In 1965, the Palomar Observatory told a visiting astronomer her observing time would be limited for one reason: the building had no women's restroom. She cut a piece of paper into a little skirt, taped it over the stick figure on the men's room door, said "there, now you have a ladies room," and got to work. That quiet, unshakable confidence carried Vera Rubin through a career of ignored advice and locked doors: a high school teacher who told her to become an artist, a Princeton graduate program that banned women until 1975, and a 1950 conference debut, three weeks after giving birth, that the Washington Post covered under the headline "Young Mother Has Her Own Theory of Universe."

So she made a deliberate choice: skip the fashionable fights over quasars and study something everyone else found boring, the rotation of ordinary spiral galaxie ...