Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Theodor Jacobsen, 1901-2003: Scholar spent a
lifetime studying stars
By CAROL SMITH
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
We are all of us made of stars, but Theodor Jacobsen perhaps more than most.
Mr. Jacobsen, who was the sole member and "executive officer" of the astronomy department at the
University of Washington for nearly four decades, died last week at age 102.
His life spanned a century that brought sky revelations from the Hubble Space Telescope into our
living rooms, but a much more modest device launched his own career.
As a boy in Denmark, his parents gave him a telescope made of a 2-inch lens set into a paper tube.
He was 7 then, but he didn't stop looking at or thinking about the stars for the rest of his life. When
he was 98, he wrote a book called "Planetary Systems from the Ancient Greeks to Kepler,"
published by University of Washington Press.
He perhaps remembered his own boyish enthusiasm when a young Paul Hodge wrote him excitedly
decades ago, saying he believed he had discovered a new comet.
"He wrote me back the nicest letter in a way that kept me from feeling disappointed that what I'd
found wasn't a comet, but a globular star cluster," said Hodge, now himself a professor emeritus of
astronomy at the UW. Years after that letter, Hodge became one of the first professors to join Mr.
Jacobsen's department it its nascent expansion phase in 1965.
As the department grew, Mr. Jacobsen stuck to classical astronomy, making detailed measurements
of the wavelengths of light coming from four bright stars called "Cepheid variables." Measurements
of those stars helped illuminate the nature of stars, their composition, distance from the Earth and
their movements with respect to each other, astronomers said.
That style of work has been eclipsed by fancier technology, but it anchored his reputation as a
careful, diligent astronomer of the "old school."
Mr. Jacobsen, a reserved man who thought carefully before he spoke and spoke only when he had
something to say, joined the UW in 1928 and retired in 1971. Today, the department he started has
an international reputation and supports more than 30 faculty and researchers.
But for 36 of his years there, Mr. Jacobsen calculated his star measurements solo in an office at the
observatory near the Burke Museum where his name is still on the door. He was used to it. He had
been the only astronomy major in his class at Stanford University, which he attended after his
family fled the socialist movement in Denmark.
At the UW, he would walk to work each day in a suit and tie, and seemed content not to have to
deal with the departmental politicking with which other university professors contended. Although
that had its down side.
He went one stretch of seven or eight years without a raise because department heads were given
raises by their deans, and the dean forgot about him, said Paul Boynton, a professor of both
physics and astronomy at the UW. "He just never said anything."
If astronomy was his first love, his other center of gravity in life was his passion for the piano. He
married a piano teacher and was himself an accomplished classical pianist. He and his wife played
together at facing grand pianos for many years before her death about 10 years ago. They had no
children, but kept Welsh corgi dogs named for famous astronomers.
In the years after his retirement, he focused intensely on writing the book, which he began for his
own education. In it, he recreated the theories of ancient astronomers using modern math to explain
how they were derived.
Boynton, and his colleagues Donald Brownlee and Woodruff Sullivan were visiting him at his
North Seattle home when they noticed the stack of pages and inquired about them. The three
professors immediately realized the value of the calculations, and helped shepherd the book through
publication.
Boynton recalled once listening as Mr. Jacobsen sat down to play a Grieg piano concerto. Mr.
Jacobsen, then well into his 90s, looked up from the keyboard and said: "To play well, you must
know the details."
His understanding of details led in particular to new knowledge about the behavior of binary
systems -- stars that revolve around each other.
"More than half the stars are multiple stars -- two or three stars in orbit," Boynton said. "Single
stars are not the most common arrangement." |
