Glennys Farrar Discovers Particles and Life as a Woman
By Natalie Meecham
December 4, 2017
Glennys Farrar, a woman who pioneers physics in a patriarchal world of academics. Fifteen minutes after our scheduled time to meet, Farrar hurries into her office frantically, coat in one hand, smoothing her hair with the other. In one stroke of excitement, she greets me, shakes my hand and pulls me into her office.
“Come in, come in! I’m sorry it’s so messy in here. It’s always like this.”
Against the back wall was her desk. Books on particle theory lay open, some pages folded down and others creased. The wires that twined around her two computers attached various gadgets to one another. Graphs and data sheets were in piles higher than her books. To the right was an old blackboard that stretched across the entire wall, completely covered in her mathematical equations. In a way, it felt intimate looking at her work, as if I was inside her theoretical world of imagination and creation. To the left was a large painting with explosions of neon color that jumped out of place against her achromatic office.
Farrar has pursued a combination of astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics to research the nature of dark matter and supersymmetry. She has been responsible for developing most search techniques used to discover superparticles in outer space. More recently, she has made experimentally verified predictions of new particles (quarks) that are claimed to be dark matter itself. This has now been established as the ‘Standard Cosmological Model’ of the known universe today. Over the years, she has accumulated several awards for her achievements, including the Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences and the Sloan Fellowship.
“Work, I can only think of one word to describe it, which is just wonderful. I truly love doing what I’m doing and I also feel incredibly lucky. Generally, I’m an optimist and enthusiastic and that’s quite relevant to set backs…I think the most important character attribute for theoretical physicists is to be very resilient…I’m constantly thinking OH WOW I’VE MADE THIS THIS GREAT DISCOVERY but then two days later you discover it doesn’t work for some reason. Making correct new discoveries is very hard. The times that I’ve done that its usually been a very slow process so it’s very rare that there is some sort of eureka moment of OH WOW I’VE MADE THIS GREAT DISCOVERY.”
With this resilient mindset in place, Farrar approaches her work in a cut-throat manner. From a young age, she was driven by her ability to push herself academically, a skill she says she inherited from her father.
“When I have a new idea, I think about the first things that could rule it out.”
Fortunately, her current research has been consistent with experimental tests to date. Referring to this dark matter model she exclaims, “I’m right now really excited about something. Maybe I’ve made two discoveries, each of which is worth a Nobel Prize!”
She then quickly adds, “But ultimately you’re not driven by that. Otherwise, it would probably be way too low and you would want to do something different. But the fact that it’s a possibility is definitely stimulating.”
“I have so many ideas. But only a small fraction of them get worked out because the number of students who are capable of picking it up is just less here.”
Farrar’s voice trails off as she glances to her blackboard.
“When I look at certain colleagues of mine at Harvard, with one beautiful thing after another, they are so inventive. But I’m inventive too! And if I had a student who I could just tell my ideas to and two weeks later they would have calculated the math for it, then I would have that level of productivity. I think there is no doubt that if I hadn’t been a woman I would have had an appointment at Princeton or Harvard or one of the absolutely top places, given the quality of what I was doing. For a long time, I thought oh I don’t care, it doesn’t matter where you are. But really it does matter because your productivity is much higher if you’re in an environment where you have a huge number of incredible students compared to one where you struggle to help the students do-”
She suddenly begins to struggle expressing her thoughts and instead leans in close to ask, “you know what I’m saying?”
It becomes apparent that her frustration comes from her own experiences as a student. Farrar only completed three years of high school before her enrollment at The University of California Berkley. She was one of the first students to take graduate courses during her undergraduate years, securing her position at the top of her class. Having always engaged in a learning environment of constant competition, Farrar finds it hard to expect nothing less from her current students. She remarks it being especially difficult as a woman in the seventies, feeling that she had an expectation to uphold. She reminisces on this time at Princeton as a graduate student.
“I was very isolated. It was during the Vietnam war so by the tail end of it there were very few men. Many of them had been drafted and of course there were no women studying science. I think I was the only graduate student in my area at that time.”
“I never went to lunch with anybody. Looking back, it seems so completely obviously stupid but when people would go to lunch, I always imagined that if they wanted me to join them, they would just ask me.”
She breaks into laughter, cupping her eyes in embarrassment.
“They just assumed everyone would just go! But in those days, a girl wouldn’t go with a bunch of people if she weren’t invited.”
She continues to laugh and shake her head, mumbling to herself about the silliness of her predicament. Her youth had lacked a strong female presence and as a result, Farrar experienced college in equal amounts of ignorance and apprehension. Her mother had never provided any guidance on interacting with men, never engaged in deep conversations of feelings and experience. Farrar thus makes her own motherly duties a priority alongside her research.
As her photos are being taken, she nervously smiles.
“Sorry. I get a little self-conscious when the camera angle shows the hair on my chin.”
After all, Glennys Farrar was merely being a woman.