Margherita Hack

Biography

Born in Florence, her father was Roberto Hack, a bookkeeper of Swiss origin and Protestant religion. Her mother, Maria Luisa Poggesi, from Tuscany, was of Catholic religion, graduate at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and miniaturist at the Uffizi Gallery.

Both parents had left their religion of provenance to join the Italian Theosophical Society, for which Roberto Hack was secretary for a certain period under the chairmanship of the countess Gamberini-Cavallini.

Margherita Hack, after attending (without taking exams because of the outbreak of World War II) the Liceo Classico "Galileo Galilei" in Florence, graduated in physics from the University of Florence in 1945 with test score of 101/110, with a thesis in astrophysics on Cepheid variables, after studies made in the Arcetri Observatory at those times under the direction of Giorgio Abetti, that was for her a model of scientist, teacher and scientific research centre administrator.

In her youth, in addition to basketball, she practiced with success athletics, in which obtained victories in the long jump and the high jump at university championships, named Littoriali under the fascist regime.

On 19 February 1944 married with religious ceremony, in the church of San Leonardo in Arcetri, Aldo De Rosa, one of her playmates when they were kids.

In Italy, she was specially known for her anti-religious views and her continual criticism of the Catholic Church and of its hierarchy and institutions.

She was a vegetarian and has written a book explaining this choice entitled Perché sono vegetariana (Why I Am A Vegetarian).

Hack died in Trieste on 29 June 2013 at 04:30 at Cattinara hospital, after being hospitalized for a week for heart problems, from which she suffered from about two years. She had refused to have heart surgery.

The husband, Aldo De Rosa, died on 26 September 2014, due to complications of the Alzheimer disease. They both rest in the cemetery of Sant'Anna di Trieste.

She left to the city of Trieste her personal library containing 24000 books on astronomy.

Scientific activity

She was full professor of astronomy at the University of Trieste from 1964 to 1° November 1992, when she was placed "out of role" for seniority. She has been the first Italian woman to administrate the Trieste Astronomical Observatory from 1964 to 1987, bringing it to international fame.

Member of the most prestigious physics and astronomy associations, Margherita Hack was also director of the Astronomy Department at the University of Trieste from 1985 to 1991 and from 1994 to 1997. She was a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (national member in the class of mathematical physics and natural sciences; second category: astronomy, geodesic, geophysics and applications; section A: astronomy and applications). She worked at many American and European observatories and was for long time member of working groups of ESA and NASA. In Italy, with an intensive promotion work, she obtained the growth of activity of the astronomical community with access to several satellites, reaching a notoriety of international level.

She has published several original papers in international journals and several books both of popular science and university level. In 1994 she was awarded with the Targa Giuseppe Piazzi for the scientific research, and in 1995 with the Cortina Ulisse Prize for scientific dissemination.

In 1978 Margherita Hack founded the bimonthly magazine L'Astronomia whose first issue came out in November 1979; later, together with Corrado Lamberti, she directed the magazine of popular science and astronomy culture Le Stelle.

Social and political activity

Hack was also known for her activities outside of science, especially in the social and political fields.

She was an atheist and she did not believe in any religion or form of supernaturalism. She also considered that ethics does not derive from religion, but from "principles of conscience" that allow anyone to have a secular view of life, respectful of other people's individuality and freedom.

Hostile to any form of superstition, including pseudoscience, she was a scientific guarantor of CICAP since 1989 and an honorary president of the Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR). In 2005 she joined Luca Coscioni Association for the freedom of scientific research. She was a member of the Transnational Radical Party.

She stood for Italian regional elections of 2005 in Lombardy in the list of the Party of Italian Communists obtaining 5,364 votes in the province of Milan. After the election, she gave her seat to Bebo Storti.

She sided again with the Party of Italian Communists in the 2006 Italian general election. She was nominated for several districts of the Chamber of Deputies, but she decided to give the seat up to devote herself to astronomy.

On 22 October 2008, during a student demonstration in Piazza della Signoria in Florence, she gave a lecture on astrophysics touching on the experiments carried out at the CERN about the Higgs boson, after a discussion against the law 133/08 (which was the law-decree 112, called "Tremonti decree").