Most physics majors don't spend months carefully analyzing a few lines of poetry, let alone publish a paper on the research in a national publication. But Ava Pope wasn't the average physics major.

A recent graduate of the Honors Program at Texas State University in San Marco, Ava worked closely with Professor Donald Olson on several research projects that sussed out the astronomy behind major works of art, among them Edvard Munch's painting The Scream. Most recently, she helped him to link a description in the Walt Whitman poem "Year of Meteors (1859-60) "  to a rare astronomical phenomenon known as an Earth-grazing meteor procession, in which a meteor breaks up as it passes through the atmosphere without striking the Earth's surface. A paper describing their work was published in the July 2010 Sky and Telescope.

Ava will spend this summer researching once more with Dr. Olson in Europe before beginning a Ph.D. program in physics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She took some time to talk about her Whitman work, her experiences as a woman in a male-dominated field, and her advice for girls.

Under the Microscope: How did you figure out what Whitman was describing?

Ava Pope: We did tons of research on what scholars thought Whitman was writing about. Many people thought he was writing about the 1833 Leonid [meteor shower] that he did in fact see back in 1833, but the appearance of those was way wrong, it was impossible for it to be those meteors. In one of the references to the meteors Whitman says it was "year 58 of the states" when he saw them and some English scholars interpreted that to be 1858. They said, "Oh well that's close enough to 1860, so maybe it's those Leonids." In fact, we did some historical research and we couldn't find a single account of Leonids in the U.S. in 1858, so it couldn't be those.

There were several other options and finally we narrowed it down to the meteor of 1860 that Frederic Church painted. There was a guy named George Vaughn and after the meteor he collected hundreds of personal accounts of the meteor all across the northeast and he even made a plot of the track of the meteor. We found this, a fifty page document with tons of personal accounts, and it showed it passing right over New York City, which is where Walt Whitman was [there] during the time of the meteor. It also passed right over Catskill [NY] which is where Frederick Church was. [Vaughn] documented the time and there are even accounts from astronomers at Harvard College that gave the time and the position. With all of that to back us up, we were positive that that's the meteor that Whitman was writing about. The descriptions...describe it exactly like Whitman did: multiple balls, passing at night, it matched it perfectly.

UtM: And what parts of this project did you work on?

AP: Dr. Olson knew the direction he wanted to take it before I got involved. He knew about the poem and he knew about the painting, but from there on out [I was involved in every step]. I would go to his office almost everyday and we would work for hours. We modified a computer program he had written years ago to track the meteor and calculate its brightness, and its path, and how much mass it lost. That was a big part of what we did.

Most of what we did for this project was historical research. We would go to the library, get newspapers [on microfilm] and read through that. I got to go to New York with Dr. Olson and his wife, who's an English professor -- so Dr. Olson and Dr. Olson -- and another physics professor, and Roger Sinnot, who works for Sky and Telescope. We went to upstate New York and stayed in Hudson River Valley in a little house about two miles away from where Frederic Church lived. We were able to go to a small research library called the Vedder Library and find old documents. We found old diaries that showed that Frederic Church was in fact in Catskill in July of 1860. We also got to do some research in the basement of Frederic Church's house -- it's now kind of a Frederic Church archive and museum. We even found things the Frederic Church people didn't know about -- they didn't know that the diaries existed. They had some transcripts of the diaries but the transcripts weren't completely correct, so we found the original diaries and re-transcribed them.

UtM: How did you get involved in such unusual work?

AP: I took a class with [Dr. Olson] three years ago [as a sophomore]. One of my best friends had been working on research with Dr. Olson for two years, and she was about to graduate, so I knew he might want someone [new] to work with [him]. Toward the end of the semester I asked him if I could help him with research because the class was so fascinating and everything he did was so cool. He said, "Yeah, why don't you write a research paper and try to figure out when this painting was painted?" That was Edvard Munch's Starry Night. It was really hard to figure out. I had to use a star charting program on the computer and check every night of the summer of 1893 -- I had to go and scroll throughout the night. It took me forever and I didn't know what I was doing, but it turned out I was almost right. I turned in the term paper, he graded it and gave it back, and then he asked if I wanted to go to Norway at the end of the summer to do some research. I definitely jumped on the wagon. We met tons that summer...doing background research, figuring out exactly where we were going, printing out maps, trying to calculate the slope of a hill in a small fishing village in Norway.

UtM: What's been your experience as a female undergraduate in a STEM major?

AP: Being a girl in physics is really hard. For the past two years it's been me and one other girl in all of our physics classes...It's us and ten or twelve boys, or me and six boys. Any lack of encouragement or negative things that happen come from those boys. It's almost always sarcasm, but two years of sarcasm from the same boys can be kind of discouraging and obnoxious. That's pretty much the source of discouragement. If you asked them they'd say they're not discouraging, they're just joking around.

UtM: What's next for you?

AP: In July I'm going to move to Chapel Hill, NC so I can go to graduate school in the physics program at the University of North Carolina. Some students going in know exactly what they want to do and exactly who they want to work with, but I don't. I met two professors [when I visited] who are working on stuff that's interesting to me but I don't know a whole lot about, and they're taking on students, so I've maintained contact with them...hopefully something will come of that.

As far as working on similar things [to Dr. Olson's work] in graduate school, it's kind of impossible. Dr. Olson is almost the only person in the world who does what he does, so I won't be able to work on similar stuff. But it's okay because I've always had an interest in other aspects of physics. The Texas State Physics program has a big focus on condensed matter and solid-state physics so I've gotten exposed to that and it's probably what I'll end up doing.

UtM: Do you have a message for young women interested in STEM majors?

AP: First off, get involved and be as active and connected with whatever department and professors they have. That's been the most beneficial thing to me. Once you start talking to your professors and meeting with your professors and they realize that you're a real human with a brain and you're interested and excited they'll do anything for you, and you'll do anything for them. With that, find someone -- it doesn't matter who it is or what department they're in -- find a professor and make a connection. My connection with Dr. [Heather] Galloway [a Physics professor and director of the Honors Program] has gotten me so far.

Also, fear can get you down. That's why I didn't want to be a physics major [initially], because I was afraid I couldn't do it. Don't be afraid of boys, don't be afraid of professors -- once you get over that you can do anything.

Image courtesy of Russell Doescher

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Mark Maynard July 09, 2010 24.206.104.163	I had the privilege of sitting next to Ava this past semester in an advanced Physics - Electronics class, while I was completing my math degree. She is an absolutely amazing student, with a dedication I have rarely seen, and as far as I know the only physics major at Texas State that was also in the Honors program. I think that any negative comments from the "boys" can be written off as petty jealousy. Besides, according to an article I just read in the Atlantic Monthly ("The End of Men" by Hanna Rosin), I think she is probably just leading the pack for the coming wave of female STEM students.

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