The Humble Origins of the Man Who Discovered Dark Matter

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election in 1932 gave hope to a nation beleaguered by the Depression and the moralizing of Prohibition, which, for a dozen years, had prevented the miserable and unemployed from escaping their troubles in strong drink. There remained a lot of trouble ahead. The year 1933 would be the very bottom of the economic trough, when unemployment hit a remarkable 25 percent. The country’s gross domestic product would shrink to half what it was only four years earlier. The Great Migration west was fully under way, and poverty would not relax its bite for some time.

But with Roosevelt’s election, people dared to believe that change was on the way. “After the election of Roosevelt and the prospect of unlimited quantities of schnapps, life here has taken on a fresh impetus,” Fritz Zwicky wrote to his Swiss friend, “and everyone is looking forward to an inebriated future.”

The jaunty tone of Zwicky’s note to Rösli Streiff reflected not only his relief that he and his friends would no longer be breaking the law when they tippled after hours, both on and off campus. The man who had begun referring to himself as a “lone wolf” had recently entered two important partnerships that would change his life and alter the course of scientific history.

The first began at a Caltech event in October 1931, where he met a 27-year-old socialite named Dorothy Gates. They hit it off immediately. Dorothy represented everything with which a young foreigner trying to make his mark in America could wish to adorn his life. She was attractive, if serious, with a handsome face, thin lips, and a steady gaze that conveyed depth and determination. Despite his family’s long history and his own father’s accomplishments, Zwicky was conscious of the fact that he remained an outsider in America. Dorothy offered entrance to social circles to which a simple professor, even one who had already built a reputation among his peers, would not normally be admitted.

Hers was one of Pasadena’s, and southern California’s, most respected families. Her grandfather was one of California’s educational pioneers. Her father, Egbert, gave up a career in medicine to get into the ranching and mining business in Mexico and Arizona. The gold strikes of a couple of generations earlier were still fresh enough in memory for entrepreneurial people like Egbert Gates to keep trying their hands.

Fritz Zwicky did the same. Shortly after meeting Dorothy, he invested some of his hard-earned teaching dollars in a gold mine in Mexico. It was a costly education for the young professor, who lost several hundred dollars before the enterprise was abandoned for lack of gold.

The new gold mine in the early 1930s was California real estate, and Egbert Gates was naturally drawn to it. He became president of the Huntington Beach Company, founded by railroad pioneer Henry Huntington. When, in 1920, rich petroleum reserves were discovered, the company got to work drilling—quite successfully. Everyone connected with the firm became rich.

Gates’s newfound oil wealth enabled him to try his hand at politics, winning election to the upper house of the state legislature. A rock-ribbed Republican, his values were deeply rooted in protestant economy and rigorous morality. His most notable achievement in the state senate was to spearhead a campaign in 1923 to change the law so that criminal trial juries could convict with only a three-fourths majority. The measure was inspired by one of those periodic paroxysms of panic over lawlessness that juries didn’t seem able to stop.

During the Gold Rush, Los Angeles suffered through the highest murder rate in the country. Crime was so bad that some eastern churches decided to forgo tribal Africa, instead sending soul-saving missionaries to southern California. Prohibition had not improved the behavior of crooks, or juries, for that matter, in Gates’s mind. “In criminal practice matters are reaching a point where it is almost impossible to get a verdict,” Gates told reporters.

Little remembered, this was one of the most audacious assaults on the rule of law in the history of the state. Many judges signed on, urging that the matter be submitted to the voters. The measure died only when the lower house of the legislature declined to place it on the ballot.

Egbert Gates faded into history, along with his failed morality campaign, after suffering a fatal heart attack while visiting New York. His estate was valued at $470,000, which yielded sizable trust funds allowing Dorothy and her younger sister, Tirzah, to travel when they wanted in whatever style appealed.

Zwicky had been ambivalent about marrying an American. And about the estate of marriage in general, being, as he was, a modern-thinking man who cherished his freedom to go off climbing mountains and hiking deserts whenever the impulse struck. He still talked about returning home, even though the idea was growing ever more unlikely as he began delving into research that could only be done at the controls of California’s great telescopes.

On the other side was the fact that, whether he admitted it or not, he had a deep desire to make a family. The loss of his own family had forced on him an independence that he treasured. But there remained a barely acknowledged desire to build around him a society that would replace the sense of peace and security he lost when his parents sent him away.

For Dorothy, the attentions of a man whose name and ideas were being chronicled in the popular press as well as scientific journals was naturally appealing. But she could be diffident. In fact, she was so reserved that some of Fritz’s friends considered her too self-contained, even haughty, adapted as they were to more deferential women. Worse, her Swiss German was nonexistent.

There were deeper problems that would only grow as time passed. For one thing, Dorothy was a Christian Scientist, a religion that tends to blame physical ailments on spiritual infirmity. Zwicky, not particularly religious and downright hostile to the fundamentalist doctrine he found in America, could not understand that attitude. He had a deep respect for medical professionals and rarely failed to submit himself to their interventions, whether it was changing his diet after suffering a heart attack in his fifties while charging up a mountainside, or laying aside his pipe after smoking’s association with cancer was discovered.

More significant was the fact that Dorothy didn’t want children. In his early thirties, that didn’t seem like a problem. But as time went on, and his own family in Switzerland died away, it would grow in importance.

Whatever his doubts, in the beginning, what Dorothy offered to a lonely man in a foreign country made up for any perceived shortcomings.

By March of 1932, the two were husband and wife, having eloped to Santa Cruz, where Tirzah’s soon-to-be-husband, Nicholas Roosevelt, a cousin of former President Theodore Roosevelt, had taken up residence on a gorgeous stretch of Big Sur called Point of Whales. “Pasadena society and scientific circles were given a big surprise yesterday in the form of a simple little announcement from Mrs. Egbert J. Gates, a member of one of Pasadena’s ‘first families,’” is the way the local paper put it.

Zwicky, the article noted incorrectly, had come to the United States in 1927. “Since then his researches have brought him world recognition.” That was an overstatement, but within a short time the remark would be considered prescient.

Zwicky’s friends and patrons at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology were quick to respond to the news. “I am overjoyed that you have found the woman with whom you wish to spend the rest of your life,” wrote Paul Scherrer, Fritz’s former professor. “If I know you she must be a very special girl.”

The great mathematician Hermann Weyl was also pleased. “What a surprise and what a welcome surprise! Sincere congratulations from both of us on your, to quote Einstein, ‘having taken the plunge,’” wrote Weyl’s wife, Hella.

Zwicky had been especially fearful of Rösli Streiff’s reaction. Although theirs had been a friendship maintained almost exclusively through letter writing and would never be much more than that, he wrote her what he called a difficult letter about Dorothy in May 1932.

“I married a girl from Pasadena, and I am embarrassed to say that our long-planned tour in Valais can’t really go ahead. I hope you are not too annoyed that I didn’t write to you earlier. I first met my new wife in October last year, and two months ago we decided to get married.”

At that time, even in forward-thinking social circles in Los Angeles, where people ignored the Prohibition laws and accepted divorce as a consequence of the complicated life led by modern human beings, it was still not done for unmarried people to cohabitate. There was no choice but to marry. The hastiness of it—neither her family, except her sister, nor his were invited—produced some second thoughts.

“This decision caused both my wife and myself to give up a lot of things dear to us. It seems this cannot happen without some suffering,” he wrote. “The worst irony for me is that I didn’t meet you sooner, even though we both grew up in Glarus. I can only say that you have become dear to me through your letters.”

These addendums were odd. Was he trying to keep Rösli on the hook, in case the marriage failed? His letter certainly displayed more ambivalence than delight. Although he was careful to include Dorothy in his comment about having to give up hobbies, it is more likely he was speaking mostly about himself and his freedom to go exploring and roughnecking in the woods with friends.

On their honeymoon to Europe, Dorothy gamely accompanied him on a trip to the 10,000-foot Gornergrat mountain, where he took a picture of her on a rock outcrop with snow in the background. Wearing a flapper hat, she was dressed more for a night out to Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood than for a grueling hike in the mountains. Her smile was broad enough that it’s not unreasonable to think she might even have enjoyed the outing.

She would further prove herself on a two-month trip to Alaska, on which the couple, accompanied by Dorothy’s younger brother, Howard, a student at Stanford University, spent a lot of their time camping. Zwicky told the local reporters on his return that the salmon fishing was glorious and the rivers were fresh and clean. They encountered plenty of gold miners, the fever having been transferred north from the played-out California gold fields. But even he had to admit that the constant rain became “no fun” after a while. Mrs. Zwicky was not solicited for her opinion of the expedition.

After his return, he sent Rösli a note apologizing for not writing. There had been an “immeasurable amount to do” at the Institute. This was partly because of all the traveling he and Dorothy had done after the wedding. Then they had to find a house. After searching fruitlessly through one Pasadena neighborhood after another with “such terrible architecture that your head stands lopsided after three days,” they finally found a rental near Caltech.

His duties at the institute had also expanded. In addition to lecturing in physics, as an associate professor, he had begun teaching astrophysics, the field in which Millikan had challenged him to make his name. The assignment was, as much as anything, a backhanded compliment. Zwicky was young, with no status. He would not become a full professor of astrophysics until 1942. That he would turn the new assignment into a perch from which he would survey the universe and bring back strange beasts likely never occurred to Millikan.

“I did already have some knowledge in this field, but it was never enough for lectures just like that,” he wrote to his Swiss friend, “so I really always have to prepare myself enormously.”  His “Analytical Mechanics” course, required for a PhD in physics, would be remembered by his weary students as especially tough.

The second partnership he entered would at last bring him the achievement and recognition he so deeply wanted. Walter Baade’s genius was every bit the equal of Zwicky’s. Not in its leaps of imagination and insight, maybe. There were few who could match Zwicky there. Baade’s intellect was entirely different, expressed in a surgeon’s peerless use of the new astronomical tools to probe and excise truths that stared others in the face but lay beyond their ability to understand.

Like a number of Zwicky’s associations, the relationship would eventually fracture, leaving both men the bitterest of enemies. But while it existed, his connection with the German astronomer was one of the most fruitful alliances in modern scientific history.

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Excerpted from Zwicky: The Outcast Genius Who Unmasked the Universe by John Johnson, Jr., published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2019 by John Johnson, Jr. Used by permission. All rights reserved.