To a generation of science readers, he is the oddball astronomer who reportedly called a colleague a Nazi, claimed credit for everything that happened in cosmology after Einstein, and assaulted his peers in print and in person.
To Barbarina Zwicky, he is Daddy.
She recently wrote to this magazine, “My family has endured malicious literary assault since my father’s passing, and it has been a laborious effort for me to identify and highlight these individuals for their part in this very painful collusion to dishonor my father.” She once scolded a blogger: “My father’s theories are now being verified as scientific fact so many years after his death. The unbelievable incompetence and ineptitude of his colleagues and their subsequent rage [have] resulted in rabid attempts using literary assault against a decedent.” Before that, she wrote to another magazine: “Fritz Zwicky revealed a genesis of astounding cosmological achievements that still illuminate the scientific world. He was a scientific prophet and the sacrificial lamb for the provincial judgment of his colleagues. His emendation of intellect was such apodictic truth, and his presages were of such advance, that the standard mind only could falter in their presence.” She concluded, “As his youngest daughter, having had great propinquity to his genius, I am his voice against any malevolence, as his voice has been silenced by debt of nature.”
It has been nearly 35 years since that debt came due on February 8, 1974. For more than half the time since her father’s death, Barbarina Zwicky has been his self-appointed advocate. Over the past two decades her one-woman crusade has only gotten busier as more of her father’s ideas have entered the scientific mainstream. Dark matter, the mystery mass that, according to data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, outweighs ordinary atoms by more than five to one: That was Zwicky’s. Gravitational lensing: his too. Neutron stars, supernovas, carpooling: his (partly), his (partly), his (well, sort of).
“They’re eaten up,” Barbarina Zwicky says of her father’s critics. “I mean, they are consumed by him.” And she by them—or, more accurately, by her belief that their ridicule and neglect will rob Fritz Zwicky of his rightful place in history and perhaps render him as invisible as dark matter. Today, though, Barbarina Zwicky has accepted DISCOVER’s invitation, prompted by her letter to the editor, to meet with me to tell her father’s side of the story, or at least—the subjective nature of history being what it is—her side of his side of the story.
