The Learned Astronomer

About thirty-five years ago a Dutch Boy Scout was hurt by a reprimand for not knowing his constellations. He set out to learn them, and in time became Associate Director of the Harvard College Observatory.

Three years ago, he was stunned when the University decided to give up the observatory at Bloemfontein, South Africa, for this station was essential to his research on the Milky Way. His response was to enter the new field of radio astronomy, in which he became a world authority with discoveries about interstellar dust that suggested important insights into the birth of stars.

Now Bart Jan Bok, Robert Wheeler Wilson Professor of Applied Astronomy, is leaving the University after twenty-seven years. In two months the jolly Dutchman and Mrs. Bok will set out by car on the first leg of a journey that will take them "home" to the Southern Milky Way.

Bok's new position as director of the Australian Commonwealth Observatory, on Mount Stromlo near Canberra, will enable to return to his original field of interest. Optical research on the Southern Milky Way has been his special interest since Harlow Shapley brought him to Harvard in 1928.

Another of Bok's special interests means that the University will be losing more than an astronomer when his resignation becomes effective: he has always loved to teach and been concerned with undergraduates, who regard him as their best friend in the Department. Yet when Shapley first offered him an Observatory fellowship at a meeting in Leyden, Bok thought Harvard was just an observatory, and did not understand that it was also a university. Yet later he was to become critical of his Department and at one point say, "a university that does not exist for teaching has lost direction."

In Australia he will be connected with a university, but one that teaches only graduate students, and while he hopes to stimulate the study of asronomy in high schools and colleges there, he will largely be giving up teaching. Not again will he come home with a batch of Astronomy 1 essays, toss them onto the floor in a heap and settle back with two or three cans of beer to read them. This system, of course, had its disadvantages for the student whose paper was being read when he ran out of beer, for Bok always advised brevity.

Formal courses were not his only contact with undergraduates. Last year he organized a series of Astronomy Concentrators' dinners in Leverett House, which led to a reinstitution of tutorial in the Department this fall. And he was interested in Radcliffe, for Moors Hall, where he is a faculty affiliate, is but a short walk from his Garden Street office in the Observatory. Bok likes to drop in for lunch there, especially for "submarine" sandwiches. He also invited the girls out to the Harvard Mass., observatory to see the telescopes and other equipment each spring, and Mrs. Bok made an occasion out of it by preparing fried chicken dinner.

He first encountered Mrs. Bok at the same astronomical conference where he met Harlow Shapley. She was then Priscilla Fairfield, assistant professor of Astronomy at Smith, but Bok's high school English was enough to convince her to forsake an academic career, and they were married a few days after he came to America the next year. She did not give up Astronomy, though, and has collaborated with him on many books, notably one of his principal works, The Milky Way, now in its third edition.

Bok's career has not been just in observatories, operating telescopes, and looking at slides. He has seen a need for international co-operation in science, and joined in the fight to put the "S" for science, in UNESCO, and just after the war was among those who urged that Russia join the organization to promote international access to scientific information.

He led in establishing Mexico's national observatory in the early 40's, and last year he helped the National Science Foundation draw up its plans for a National Radio Observatory, a project which President Eisenhower called for in the last budget.

His continuing interest in astronomy he explains as "the satisfying your curiosity, the wanting to know," and at Canberra he will again be seeking knowledge in "the most interesting parts of the sky," for some of the more complex aspects of the Milky Way are only visible in that hemisphere. Much of the thrust of his earlier work had been on the galactic structure and dynamics of the southern Milky Way.

It is quite unlikely that he would have left Harvard if the Bloemfontein station had not been given up for reasons of economy, and he was unquestionably disappointed at the decision. He regrets going, saying wistfully, "you don't leave a university and friends after a long time, quite as easily as it seems," and it's more than likely that he may be around Cambridge on his periodic leaves from the Australian post.

The Mount Stromlo Observatory has an excellent potential, but several of its instruments are not operative, and Bok calls it "an incomplete jig-saw puzzle, one that one feels should not be difficult to put right." Mount Stromlo uses optical, not radio telescopes, and while Bok will be cooperating with the Sydney Radiophysics Laboratory, he will generally be giving up his radio work, which, incidentally, has emphasized the co-ordination of optical and radio techniques for astrophysical research.

Yet Bok feels that he is regaining more than he is giving up by taking the Australian position. He says, "I am neither a radio astronomer nor an optical astronomer, I am a Milky Way astronomer." Hearing of this, one of his students said, "We wish him luck, but we wish that only an astronomer were going. Actually he is a teacher and a friend."