of nature was ejecting the results into space. In accord with protocol. 

I think it’s funny. 

Here though is a great story about the modern space age. 

https://www.space.com/intuitive-machines-odysseus-private-moon-landing-success

O’Keefe always thought we should go back.