This was the Google Doodle for Monday, 28 May, 2012.
For those of you who don't know the name of the pioneering radio-astronomer depicted, it's Ruby Payne-Scott. She also found time to be the mother of our own Peter Hall. Peter assures us 'it's a good likeness.'
Wikipedia:
"One of the more outstanding physicists that Australia has ever produced and one of the first people in the world to consider the possibility of radio astronomy, and thereby responsible for what is now a fundamental part of the modern lexicon of science, she was often the only woman in her classes at the University of Sydney.
During World War II, she was engaged in top secret work investigating radar. She was the expert on the detection of aircraft using PPI (Plan Position Indicator) displays. She was also at the time a member of the Communist Party and an early advocate for women's rights. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was interested in Payne-Scott and had a substantial file on her activities, with some distortions.
Ruby Payne-Scott and William Holman Hall secretly married in 1944; at this time, the Commonwealth government had legislated that a married woman could not hold a permanent position within the public service. She continued to work for CSIR while secretly married until the regulations of the new CSIRO in 1949 raised the issue of her marriage. The following year, her treatment by CSIRO resulted in hostile written exchanges with Sir Ian Clunies Ross (Chairman of CSIRO) about the status of married women in the work place. She lost her permanent position in CSIRO. However, her salary was maintained at a level comparable to that of her male colleagues. In 1951, she resigned a few months before her son Peter was born; there was no maternity leave at this time."
Her career arguably reached its zenith while working for the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (then called CSIR, now known as CSIRO) at Dover Heights, Hornsby and especially Potts Hill in Sydney, Australia. Some of her fundamental contributions to solar radio astronomy came at the end of this period. She is the discoverer of Type I and Type III bursts and participated in the recognition of Type II and IV bursts. Payne-Scott played a major role in the first-ever radio astronomical interferometer observation from 26 January 1946, when the sea-cliff interferometer was used to determine the position and angular size of a solar burst. This observation occurred at either Dover Heights (ex Army shore defence radar) or at Beacon Hill, near Collaroy on Sydney's north shore (ex Royal Australian Air Force surveillance radar establishment - however this radar did not become active until early 1950)."
- Read more about Ruby Payne-Scott.
- Click here,
- or Click here,
- or Click here.
- and - with a mention of Peter himself ! - click here.
- ABC Radio National Science Show documentary - click here.
Above: from The Sunday Herald (Sydney) 24 August 1952, p.23.
