On May third in the Lipsett auditorium in the Clinical Building of the National Institutes of Health, Vera Copper Rubin will speak to us on "What Hubble Didn't Know About Galaxies." Vera was a junior member of the National Capital Astronomers when she was in high school. She graduated from Coolidge High School in Washington, DC. She then went on to get a BA from Vassar College, an MA from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. from Georgetown University, where George Gamow, who was a faculty member at George Washington University, was her dissertation advisor. Her MA thesis was on non uniformity in the Hubble (expansion of the universe) flow-work that would latter bring her student, Sandra Faber, who was one of the so called seven samurai, fame for discovering the great attractor. Vera has been on the forefront or ahead of the front in Galactic astronomy since her MA work. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has been awarded numerous honorary D.Sc. degrees from Harvard, Yale, Williams, and other schools. She has been awarded the National Medal of Science by President Clinton. She has even been awarded medals by the Pope in Rome. She is a much sought after speaker. On her resume, she lists the Ph.D. in science of her four children before her own degrees. She and Robert Rubin, the famous applied mathematician, have produced an astronomer daughter, Judith Young, an imminent abstract mathematician, Karl Rubin, and two more geoscientist sons. Since 1965 she has been an employee of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, DTM, of the Carniegie Institution of Washington, CIW, and was the first women to be allowed to observe at the Palomar Observatory. When she was hired by Merle Tuve of DTM to use Kent Ford's developing imaging phototubes , Kent was told that they had hired a house wife to help him with his astronomy. Two Carniegie scientists are reported to have gotten in a kicking fight where blood was drawn at the shin over holding a meeting in the Cosmos Club, that at the time did not admit women to membership and therefore discriminated against Vera. When Vera's daughter, Judy, was young, and heard of this she replied incredulously `mother do grown men do these things?' When important contributions to astronomy are listed and persons are grouped according to obstacles that they over come based upon the stupidity of men Hypathia, Henrietta Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, Charlotte Sitterly, Nancy Grace Roman, and Vera Copper Rubin will be listed along with others.

Vera Rubin and Kent Ford measured the rotation curves of stars in disk galaxies using imaging phototubes on a two dimensional spectra across the long axis of the galaxies. What they discovered is the most perplexing unresolved problem in all of physics and astronomy. In what amounts to a test of Kepler's third law (the so called harmonic law), the semi-major axis of rotation cubed divided by the period of rotation squared should be proportional to the mass enclosed by the rotation. While this is observed for the planets orbiting the sun and the moons orbiting around their planets; it is not observed to be the case for disk galaxies-at least not if mass traces light. The conventional interpretation is that most of the mass of galaxies are not what we see in stars, gas, and dust; but that most of the galaxy is made up of under luminous matter, the so called "dark matter." This cosmic embezzlement of light, not being able to see the mass that is responsible for the gravitational binding rotation of stars in galaxies, is not a small thing. Around 90% of the universe is "dark matter" in the conventional interpretation. Vera has said that it is the responsibility of galactic astronomers to set some limits on this under luminous matter. When you have 90% of the universe missing, theorists can imagine too many things to be contributors to the "dark matter." Having discovered that the velocity of the rotation curves are flat at large distances well beyond most of the ponderable matter were it had been thought that the velocity of rotation curves must fall, Vera has set herself the task of setting some limits in the distribution of the 90% of the universe that seems to be missing.

Her abstract for "What Hubble Didn't Know About Galaxies" is as follows:

In a spiral galaxy, gas clouds and stars move about the center of their galaxy on circular orbits, with periods of hundreds of millions of years. Over the last few decades, studies of orbital velocities in galaxies have convinced most astronomers that the universe contains mostly dark matter. The luminous stars and galaxies that we observe with our eyes and with our sophisticated telescopes comprise less than 10% of the matter.

More recently, astronomers have discovered that in some galaxies, the orbital motions are complex. In a few galaxies, stars and gas are observed to orbit with opposite senses of rotation; in a few others, some stars orbit prograde, some retrograde. I will discuss the important clues concerning the history of galaxies with more than one axis of rotation.

The identification of the "dark matter" problem via rotation curves of stars in galaxies will one day occupy the same place in the history of human scientific thought that the absence of interference fringes in the Michelson-Morley experiment, and the subsequent falsification of the luminous ether, did. I suspect that we are at the stage where the Michelson-Morley like experiment has been done and Lorentz and Poincar'e invariance has been written out by their respective authors, but an Einstein has not yet come along and invented or reinterpreted Lorentz and Poincar'e invariance into the theory of special relativity, yet-or if they have, the general scientific community has not embraced their radical theory yet. The talk this May third will probably be one of the more intellectually stimulating talks in any ones life time.