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High-Flying Physicist:
An Interview with Katharine Blodgett Gebbie ’57
By Barbara L. Whitten
Katharine Blodgett Gebbie
’57, director of the physics laboratory at
the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
graduated from Bryn Mawr College with an A.B.
in physics and subsequently earned a B.S. in astronomy
and a Ph.D. in physics from University College,
London. She joined NIST in 1968 as a physicist
in the quantum physics division of JILA, a cooperative
enterprise of NIST and the University of Colorado
in Boulder. Before being appointed director of
the physics laboratory in 1991, Gebbie served
as chief of the quantum physics division and acting
director of the center for atomic, molecular and
optical physics.
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1997
Nobel Laureate in Physics William
D. Philips (l.), Katherine Blodgett
Gebbie ’57 and Luis De
Araujo at NIST.
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Gebbie is a fellow of both
the American Physical Society and JILA, and a
member of several professional societies, including
Sigma Xi and American Women in Science. She has
served as vice president of the International
Committee on Weights and Measures of the Bureau
International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), Sèvres,
France, and as president of BIPM’s Consultative
Committee on Temperature. She has received several
awards, including the U.S. Department of Commerce
Gold Medal, the Women in Science and Engineering
(WISE) Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Washington
Academy of Sciences Award for Outstanding Contributions
to the Physical Sciences.
The following is an
abridged version of an interview that was published
in the fall 2001 issue of the CSWP Gazette
(volume 20, number 2, pages 1-4), and is reprinted
with the permission of the Committee on the Status
of Women in Physics of the American Physical Society.
The complete interview may be accessed on CSWP’s
Web site at http://www.aps.org/educ/cswp/main-gazette.html.
What influenced you to
choose physics as a career?
I’d like to think that
I chose Bryn Mawr for my undergraduate studies
entirely for its high standards, but the fact
that my mother and two aunts on both sides of
the family were Bryn Mawr graduates probably had
a lot to do with it. They all — my mother
(Isabel Arnold Blodgett ’20) and the two
aunts (Katharine B. Blodgett ’17 and Margaret
Arnold Woodard ’26) — graduated second
in their classes. I didn’t. One of my aunts,
the one on my father’s side, was the first
woman to get her Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge
University. She subsequently worked with Irvine
Langmuir at GE in Schenectady and was the Blodgett
in Langmuir-Blodgett films.
I guess she must have been
what is now called a "role model," but
I didn’t realize it then. Perhaps it never
occurred to me that everyone didn’t have
aunts who were distinguished physicists. What
was special about Aunt Katharine was that she
always arrived with suitcases full of "apparatus,"
with which she showed us such wonders as how to
make colors by dipping glass rods into thin films
of oil floating on water.
My plans for my senior year
at Bryn Mawr changed when my father disappeared
in a small plane in the jungles of Costa Rica.
He had taken up flying when he was 50 so he wouldn’t
grow old, and it did the trick, although perhaps
not quite the way he intended. During the extensive
search for him, I arranged to take my senior courses
at MIT so that I could be in Cambridge with my
mother. At that time there were 30 female undergraduate
scientists, engineers and architects at MIT —
three in physics, which was one more than in my
class at Bryn Mawr. All my correspondence with
MIT was addressed to Miss Blodgett but began "Dear
Sir." Morale was high among the MIT women;
it never occurred to any of us not to go on to
graduate school.
I wanted to live in London
and study astronomy. I had in the meantime met
a Scots physicist, Alastair Gebbie. He was a great
admirer of A. A. Michelson, which led him to the
crazy idea of Fourier Transform Spectroscopy.
I was his first analogue to digital converter.
Such is love.
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Isabel
Arnold Blodgett ’20
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After I got my degree at University
College, London, our careers took us back and
forth between Boulder, Washington and London,
with time out for trekking in Nepal, hiking in
Kashmir, mountaineering in Turkey, and flying
my mother’s airplane around North America.
When the music stopped, I was in Boulder working
as a physicist in JILA (Joint Institute for Laboratory
Astrophysics), a cooperative enterprise between
the then National Bureau of Standards and the
University of Colorado; Alastair was in London
at Imperial College. We’ve had a transatlantic
marriage ever since, with homes in Boulder, Washington
and London.
What makes a research project
interesting or important?
One metric might be the extent
to which it changes the way we view the world
— or, less grandly, the extent to which it
pushes back the frontiers of knowledge (as opposed
to just adding information). Another might be
a measure of the time it would have taken someone
else to do if you hadn’t — assuming
of course that it was worth doing in the first
place. While I was thrilled with my models of
the central stars of planetary nebulae, I’m
not sure they would have rated very highly on
either scale.
To me my most exciting and
memorable work was during the gestation period
of an altogether new field called helioseismology,
the study of wave oscillations in the Sun and
how they can be used to study the interior structure
and dynamics of the Sun with ever increasing precision.
Helioseismology is currently
the best method we have for verifying theories
of stellar structure and evolution. Just as seismologists
learn about the Earth’s interior by monitoring
waves caused by earthquakes, so helioseismologists
study wave oscillations in the Sun. But whereas
for the Earth, there is generally one source of
agitation — an earthquake — in the Sun
a continuum of waves is stochastically excited
in the turbulent subsurface convective boundary
layer. So the Sun is ringing like a bell struck
continually by many grains of sand.
But back in the ’60s,
we didn’t understand that. We thought that
the five-minute oscillations were localized patches
of the solar atmosphere that had been thumped.
We were using ground-based and satellite observations
to study the height variation of steady flows
in the solar atmosphere and discovered the existence
of mesogranulation, a new horizontal scale of
solar convection. This new scale of motion has
since been confirmed by higher-resolution observations,
with important implications for the movement of
magnetic fields and their effect on the heating
of the upper solar atmosphere.
How did you come to change
from research to administration?
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1932
Nobel Laureate in chemistry Irving
Langmuir (l.), Robert Smith-Johanesen,
Katherine B. Blodgett ’17 and
Vincent Schaefer
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There is no such thing as
an unmixed motive. Helioseismology was, as I have
said, in its gestation period, and the prospect
of taking part in its birth and infancy was certainly
exciting. At the same time, the National Institute
of Standards and Technology (NIST), then the National
Bureau of Standards (NSB), was evolving away from
astrophysics and focusing more on standards, measurements
and data. My work and I were tolerated but it
was not — how shall I put it — a situation
in which I seemed destined to thrive. It didn’t
improve matters that I had financed and orchestrated
a successful Title VII suit (someone else’s)
against NIST.
So I had to make a decision,
and the decision I made was to spend what turned
out to be two years working in Gaithersburg, Md.,
on the NIST director’s staff. Towards the
end of that time, I was taken out for a glass
of scotch and asked if I’d go back to JILA
as chief of the quantum physics division, the
NIST part of JILA. There I had a wonderful time
working with the scientists in JILA and flying
my little airplane over the mountains and deserts
of the Southwest. And three years later I was
asked to return to Gaithersburg to design and
head what is now, after several reorganizations,
the NIST physics laboratory.
How do you see your role
as director of a laboratory?
I guess my role is to set
the climate in which the scientists and engineers
can thrive and contribute to the nation’s
measurement infrastructure. I guess I belong to
what is known as the "plant-water-and-stand-clear"
school of management — get the best people,
steer them in the right direction, give them the
resources they need, and let them run. It’s
not politically correct, but I prefer to be judged
on my results rather than my processes. I’ve
been accused of supporting people, not programs,
and to some extent it’s certainly true.
Do you think your management
style is different from that of male peers? If
so, in what way?
My management style is
different from that of my male peers. But I appreciated
that only quite recently, and I’m not sure
it has anything to do with sex (or more delicately,
if you will, "gender"). I believe it
to be consistent with the way the NSB/NIST forerunners
of the physics laboratory have been managed; it’s
consistent with the way Ed Condon managed NIST,
and it’s consistent with the way Lewis Branscomb
managed JILA. I never knew anything else.
What has been your role
in encouraging younger women scientists?
Maybe you would have to ask
them; they would be much better judges of that
than I. I don’t think my role in encouraging
the laboratory’s young women is very different
from encouraging the young men.
We do have a very exciting
Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program
that provides competitively selected, predominantly
minority and female undergraduates with 12 weeks
of hands-on research experience with our world-class
scientists. It started nine years ago with 20
students in the physics laboratory and has now,
with support from the National Science Foundation
and the NIST director, expanded to 64 students
in all seven NIST laboratories. Their arrival
each June changes the whole demographics of NIST.
At the end of the 12 weeks, they each give a 10-minute
talk on their research. The talks this year were
awesomely good. It was really quite thrilling
to watch these poised young women making lucid,
interesting Powerpoint presentations — and
obviously enjoying it.
Like most women physicists,
I have served as a member and/or chair of many
committees, including the International Union
of Pure and Applied Physics’ Working Group
on Women in Physics, the American Physical Society’s
Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, the
APS selection committee for the Maria Goeppert-Mayer
Award, the NSF Panel for Professional Opportunities
for Women in Research and Education (POWRE), and
the Committee on Diversity in the Navy’s
Scientific Work Force.
Can you contrast the struggles
you faced as a young woman in science with the
challenges facing you now?
I’m not sure where to
take this. Much has changed in 40 years. The climate
for women has changed; I have changed; and, perhaps
most significantly, my position has changed.
I certainly wouldn’t
have my present job without a lot of support from
men. By definition, they made all the decisions.
The government is perhaps different from a university
in that once you have a position such as laboratory
director, you have the same salary, the same office
space, the same opportunities to compete for resources
as your peers. Whether or not we all have collegial
relationship probably depends more on our individual
styles and personalities than directly on our
sex — although, of course, sex is a contributing
factor to our styles and personalities.
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