I want to thank the Simons Foundation for supporting all of our initiatives here where we do private events, events that are science themed or science inspired and its really with the support that we are able to using these events, were excited to shout at simon. I want to mention before i do this, our guest is an amateur astronomer, he will be out in the cold gardens, applaud a lot louder. Hes out in the cold garden tonight and helping us and the claim is that the cloud sphere, is right about exactly as we sent it in the last question and also we will have a book signing for the glass universe so we will have signing over here and we will do a little q a after our conversation so let me introduce our guest. Im sure a lot of you have heard of our guests so i want to introduce david sobel. David sobel is a bestselling author, a superb writer. I remember when i heard you speak about your longitude, you said i think it was her son, asked you what you are working on and he started, i didnt think anybody was going to read it. He was like nobodys going to read that mom. Totally bestselling, wonderful book. And most recently of course galileos daughter was involved so a very popular book and of course i was acknowledged on the prize nomination in 2000, quite an honor. And most recently we have a glass universe which is what were here to talk about tonight. Which is the story of the women of the Harvard College service racial pakistan and so its welcome data. If youve ever been here, welcome to plan works. And we also have miaholleran, my pal. Also known as an assistant professor of art and director of the painting and drawing project at chapman university. We have a wonderful artist and a greatsort of synchronicity , has worked with the place that david wrote about in his historical book where really we are lucky to have them there and their different as an artist and one as, i dont know if its fair there. Its very much so i think if you dont mind being called a historian. I will take it. Hey historian. So lets take this, welcome a set. I did a terrible thing, i didnt bring my clicker. You guys have been so nice and i asked you to for, can we run up into my bag and my clicker. On the second floor, oops. You are a little rough around the edges here. So lets talk, can we actually go back to the first slide for a second . Lets talk about this picture. Tonight, presentation the glass universe, its so named because of the glass plate , the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of glass plates, 500,000. 500,007 plates. That the women of the Harvard College use, its an innovative technique and many things are interesting about it scientifically which we will talk about but of course obviously sociologically this is womens right to vote and i used your the story about this which i relayed, this gaggle of women allegedly that work or Charles Pickering, the director of the College Observatory and the story i had heard, if you take his failed computers which is the name for people who computed astronomical calculations that he said my gosh, my maid could do a better job and file all the men and hired is made who did a fine job. It was apocryphal. But what is the real story . Part of the real story . The real story is he had this in his computer, he also had a maid who had come to work with him at the residence side of the observatory, a pregnant woman, no longer her husband. She was abandoned by her husband. And he immediately realized that she was too talented to be working as a maid and a master servant so he took her to the observatory and gave her computing work to do and she went on to become the first woman at harvard to have a University Title who was the tracer of that job. So pickering. What year was she hired . It depends where you count. She came around 1879 but she had been there only two years and then she had to go home to have a baby. But really, they list1881 as the year. Wilhelmina flemings. We do not have a shout out from the audience. This picture was taken in 1985 so she is no longer there. But a lot of famous folks are in the picture including andrew john cannon who started at the service in 1896. Which one is any . She is, she is seated next to the globe and shes looking down. Annie buchanan became famous for her classification of stars. But when you learn the type of stars, she said oh, youll be a fine girl, kiss me. Thats her classification. So the acronym, its an old star. Exactly. [overlapping conversation] they were in alphabetical order to begin with but alphabetical consideration of the stars, that mnemonic helps people remember but also in the picture is her husband, she is the woman sitting at the table. Shes the first person to earn a phd in economy at harvard. The astronomy teacher at harvard, went 12 years with students who listen to this history. And its become a caring. Pickering had already died when the education band was started. His gathering of a great number of women to work there. His befriending of wealthy women who paid for the research and who also paid to establish fellowships for young women to come and work at the observatory for a year. And then they can work somewhere else. I thought it was amazing, i remember i had to keep reading reading this in your book to make sure i was understanding but the first tv in astronomy at harvard went to sicilian pain. I think you just said. I remember rereading it i just went to the first women, i kept struggling to think the Astronomy Program didnt exist in the expansion was to include men. The expansion was to include men and she was also the first chair of, the first female chair of any department harvard so she goes on to teach at harvard in the Astronomy Department and oversees the very first mail phd candidate. And then, what is it, four years later shes awarded astronomy chair. Theres a lot of assistance that goes to hiring, giving a title to other than computer assistance. Computer assistance is a euphemism even though there were mathematicians or astronomers. Men could do computers. So lets see the next slide. Who do we having this slide . This is one of many people in the previous slide. Ending at the back overseeing the work is william lanning, the women we were talking about. So she supervised the other women. She hired a lot of other women to. When she started, were there as many female students . The great expansion of the female staff happened cause of the drapers. So anna palmer draper, she was planning to do a series of projects with her husband. He died. At age 45 and she wanted to see his work completed. So being an independently wealthy woman, she offered to give pickering the money to carry out this Research Program in exchange for having the program name for her husband. She continued for decades. Lets talk about, wheres charles. Next slide. Charles pickering, he was about 30 years old in this picture when he took over at the observatory. A physicist and that was fine in a scandal. Why were they hiring a physicist . And how many years has he had , 42 . Its interesting because i was very moved by this in the story that they hire this woman in a compromise position. As you see, to be a maid. And pickering, i think about the idea of him at some kind of feminist in a strange way. I dont think he could hypothesize about women breaking boundaries but he simply saw the talent and he accepted it, it seemed without any hesitation. You think thats unfair . He was also hiring women but he encouraged the alumni of the womens colleges to work on their own and send the results to harvard for publication to prove that Higher Education was a value. You also, this was a lot of us history. He encouraged women to publish other in their own names so it was like if you were a computer working at the observatory you are part of the Bigger Picture that was going on but whenever it was paid he would encourage and even pushed different women to be noted as first in the harvard animals and what they were publishing each year. And give them credit. He was first to respond to those things easily, just with no kind of wage of some kind of social burden but interestingly he still had severe limitations. He said things and im quoting from your book where he says women with enough figures to be accommodated in the computing room went into a different profession which is a strong thing to say but he prefaces that by saying while it would be unseemly, im putting you, while it would be unseemly to subject a lady to not to mention the cold and winter of Telephone Services and then he goes on to say women with a nexis of cheaters. He couldnt conceive of them operating the scope. But he came. Because when ms. Cannon came, she was first woman to use the telescope. So that was open to them. I was trying to say that he saw them as being very valuable but he didnt financially value them equally as the mail computers and i think thats an important part of the story that on 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, these female computers are paid less than half of their male counterparts were doing the same work. What is it, . 25 an hour they were paid . In your book, i think you use the, you can times it by 285 to get the current amount and i did the math one point and these women are making like 6. 16 an hour. I think it came to 15 a year, not scaling up for inflation and the men had not been fired. Unlike the apocryphal story, they were garnering 2000 year so she was completely in support of equal gender pay, kind of fascinating. And Wilhelmina Fleming complained about it, she was fond of him but she keeps a diary. Edward or charles, what did she named him . It was Charles Pickering fleming. She goes back to scotland to have his baby out of wedlock and she nurse named the baby after the observatory director. Thats significant how much she admired him. I got the sense that most of the women really were quite devoted to him in a lot of ways. They felt they were a very collegial group. They worked in close quarters, six days a week and they all socialized on saturday night. I mean, it has to be admitted that some of the work was toilsome. Truly toilsome. Once we get to this slide has all the numbers. They were working insane hours, it was a tedium involved from the task and you never get the sense, you get a sense of their fatigue at times. You never get a 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 and other things that we value socially and even pickering, even his attitude towards these women were, i felt from reading your history that science was going to benefit from his work and it made no sense. It made no sense to be concerned about anything else, whether they were women or anything at all and yet he did do them much less. Im going to get from Wilhelmina Flemings diary. She wrote, he seems to think the work is too much or too hard for me. No matter the responsibility or how many hours. I immediately told that i receive an excellent salary. If you would have everything you i have a home to keep as well as a family to keep as well as the men and then the women had no claims to such comfort and this is considered an enlightened age, she says. She was written right before women had the right to vote. She was living in. But it was very interesting is that this is a crucial point. We still live with this legacy of unequal gender pay. Women have to support their families to and its deeply rooted in our history, this idea. She starts to feel her work, over and over again, must not be of value if shes not paid equally. I thought that was very strong. Did you read her journals at all like to mark. When i was looking at the archive, i was focusing on the visual but i was drawn to the Annie Buchanan book, this amazing lineage of scrapbooks coming out of the current newspapers where they getting all this credit and the same story you heard, that they were unappreciated at the time, the story flips quickly when you see that theres this kind of seemingly unending source material of the newspaper clippings from all over the world of recognition of these women but at the same time when Wilhelmina Fleming passes away and Annie Buchanan comes the curator of the place, the president of harvard refuses to give her that title and. Different president. Yes. Until the new president that she assumes that its an acknowledged position. So shes knownworldwide. The classification system of that we use today and at the same time astronomers are writing and speaking openly that the president itself is not even recognizing this brilliant scientist within the corral at harvard so i was really fascinated by any jump cannon in the way that she visually recorded all of her travels through all of these incredible observatories and eclipses and comments, hunting. She was relentless. Theres so many great pictures of her. Im sorry, i dont have any of the pictures. Couldwe see the next slide . Here is an actual glass slide. Women typically work in pairs, one of them would be looking at the plate and speaking aloud, her observations through the recorder who would write things down. The glass plate, what was so innovative about the technology . We think of this as being an astronomical observation, emotions and almost photography. It was photography. These were glass negatives. And pickerings genius was to create this photographic archive which as we pointed out, in the building that was constructed specifically to hold them all. And to keepthem from fire. They were very aware of fire. Things use to burn down a lot. Not to scare you or anything. A lot of wood. So by introducing photography instead of observing through the telescope, you could collect a record over a period of hours and stars would show up that couldnt be seen through the telescope by the eye. And then photographs could be taken all through the night over time and you could study a series of photographs to watch how the stars changed over time. So all of this kind of work was new and thats why they needed so many women to be looking at the employees. Could we see the next slide . Whats amazing about the story that dave was talking about is that this is actually the record we have 100 years ago of looking at the sky itself so even though we are looking at archival material, this is relevant imagery because this is the birth of photography itself and some of the very first images of the sky were taken with the drapers and at harvard of different objects but it also is still relevant now. When new objects are discovered, they look back at the harvard record of what was in that part of the sky 100 years ago. And variable stars was one of the important discoveries that came out of this incredible catalog of information. But can you tell me about this . This is to scale so this is the shadow of a penny. This little tiny strip that you are seeing is the spectra of all the stars that were captured on the place, eight inches by 10 inches. And theres a prism over the telescope. So instead of seeing the stars as points of light, they are seeing the stars spread out into its component colors but its a blackandwhite photograph so you dont see your colors. So you just have to know blue is over here and it varies all the way to read. You are looking at it with a magnifying group and you are seeing the lines that are in the spectrum and from that, from the patterns of the lines reading a classification system, deciphering the chemicals, composition of the stars. Just as an aside but one of the most interesting discoveries which the discoverer, i cant remember which one of the women made the discovery but they didnt really believe it and this was the abundance of hydrogen. Its shocking if you look at the composition of the earth you dont think of hydrogen as being overwhelmingly abundant but we are the product of stars having synthesized heavier elements and spewing it back out into the universe to make a second and thirdgeneration material. But most of the universe she realized was still primordial hydrogen, you didnt think about the big bang, this is prior to all that but we know when the universe is created its mostly just hydrogen. We dont have the means to take down nitrogen and hydrogen until you make stars so this is a peak discovery that she made. And her colleagues, professional colleagues dismissed it. People bought the stars composition of the stars was not that of the earth and that the heavy elements would be more prevalent and the idea that the universe was not interested in the lightest two elements, it took only four years from her paper. From studying the spectra and noticing in the spectra theres evidence of hydrogen absorbing in particular color. So you look at the spectra and you say hydrogen is responsible for eliminating a particular color in the spectrum and isnt that how a lot of it was done . He really knew about a topic. She studied quantum physics. From the early days of quantum where people didnt know that the bright stars and quantum physics would be relevant in the interior stars in terms of explaining their histories. Whats also interesting is that her advisor had really discouraged her from publishing them there, in your book where she writes this beautiful phd peace and is talking about the abundance of hydrogen and theres this one sentence that she said this is probably not the case. Is probably a spurious result. She undermines herself what she does so under external pressure. She first thought this is what i observe. Sure. Its so counterintuitive. But whats so interesting as you point out in your book is its such a new subject that it wasnt so far out there for an astronomer to make a discovery and speculate at the same time because everything was just being discovered at that time. We should absolutely right and this again predates the predictions that led to the predictions of the big bang, and einstein turned talking about general relativity. Yes, but its close. Not in the vernacular of everybodys, einstein didnt believe in the big bang even. Even after he derived from his own theories so it was a long time between that and the universe was created and its very simple. Its one of the most elementary stuff. This is henry at 11. Who was looking at these magnificent images. Looking at images that had been taken from south america, if the whole sky had to be covered, there was a second observatory built in peru to photograph the stars of the Southern Hemisphere and she was looking at the