“I discovered what the sun is made of. Too bad I didn’t have a penis, then you’d know that.”
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) discovered that the sun, all stars, even the universe were made primarily of hydrogen, not heavy elements (as earth and other planets are). She wrote the most brilliant PhD thesis ever and spent a lifetime doing important research at Harvard — though the classes she taught weren’t even listed in the catalog until 1945. Her conclusions were dismissed until male scientists confirmed them. She was a dangerously brilliant woman and one of the great astronomers. Now she has her own meme: Passive-Aggressive Cecilia Payne.
