THE WOMAN WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING ABOUT THE UNIVERSE
IN 1965, PHYSICIST Richard Feynman was busy. He was busy winning the Nobel Prize, and he was busy learning to draw. One day during that productive time in his life, he saw astrophysics student Virginia Trimble striding across Caltech's campus and thought, There's a good model.
Soon, she was posing for him a couple Tuesdays a month, in exchange for $5.50 each session and a lot of physics talk. She was studying a nebula, and he was, sometimes, sharing anecdotes that would later appear in one of his books, which featured everything from his bongo playing to his work on the Manhattan Project. Treatment of women in professional and academic situations has changed—and significantly so—since those sixties-California-campus days. Trimble was a student at a university that enrolled few women, in a field that enlisted few women. But her experience at Caltech wasn't limited to sidelining model gigs. Those early days of learning and research were the beginning of a five-decade career that has turned Trimble into a powerhouse of astronomy.