Transcripts For CSPAN2 Dava Sobel Discusses The Glass Universe 20170830

[applause] i just realized i dont know if we get a sound check. Its so good to see everyone here. I love doing book events because weve got to keep books alive. I want to thank the Simons Foundation for supporting all of our initiatives here when we do live in the present date for private events that are science themed or inspired and its with their support we are able to do these. So a shout out to science. [applause] i want to mention before i introduce the guest of for the amateur Astronomers Association of new york will be out in the garden. Its going to be out in the cold garden tonight with telescopes to help us do this guys and the claim is the clouds will clear write about exactly as we finish the last question and also we will have a book signing for the glass universe so we will have a book signing over here and then we will do a little q a after the conversation. But we introduced the guests. Im sure a lot of you have heard of our guest. I want to introduce david sobel of the bestselling author and a superb reporter. When i heard you speak about the book longitude you said i think it was your son asked me what you are working on even you said i didnt think anybody was going to read it. Totally bestselling, wonderful book and most recently of course galileos daughter was also a very popular book more so acknowledged with the Pulitzer Prize nomination so that is quite an honor. And the glass universe which is what we are here to talk about tonight which is the story of the women of the Harvard College observatory people be talking about so lets welcome. [applause] we also have my pal also known as assistant professor of art and decorative painting and drawing department at chapman university. A wonderful artist and great sort of synchronicity has worked with the glass plates that david wrote about in the historical book so we are lucky to have them and their different perspectives one as an artist and one i dont believe it is fair to call you specifically a historian but very much so i think in this book. If you mind being called a historian . Lets welcome leah. [applause] i did a terrible thing. I didnt bring my clicker. Can you advance the slides when i ask you to pretend somebody onto my bag and find it on the secondfloor . Sorry. We are a little rough around the edges here. So, can we go back to the first slide for a second and talk about this picture . Tonights conversation the glass universe is so named because of the glass plate that tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, 500,700 place that the women of the Harvard College observatory used as innovative technique to study the universe and many things are interesting about it scientifically which we will talk about. This gaggle of women that worked for charles pickering, the director of the Harvard College observatory. They allegedly fired all the men and hired a scottish made. He already had some Women Computers and a scottish made that worked for him on the residents cited the observatory. As a pregnant woman no longer with her husband as was said that she was abandoned by her husband and pickering immediately realized she was too intelligent to be working as a maid to come as a domestic servant moved her to the observatory and gave her copying and computing work to do and then she went on to become the first woman at harvard to have a University Title and was the curator of astronomical photographs, and she came here around 1879 said hed been there only two years and then she had to go home to have the baby so they lived 1881 as the year she started and shout out from the audience this picture was taken in 1925, so she is no longer there. A lot of famous folks are in this picture. Starting in the observatory in 1896. Seated next to the globe, she is looking down. She became famous for her classification of the stars. When you learn the types of stars you learn be a fine girl kissed me and that is because of this classification. The acronym some is the star. They were in alphabetical order to begin with. But then the characteristics of the stars required a jumbling of the alphabet and so that pneumonic helps people remember the types but also in the picture is a painting of the woman sitting at the drafting table and she was the first person to earn a phd in astronomy at harvard. They also paid to us accomplishes chip and then they could go out and work someplace else. I thought that it was amazing we had to keep rereading this in the book to make sure that i was understanding it correctly the first phds in astronomy went to cecelia who youve just said and i remember reading reading it i kept struggling with it to think the Astronomy Program didnt exist and the expansion was to include men. And she was the first female chair of any department at harvard associate goes on to teach at harvard in the Astronomy Department and actually oversees the very first Phd Candidates and then years later she is awarded the astronomy chair. Theres a lot of assistance to high gearing and giving titles to the computer assistance. Computerassisted was kind of a man could the computer assistance, too. Who do we have in this slide . Standing at the back overseeing the work is the one we were talking about at first. She supervised the others and hired a lot of others. Were there as many . The great expansion of the staff happened because. So Anna Palmer Draper was planning to do a project her husband and he died at age 45 and she wanted to see his work so being an independently wealthy woman she offered to give him the money to carry out the Research Program in exchange for having the Program Named for her husband. Its lifelong. Lets talk about pickering himself. Edward Jones Pickering was about 30yearsold when he took over the observatory. A physicist at the. As. It is a kind of feminist in a strange way. They accepted it and it seems without any hesitation do you think that is fair . He was only encouraging the colleges to work on their own and then send the results to harvard to prove that Higher Education was of value. You also looked a lot at this history. He encouraged women to publish under their own names if you were working at the observatory coming you were part of a Bigger Picture of research that was going on but whenever discoveries were made, he would encourage and push different women to be noted as first in what they were publishing each year. They responded easily with no kind of weight or social burden but interestingly, he still had severe limitations and said things like, and im quoting from your book where he says when and with a knack for figures could be accommodated in the computer room which was a strong thing to say but he processes that by saying while it would be unseemly, and im quoting you, not him, it would be to subject a lady not to mention the cold and winter of telescope observing then he goes on to say they could be with computers so he couldnt conceive of them actually operating the scopes. That he changed because when she came she was the first one to use the telescopes. So he was open to that. I was just going to say he kind of sold them as being very valuable but also didnt financially value them equally as male computers and i think that is an important part of the story that on the one hand hes sort of saying this is a great opportunity for you and for women that are getting out of the rise of Womens Colleges but at the same time the harvard computer in female computers are paid less than half the male counterparts for doing the same amount of work. I have the numbers here 25 cents per hour they were paid. In your book i think that you used the times 285 to get the correct amount and i did the math at one point Something Like making 6. 16 per hour and those that hadnt been fired. They were garnering 2,500 per year. Shes clearly very fond of him but she keeps a diary and names means her son after him as well. Edward was charles . Edward Jones Pickering fleming. She named her baby after the observatory director. That is pretty significant. Most of the women in the observatory were quite devoted to him in a lot of ways and they felt they were a very collegial group. They worked in close quarters six days a week and socialized on saturday night. Thats tough. I mean it has to be admitted some of the work was totally awesome. Once we get to the slide where it has all the numbers. They were working with these insane hours and there was a good deal involved in the tasks that you never get this sense, you know they are fatigued at times but you never get the sense that they are ungrateful or resentful. No, they were well aware that they were involved in groundbreaking research and they felt, including pickering that science was more important than these other luxuries or other sort of things that we value socially, and even his energy towards these women is one that i felt from reading your history that the science was going to benefit from this work and it made no sense to be concerned about anything else about whether they were women, it made no sense at all and it he did pay them less. Im going to read this from the diary. She writes he seems to think that nowhere is too much or too hard for me no matter what responsibility or how long the hours before the raise the question of salary and im immediately told i received an excellent salary. Does he ever think i have a home to keep and family to take care of as well as the man and then she said i supposed they had no claims to such comfort and this was considered to be enlightened age, she adds. And this was written right before the women have the right to vote. What is very interesting is that this isnt really a crucial point. We still live in this legacy of unequal pay. Women have to support their families. Its very deeply rooted in our history, this idea. And also, she starts to feel that her work although shes told over and over again how valuable it is if must not be if she isnt paid equally, so i thought that was very strong. Did you read the journal at all . I was so focused on the visual archives because it is like this amazing lineage and history of scrapbooks they were cutting out of the current newspapers where they were getting all this credit and so the story i heard is the same story that you heard that they were not appreciated in their time and it slips very quickly when you see that theres this kind of seemingly unending source material with newspaper clippings from all over the world of recognition of these women but at the same time, when she passes away and her successor becomes the curator of the astronomical president of harvard he refused to give her the title and she has no it isnt until the new president that she assumes this acknowledged possession. Said she is known worldwide and had set the classification system that we still use today but at the same time they are writing and speaking openly that the president himself isnt even recognizing this brilliant scientist at harvard, so i was really fascinated by the way that she visually record all of her travels through all of these incredible observatories and she was relentless. Theres so many great pictures. Can we see the next slide . Here is an actual class played. Women typically worked in pairs one of them would be speaking aloud the observations to the recorder who would write things down and so the glass plates with whats so innovative about the technology when we think of this we think of using emotions and photography. It was like the colonial. By introducing photography instead of observing through the telescope, you could collect the record over a period of hours and stars live show up that couldnt be seen through the telescope by vi and it could be taken over time and you could study the series of photographs to change over time so all this kind of work his wife he needed so many women to be looking at the place. What is kind of amazing about this story that dave is talking about is that this is actually the record that we have 100 years ago was looking back at the sky itself so even though we are looking at archival material, this is relevant imagery because this is the kind of birth of photography itself, some of the very first images of the sky that were taken with the drapers and different objects, but its also still relevant now. It pays to look back at the record in that part of the skype in hundred years ago. And was one of the most important discoveries that came out of this incredible cobalt. It is a penny for scale, a shadow of the penny. Those little tiny strips that you are seeing are the spectrum of all the stars that were captured on this place about 8 inches by 10 inches and theres a prism over the telescope so instead of seeing them as points of light you see the light spread out to its component colors but its a blackandwhite photograph so you dont see the colors. You just have to go blue is over here and there very is all the way to read. You are looking at it with a magnifying and seeing the lines that are in the spectrum and from the pattern of the lines created a classification system and the chemical composition of the stars. So just as an interesting discovery, and i cant remember which one of the women made this discovery, that didnt really believe it and that was the abundance of hydrogen. A and is not how a lot of it is done . She really knew about physics. Quantum physics. In the early days quantum were people didnt know that the stars would be relevant in terms of explaining their history. Was also adjusting about that is that her adviser had really discouraged her from publishing in a way where you said thats probably not the case so in your book where she writes this beautiful pieces and shes talking about the abundance of hydrogen and theres this one sentence where she said, which is probably not the case. Its probably a spurious results for shanda buys herself and does so at external pressure. She first rode well this is what i observed. Whats interesting as you point out in your book that is such a new subject that it wasnt so far out there for an astronomer to make a discovery and speculated the same time because everything was just being discovered at that time. Of course shes absolutely right and again it predates einsteins predictions. Actually im not sure exactly the year. Its close. 1915 einstein talks she figured all of the starchy worst looking at were roughly the same distance away so the closest really were brighter in that observation led to the first usable yardstick for measuring what was it called now galactic distances and distances in space and her work enabled the size of the milky way to be determined. Maybe getting ahead of the slides here. It was not the only galaxy in the universe that the universe this is one of your pieces. This is a painting that is done with anchor on a translucent piece of film and i wanted to not just make him a jury that would reflect what these women were looking at but the process is the final image itself would reflect their work with the glass plates of the painting is done on a translucent piece of paper and then its used the piece of paper is 6 feet by 60. Lets point out that we have a popup with work on the newly wall that was painted this morning. So that is, the piece on the left is the scale and we will get to how you make the actual physical piece. Lets see the next slide please. Okay, thats it. Thats the one on the wall, over here. Just explain the philosophy of this. So the thing that fascinated me about the glass plate itself was not just that it was the first record of the sky. Where as before if you were the astronomer you have to be a draftsman. He had to make the drawings but also define a certain luminosity. Perhaps leo or jenna might have it different interpretation of that but they were really studying the glass plates and rarely would they print it. This is a reference to the evolution of the photographic process. Starts off with a photograph of the negative and brings it into the positive but the image was never photographed. They are images of stars that they are printed by using a star so its multilayered and its meanings in process. We will see some of the process. Please. I should also say as an artist with a lot of science a resident in the Science Department you can see my equations on the back there. And it has now been demolished and rebuilt as we speak. There is lia working on a large piece which becomes the piece on the right. He you are building the negative. Thats us goofing off. This is the collaboration. Lets see the next slide and who do we have here . We have lost all of our adjectives. They are on reserve. This is one of the cupboards where she keeps her glass plates. She was there for a very long time, wasnt she . She really oversaw the women that were working. Did she oversee the men or were they just intergroup . She largely oversaw the one in. Where were the men . Their routes taking pictures. And did the analysis of the photograph. She identified an enormous number of objects. As i write . Yes. She discovered i think hundreds of variable stars and i think we have a picture of that. She had a record of the most discoveries of variable stars at the time probably worldwide. C exceeded definitely by ms. Leavitt. C of course a lets see the next slide please. Lia tell me about this when. Identifying different plates the theory that im working on are each tied to one discovery that one of these women made. This is the of nebula. If you look on a contemporary image of the day looks a little more horselike. This is after Wilhelmina Fleming c and receive the next slide, please . Can i thing thank maria r. Popa. I know she is here somewhere. It looks like shes working on an ipad. C gets a glass plate. She had it in a frame that they used. They are very fragile. C would you work on them theres always the danger that they will break which is why they are all being digitized now so scientists can have access to them easily and without handling them. You have a historical record. Its 100 years of the night sky. Next slide, please. Is this the observatory . This is the harder work. Amaze me what these women endured because there was this wonderful opportunity to contribute to science. It was very difficult commitment. It was not a luxurious commitment. It was not in the commitment to an easy life or a life of any kind of physical comfort. I mean they were poor and they suffered all kinds of illnesses. Illnesses were a real threat and they worked absurd hours. What did you think about uncovering those details . They had the same sorts of illnesses we had that they had the flu epidemic. They nominally work regular hours but then of course everybody who is really involved in research and knows you dont stop just because its by the lock or 6 00 so they were very committed. What they gave up at the beginning was certainly any kind of home life. Mrs. Fleming was unique they are as a working mother as the sole support of her son and most of the time the women wanted to get married. That would be the end of her career. There is a line where someone says something to that effect that it no longer the end of your career once you get married that was any joke kennan and the other thing you are saying about the long hours is that they are given the tasks that in a lot of ways is really just a mindnumbing labeling the stars and looking at the spectrum but they are not given enough time to make their own conclusions. For example it would be like Henrietta Leavitt to she discovered key variables and given a yardstick to measure the universe but shes not in a situation where she is a researcher to make the jump to get to what this implies later on in our talk to really take over as the discoverer. Annie joe cannon on the other hand when shes hired shes unique but shes hired not only has a computer but also hired to work the telescope at night and ends up in peru and is physically writing about how heavy the telescope isnt pushing it around and playing with the lenses. Its different than most of the other computers. A sense of frustration that they dont have the opportunity to extend their work and they have the sense that they know there is a great volume of material but also some implications of its consequences and you get the sense that they feel this frustration about king able to pursue it. Im not so sure. Im not sure they felt that. Its interesting i did really at mira in your book you do not try to repose the lens of a present from the past and you take it as it is and i think thats what gives the certain moments in the book clarity when these women speak in their own words and theres so much impact because you havent it at all. You havent diluted the impact so when it comes its really. I love when ms. Cannon goes to the meeting about special classification and she is the only woman at the table of men and she writes in her journal, since i had done most of the worlds work on the subject i had to do most of the talking. She just sort of took it in stride and annie joe cannon, she says this is a little bit out of context but shes really talking about after personal trauma but she says may i be led into a youthful busy life but im not afraid of life. Im not afraid of work today long for it. Just this idea of recognition versus participation and in the beginning of the observatory pickering puts out an ad and he gets just endless responses from educated women who have just gotten out of college who were willing to come to the observatory under basically begging to work for free, not 25 cents an hour but for free. I think that theyll of discovery that they just wanted to work. They just wanted to work and to contribute. The next slide, please. This is amazing. She came much earlier so she discovered a comet in 1847 which made her world famous. Dont mess with her. C she looks like shes going to take it off its stand and swing it. So when he started college he hired her as a professor of astronomy and she taught some of the women who came to work at harvard. Pariah mitchell many think is an unsung genius just a true extraordinary contributor. She did computing work. Interesting and she was very admired. Can we see the next slide . These are also wellesley students. Annie cannon was the third from the right pitcher was working in a physics lab that had been modeled on pickerings lab at m. I. T. And annie cannons teacher had been pickering students and thats why her education equipped her to be the first woman of the observatory who could use the telescope as well as a computer. Its important and is come up the number of times to acknowledge the impact of the Womens College. This is incredibly impactful. Pickering knew it. He thought very highly of the Womens College and there was a lot of aggression against them. He would say all you have to do is look at what these women are producing to understand the impact. It people just knew they could see the contributions they were making to science of people would understand the importance of Womens Colleges. And to add to the context of time and was going on in the world at this point when hes hiring the computers comment still 40 years before women get the right to vote. Thats just mindblowing. 40 years before women vote there is a room of 20 women at the Harvard Observatory doing physics. Script its pretty incredible i would like to see where we went from there to where we were in the 70s and early 80s. How did that happen . Thats a whole other story. Bring up the next slide please. Trying to keep my eye on the time. This is peru the first observatory near the town of arequipa. And thats at a later stage in the shadow of a volcano. They thought it was extinct. Lets get to the nonextinct one. This was built by a Harvard Group with a wonderful endowment that he was able to secure and it enabled photography of the southern sky. How problematic had the volcano been . They lost the dash after a certain number of years and arequipa would have been perfect. The rainy season got longer and longer so they moved everything to south africa. Im sorry lia. I wanted to point out when you said this was because of the donation, it was because of the donation from a separate female donor so that wasnt another totally bizarre part of the lineage of the Harvard Observatory. It was run by women and was also on that by women. This is Catherine Wilkes bruce. We are going to go out of order. Can we go one more . The first telesco. So having this site pickering wanted a much larger telescope that he said he needed 50,000 and she came forward and wrote him a check. He also spent some of his own wallet. He puts his own money back into the observatory just to keep it going. And me go back to the pickering seemed . Picnic in peru. Bailey and his wife ruth are there. They really started the place and i think the next picture is the lobular cluster. He became very interested in that globular clusters of stars, technical term a big glob of stars. He noticed that they were full of variable stars which he was interested in. In the closeup picture he and his wife are trying to count the number of stars in each cluster. When they got close to the center was impossible. Then they were also looking at pictures of the same clusters over time to see the variations. Lia is this one of the plates , this image . I think this is the glass plate. Its interesting because until they could really understand distances of things they didnt know what these globular clusters were. Now we know there are some in our galaxy than there are some in other galaxies as well but the ones we are looking at here is our own galaxy and its a collection of stars. Imagine our galaxy as a plane with a spiral that globular clusters live a little more freely. But how would you know looking at this weather was in your own galaxy are incredibly faraway . You see no extension in space at the stars. You can tell by that so how could you tell texas is so important you were mentioning with henrietta that she gave us a way to gauge the distance of the objects. Can we see the next image please . I decided to show this and this is globular clusters taken by the Hubble Space Telescope so we do a little better now. We can see tremendous details but if you think about the timescale between when these women were working and hubble after whom the telescope is named was the early 1920s and the satellite is launched if several decades later. Its really quite extraordinary and short scale to think about going from where they were with these glass plates to launching an object into space. Or even saying is this object in our galaxy . When they started doing their study of the glass plates we didnt know what the galaxy was. The definition of galaxy and what that could possibly be. Theres a real idea floated that our galaxy was the entire universe and thats all that there wasnt of course now we know there are as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy. Can we see the next slide . One more. Please tell me about this. This is one of the most interesting parts of the plates, the actual notation that the women would use on top of the glass plate. David mentioned they are undergoing a process to scan each of the glass plates. They are photographing all this beautiful calligraphy almost on top of it where there are Different Things from numbering systems to classification of peaks and what they are doing is they are scraping the plates and photographing them. Harvard looks at this as an archive of astronomy, not as an archive that is the story of the women at harvard. Was an incredibly anxiety producing . Was someone breathing down your neck while you were in the room . No, they show you very carefully. You dont touch the play. He can see all of them are original and thats why you can see that some of them are sturdy and some of the sleeves themselves have beautiful writing of conversations back and forth. Its amazing. It shows different women in different writing back and forth the next slide, please. This is part of beating into the process of how you make these plates. This is based on one of the nebula that i found in the plate and it was upstairs on the third floor. I printed it with one of my studio assistants. Natalie is here. Can we see the next slide . We are doing our carry everyone. This is mixing the chemistry for the cno types. Retake the studio in turned into a dark room blocking everything out and mixing photo emulsions and coding it on essentially largescale watercolor paper. Next slide, please. We turned on the lights for the photographs. Basically we turned the studio into a dark room and then the negative is pressed in between this painting of photo emulsion on the watercolor paper press between glass. And then its exposed out in the sun. Go to the next one. You get these big cno type and motion. You are testing chemicals in this very spot and you go through a lot of different recipes. Its not like you mix it and you were done. Theres a storebought one that you prepared again. How do you decide which is the right one when you hit the right recipe . The first print that we did was on the left of the small cloud. Think we were printing every friday for almost three months before we got the very first usable prints that also the sun moves so the print that use the Exposure Time that you use at noon in the summer in los angeles is different than the Exposure Time that you would use in the winter. So the window was actually very small and changes throughout the day. An Exposure Time of eight minutes becomes 20 minutes when you move two hours into the afternoon. And you have to experiment with all of that. Next slide, please. This is the piece on the wall. This is the print you declare of the final print. Each of the prints themselves are of two paintings in their unique. If its a photographic print i can use another one by making a negative. D. C. Is this around the edges that in the dark its hard to figure out if the emulsion is on. I kind of liked the painting itself has a lot of nebulous at peabody and it. And so does the painting and sometimes you cant tell. Is the background a motion verse of the painting itself . You often exhibit the negative and the positive sidebyside. What defines that choice . Whether you decide to show the negative or not. Are you thinking about process as opposed to final process . Process seems important is fine work. Its not important just in terms of artistic process but i think it highlights the history of this project. Im not an historian so im so glad to find out that david was writing this amazing account for these women. It was a happy time for both of us. I have to tell how i was in the archives and i was meeting an astronomer, a very wellknown astronomer owen ginger h. He said you have to read dava sobles manuscript of the story and i said how is that going to happen . Theres no way. Actually owen was celia paynes student so there is a student at harvard now who Cecilia Payne was one of her ph. D. Students. Theres actually an incredible lineage. Its it sort of hidden in plain view. Everyone knows there were women there but not actually understand the full impact. Women at harvard news that there had been women working there but they always thought it was some kind of cute quaint story. They didnt realize they were actually doing science. This is interesting as a scientist i didnt know the story and tell lia brought to my attention. I heard of pickering and i had this version which is pretty amusing. It really was in and tell lias work that i became interested and started to learn more. I really did not know about it. So i think its interesting just the idea of education and why cant we be educated in parallel as scientists or historians or writers who have the Bigger Picture of all of all time. Its interesting i also have found other scientists at harvard who have the same reaction that you did to kind of knew was there but didnt really know what was which is really astounding because the glass plates are to physical things. Its not just the story but we have this amazing physical lineage to the story that takes up three stories. If you were ph. D. Student at harvard he would walk by this astronomical archive. Eyes and a lot of time at harvard when i was a graduate student at m. I. T. And i saw the pictures and it didnt even register. It didnt even register and all of a sudden i was like oh my gosh theres a picture. Im sure it had been up there since i was in med school. Was pretty dusty and it wasnt new but its so funny didnt notice even in the fabric of the building. I went there almost every day for years. Next slide, please. We call this the paper doll. There they all are. Henrietta leavitt is on this side with the black bow and annie cannon is all in white with a similar bow but not as dark. This was just the staff out for a lark pose. Its like your picture with janna. Im sure will be equally famous one day. We were talking about these books in the context of that photo. These are the record books. People wrote down what they were doing and what they were looking at. How did you use these . I was looking at the handwriting that i was in a lot of ways directed to some of the specific plates that different women were using but i was just interested in any kind of physical imagery. Like was mentioning their andys archives are in a different library and those were actually her notebooks and journals. But then and the record you also see these endless note takings with their initials on all these things. I just think the link to that lineage is really powerful at to see a visual replication of all of his writing. In addition to the glass plates there is very expensive card catalogs that mapped the entire skype to the project itself basically draper was looking to photograph the entire sky. That was a really incredible undertaking so not just that they were taking these glass plates and numbering the stars but they were in mapping the entire sky, north and south hemisphere. He dies prematurely and its his wife who funds the computers at the observatory ever after so his dream is realized without him. Next slide. This im also thinking my friend maria who is hiding in the audience. Its of a glass plate but is taken by her iphone of the glass plate. This looks like on drum it up but we think it was taken maria who do you think that this plate its andromeda which is a near neighbor spiral galaxy to us but its much bigger than our galaxy but im not sure exactly the year of this plate so we dont know if annie job cannon knew the galaxies were an entire collection of hundreds of billions of stars and they were millions of light years away and an entire other island of universe. Next slide. This is helpful. This is the difference in terms of the obscure to the women and the acclaim. Here is hubble, incredibly famous astronomer. This is in the early 1920s. He is charming even with his fake british accent. He was working at mt. Wilson at caltech for some of the most powerful telescopes at the time and he was in pursuit of these nebula that may or may not have been in our galaxy. Next slide. I loved this image. This is the negative image that hubble took and its dated 1923 and its really a dramatic moment. Dave dava do want to talk about this . Most of the stars you are seeing are the foreground stars in the picture. They were part of this nebula and he found a nova but then he realized it was a variable star and it was one of ms. Levitz variable stars. With that he was able to tell the distance of the andromeda nebula and that put it far outside the milky way. That was proof that the milky way is not the sum total of the universe. By using levitz work he expands the universe from a few hundred thousand light years suddenly to millions and now we know its 90 some million lightyears as far as the eye can see and probably beyond. And that its full of substance. This is also a drama to and they were capturing images of the drama that as well. This is really the moment of the huge discovery. The universe is huge and there are other galaxies and not only that but the universe is expanding. I also think this cuts back to this idea what these women are able to create the data or the information and there isnt time to do the research and come to their own conclusion that leavitt is the observatory gets a letter that someone on wants to nominate for the nobel prize which he doesnt realize she passed away five years before. At that time the director wrote that basically given the time that she would have possibly come to her own conclusion but she went on to kind of handover the yardstick and kind of walk away. It wasnt just the chic catalog information. She really had discovered a mathematical law that allowed her so shed did a tremendous analysis in and of its own right and yes maybe she would have gone on to know how to leverage it. Or discovery which has been known as the period of luminosity relation. More and more people are calling it the leavitt law. These are ingesting details. Next slide these. This is my favorite photograph of andromeda. The color im not sure about. The suspect check it where. Its a very big galaxy about 1000 times bigger than ours but one day we will merge and we will all be one big galaxy one day. Next slide. On our closing slide is there anything in this image he wanted to identify that we missed . We didnt speak about this board hey or margaret harcourt. She was the first one to come to the observatory and then have a fellowship name for Mariah Mitchell. She went to work at Mariah Mitchells own observatory on nantucket. She was the director there for 40 years. Lia do you have a favorite . Is annie joe cannon your favorite . I think her adventures. But antonio mora. The interesting thing about that issue is mr. Ipers niece and she worked for the observatory but had a family tie to the donor. Correct me if im wrong about this but wasnt she uncomfortable about attaining a salary . She did have that reaction. She almost did want to hire her because he knew hed be paying her 25 cents an hour and he thought that was not right. Wilhelmina fleming, 20s 5 cents was not right. Before we open for questions i wanted to read this quote which is from Mariah Mitchell who was as we said not one of the but incredibly influential. She said at the age of 36 and again im our link for my friend maria who gave me this tidbit. The best that can be said of my life so far as it has been industrious and the best that can be said of me is that i have not pretended to what i was not. I thought that was a very lovely summary. I wonder a lot of the sentiments of the women in pickerings harem. Definitely industrious and pretentious. They found a way to be who they really were. Lets not get beyond ourselves but just to accept that despite certain limitations or maybe even because of them, and maybe even because they didnt have other opportunities they found a way to do something that was of their choice. They created a community in and of themselves that was just really sharing and experience and accounts of them not just getting together socially that doing poetry readings at the night sky. Its a really beautiful story. I want to thank our guests and then i want to open it up for questions. [applause] we have microphones floating around so if you have a question waved frantically to someone who has a microphone. Over here. Hi there. I could do quick questions. These women work very hard with their eyes. It may develop visual problems . Yes. Ms. Orr is the only one record you had to get eyeglasses for her work but you can see just from looking at some of the plates house training that would be. My other question is have you figured out where youre going to go do see the total eclipse of the sun in august . Theres a question up in the front and then behind in the second row. Listening to this im beginning to wonder what happened to the men because what i hear is and what i read in the book is they have everything. The women enjoy their work and they got the most recognition for pickering and shuffling. The only thing they didnt get was so how about the men that did this . Did they get recognition . Are you asking where their men at all . They made more money, right . They did make more money. They also get recognition and career advanced mode for their work in the observatory. Were there famous men . He yes. Not so much as computers but being able to make those photographs was very exacting so those people who are wellknown. Bailey, the one who did all favorite cognizance work to find a place in south america, he published widely. The men were wellknown too. Was it daily to have a crazy theory that he just would not give up on . It was pickerings brother. Viewing the moon and observing vegetation. Agitation on the men. Water on the moon. Theres a little over exuberance of this era i think. You mentioned you had learned about this and you are training to become a scientist and im wondering if theres a meme out there to find women but is there any systematic changes in curricula in science curricula and high school . I dont know about high school. I didnt study high and science in high school so i know from firsthand experience or professional experience but i dont think theres a change in curriculum. What i think is important is that books like this are being published and are being widely received. The education cant just be limited to the technical classroom. We have to have a greater push asian of the science on culture. This is very much our mission in the Science Department in this context. Its very intentional in this context. I think we are changing in a more important way maybe then the curriculum which is that we are thinking about who we are in the world and using the scientific lens to understand a lot of that. I know there are some professors here from columbia. Do you feel like speaking to that . The issue of whether the curricula has been changing over the years . I will say. Joe is a professor ant shock is an astronomer from columbia. I think textbooks or more starkly conscious. For example i havent seen the actual phrase but theres the linear relationship and its considered the discovery of essentially the scale of the universe out to the local group and a little bit beyond. The local group being the group of galaxies that are closer together . This was several hundred galaxies. Marauding around the university the universe together. At me ask you another question here. I believe the curating of the harvard plates actually remained virtually all female enterprise throughout the 20th century maybe to this very day. The current curator is a woman. I believe all curators until now have all been women i believe. At harvard, yeah. How is that endured . Thereve been many directors. It costs money to run this operation and i know from experience that a lot of harvard professors when it comes time to shave off the budget they point to the dash and say what are they doing here . Mrs. Draper not only paid for the work during her lifetime but she provided for the continuation and the preservation of the plates in her will. Part of the money is still coming from her. Also there hasnt been very many curators. I think it starts with wilhelm mina fleming and then canon and two others and on to number five. In this entire lineage that you are looking at its actually a small number of women. One more question . Two more questions, one in the back. How long does it take to read one of the plays . Do you mean from the astronomers when they first collected the plates . They were never fully red because the density of information is so great that i dont think anyone felt that they have been completely plumb. Lets say we look at one of the plates. How long would that have taken to market up a net great detail . I dont know that i can answer that. They be somebody marked it up and 10 years later they said there has been no bow or variable star. Lets check the spark of the sky questions were asked at different times so the same plates might yield 10 answers or sparks six research projects. I dont know that question is answerable. Wasnt exclusively at harvard that the plates were used . Was there nowhere else in the world . Mt. Rosen had a plate but many people came from europe and spent months at harvard just because of the play collection. Thats why ms. Peyton came. That was the draw for her. That and the fact as she could a future in astronomy in this country. We have the last question. We have one here and well come around to the front. This question is for lea the artist in the group. If you look at contemporary art the great museums in the world most of the subject matter that artists concentrate on have to do with the physical world so we can see the terrestrial manner, bowls of fruit, landscapes and people. But is it that gave rise to this viewpoint towards the terrestrial, the extraterrestrial rather and the second part of the question would he is there a connection between the notion of the in the cosmic . A great question. I will leave that one for lia. Well i think when i think about the absolute fundamental connection of art and science is the fascination of nature and its desire to replicate it or understand it in some way so 500 years ago that my death than the painting of something and now we have the Dance Technology of the Hubble Space Telescope. I think they are a size than a fascination with the sky but also horror of the sky. Hundreds of years ago you see it comment and he didnt know was coming or do eclipse that could produce notions of the supply and terror in a lot of ways. So i think that the notion of representing the sky that hasnt been another lineage of our history is in a lot of ways because of the lack of technology and as we get closer to the stars with the newest telescopes or measuring Gravitational Waves we are going to have different entry points of how to represent and get in touch with the objects in the sky. Dava spent the afternoon at no vendors are really incredible painting that i think youd be interested in that is dated 1492 but in the sky there is a ufo. They have xrayed it and its not only a ufo that for a long time they thought someone definitely has come back 100 years ago and added this ufo but in the painting theres a figure looking and pointing at the sky. Whether its an idea i mean you know but i think i think it created a lot of mystery and awe is there a followup . [inaudible] i think for me the relationship to the idea of experience and that to me is i think a universal experience but in a lot of ways a one. One last question up in the front. It was just a question about the digitizing of the glass plates. When is that projects slated to be finished and will that be accessible to the public or will be part of the archive . Youll be accessible to the public or you will be on line. Some of the images are er. The project had a hiccup about a year ago. The plates stacks were flooded and digitizing equipment was drowned. It has been rebuilt and carried forward. Its been going on about 10 years and i think they probably need another five to 10, maybe less. Im not sure how quickly they are going now. It kind of makes me wonder, this is just wide speculation but to joes point about when someone in the Astronomy Department needs space and a. 23 stories of metal cabinets of glass plates whats going to happen with this archive tech some of the plates have beautiful writing on them or a wonderful notation and those have been set aside but they are such a small amount that have been set aside. Essentially they are photographing covers and photographing dissertation and razor and last plates and scanning them so someone can go on line and use them as a reference of what the sky was like 100 years ago. Is it going to be necessary to have these physical plates in the future . When you said they are scraping them, they are ruining them for the sake of digitizing them . Air washing up annotations. So they are destroying the rich and though . Not the image but the writing on them. The women would put numbers or other marks on the plates. That has to be washed off before they are digitized. The reason for that is you saw the vast notation on some of these slides. If you are looking for star and if you want to see if theres a nova you cant see underneath number one through 2000 whatever. So they are scraping not the emotion site of the photographic but this site, the opposite side which is where the women would write the notation. Presumably there is some way of digitally looking at an image why dont they photograph them with the notations . They cleaned them and then they scan them. Its very interesting and i know we have to wrap up at the physicality of the plates are extremely inspiring. The digitization and all of that is wonderful but you would not have worked with your process had it not been for the physicality of their process. Her work isnt just the final thing on the wall. Her work is the actual act of going through having the sun expose it. I want to tell you how she described it as the light of the star that makes these images. They are exposed by a star to create them. In my own work i think the process highlights the history which is essential but i dont know theres something in the physical link of imagining them. Its not just a romantic notion but again the way that we contextualize what these historic objects are, harvard looks at them as an astronomical archive pretty good a different part of the different library they look at annie joe cannons scrapbook as the lineage of nhl canon but the Astronomy Department doesnt see that. Im hoping davas book will make everyone so excited about this history that they will never end up scraping another play. Is interesting because you are saying its important that a jury you to the topic as a writer. They have retained their value after all of this time. How did you discover the project . Through wendy friedman. I was interviewing her and she mentioned the importance of leavitt in her work. When i went to learn more about Henrietta Leavitt it was very surprising. Its a beautiful place to close and right before we take a minute to thank our guests i want to remind you we have a book signing. The astronomers are outside. Please stay and enjoy yourselves and lets thank our guests. [applause] [inaudible conversations] the amateur Astronomer Association has outside so if you want to see what we have to see tonight, please do so. [inaudible conversations] america is not defined by ethnicity. Every ethnicity exists in america. Its not defined by religion. Every religion exists in america. We are defined by an idea to. Where theyll make country mr. The world that was created and defined by an idea. Therefore in order to keep the republic as franklin enjoined us us to do we must know those ideas. We must understand those ideas. We must buy into those ideas and we must live them out. You are watching booktv on cspan2 on primetime. Its television for serious readers. One of the things we like to do this every year go up to capitol hill and visit with members of congress to find out what books and authors they are reading. Here is what representative Gerald Connolly democrat of virginia told us. Booktv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer. One that was a wonderful book called last call is a definitive history of television in america. How it got started, dantzler movement that joined it like the women of the Suffrage Movement for prohibition and of course the disaster that prohibition was that created enormous violations