I just realized i didnt know if we did a sound check. If so glad to see everyone here. I love doing book events because weve got to keep us alive. Science books are the best. I want to think of the Simon Foundation for supporting all of our initiatives here where we do light events and private events that are science themed or science inspired. Its really with their support they were able to use these events to shout out to the simon. Woo hoo. I want to mention before i introduce our guest about the amateur Astronomers Association of new york will be out in the garden. [applause] its going to be out in the cold garden tonight with telescopes and helping us to view the skies and the claimant is that the clouds will clear write about exactly as we finish the last question. Will also have a book signing for the glass universe. Well have a book signing over here and do a little q a after our conversation. Let me introduce our guest. Im sure a lot of you have heard of our guest. I want to introduce deva sobel. Shes a bestselling author, superb writer and i heard you speak about her book longitude and you said it was your son who said what you are working on. I didnt think anyone was going to read it. He said no one is gonna read this mom. Totally bestselling book. Most recently, galileos daughter, was also very popular book and more so with acknowledged with the Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2000. Thats quite an honor. Most recently we have the glass universe which were here to talk about tonight. This is the story of the women of the Harvard College observatory, as will be talking about and lets welcome deva. We also have leah halloran, my pal, also known as the at the chapman university. He is a wonderful artist and by great synchronicity has worked with the glass plates that they vote worked about. Were lucky to have them in the very different perspective and one as an artist and i dont know if its okay to call you a historian but i think very much though in this book. You mind being called a historian . No, not at all. Pay. Youll answer to historian. Woo hoo. [applause] i did a terrible thing. I didnt bring my clicker. Can you advance the slides when i ask you to . Or can someone go up to my bag and get my clicker. Were little rough around the edges here. Lets go back to the first night for a second. Lets talk about this picture. Tonights conversation, the glass universe, is so named because of the glass plate that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of glass plates. 500,007 glass plates that the women of the women used as a innovated technique to study the universe. Many things are interesting about it scientifically, which will talk about, but of course obviously sociologically and before the women had the right to vote. I used to hear the story about pickering which ive relayed about this gaggle of women allegedly worked for Charles Pickering the director of the Harvard College observatory and the story i heard was that he was disgusted with his mail computers which was his astronomical calculators, my job made to do a better job. He allegedly fired all the men and hired scottish made who did a fine job. Is a popular tail. What is the real story . The real story is he already had some Women Computers and he also had a scottish made who had come to work for him on the resident side of the observatory as a pregnant woman no longer with her husband as he said any delicate condition. Abandoned by her husband. Pickering immediately she was too intelligent to be working as a maid, domestic servant so he moved her to the observatory and gave her copying work, computing work to do. Then she went on to become the first woman at harvard to have a university title. She was the curator of astronomical photographs. What year was she hired . She came to him around 1879, so he had been there two years. Then she had to go home to have the baby and came back. They list 1881 as the year she started. Fleming . This picture was taken in 1925 so she is no longer there, she had died. A lot of famous folks are in this picture including, annie joan kempen started the observatory in 1896. Which one is annie . Reporter she is seated next to the globe and shes looking down. Annie joan cannon was famous for her classification of stars. When you learn the types of stars you learn, zero be a fine girl me. Theres an acronym . There were in alphabetical order to begin with. Then characteristics of the stars required a juggling of the alphabet so theres a mnemonic device to help remember. Also in the picture is cecelia. Shes sitting at the drafting table. The first person person to earn an h phd in harvard. All the early graduate students were women because of this history and its because of pickering. Green had already died when education program. The gathering of women and wealthy women who paid for the research who also paid to establish fellowship for young women to work for the observatory for a year and then they could go out and work someone else. I thought it was amazing that i had to keep rereading it in your book to remember i understand it correctly. The first phd in astronomy and harvard went to Cecelia Payne . Who you just said. I remember rereading it did you mean the first women. I kept struggling with the Astronomy Program didnt exist in the expansion was to include men. Right. She was also the first chair, the first people chair at any department in harvard. She on to teach at harvard in the Astronomy Department and oversee the very first mail phd candidates. Then 40 years later shes awarded astronomy chair. Theres a lot of resistance to hiring giving them titles other than computers or assistance. This was a euphemism even though they were mathematicians or astronomers. Lets do the next light. Who do we have in the fight . Standing in the back overseen is Celia Fleming who are we talking about it first. She supervised other women. She hired other women to. Yes, she started the great expansion of the female staff happen because of, Anna Palmer Draper was planning to do a serious project with her husband but 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 the Research Program in exchange for having the Program Named for her husband. This was lifelong . She continued for decades. Lets talk about pickering himself . Wheres pickering himself. He was about 30 years old in this picture when he took over at the observatory. A physicist and that was kind of a scandal, why were they hiring a physicist in the observatory speemac, new how many years with you there . Fortytwo. Its interesting i was because he hired this woman in a compromise position as you say to be a maid. Pickering, as i think about, i picture him as a feminist in some way. He could hypothesize about women breaking boundaries but if he simply saw the talent, he accepted it without any hesitation. Is that a fair . Yes. He hired women and encouraging 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. Youve also looks a lot of history. He also encourage women to publish under their own name. If you are a computer working you are part of the bigger discovery that was being made he would encourage and push women to be in the harvard annals. People responded to that thing easily. Interestingly, he had pretty severe limitations. He said things like and im quoting from your book where he says, women with a knack for figure accommodated in the computing room where their credits the profession. This is a strong thing to say but he prefaces that by saying, while it would be unseemly im quoting him not you to subject a lady not to the cold of telescope observing but he goes on to say though women with neck for figures to be computers. He couldnt conceive of them as operating the scopes. Keychains. When ms. Cannon came she was the first woman to use the telescope. I was just trying to say that he saw them as being valuable. He also didnt financially value them equally as mail computers. Thats an important part of the story that on one hand he saying this is a great opportunity for you and for women that are getting out of the rise of women colleges but at the same time the harvard computer, the female computers are paid less than half of the male counterparts for doing the same work to yes, i have the numbers here. Twentyfive cents an hour they were paid. In your book you said you could times that by 285 to get the current amount and i did the math it was they were making 6. 6 an hour. It came to 1500 a year, not scaling up for inflation. While the men were paid the men who had not been fired, unlike the apocryphal story they were garnering 2500. Year. They were completely in support of an gendered pay. Its fascinating. They made complaints about it and shes clearly fond of him but she keeps a diary she names her son after him as well. Edward or charles . He was edward Charles Pickering fleming. C had the baby out of wedlock and she named him after the observatory director, that significant about how much she admired him. I found that most of the women of the observatory really were quite devoted to him in some ways. They were a very collegial group. They worked in close quarters, six days a week and they socialized on saturday night. Thats tough. [laughter] that has to be admitted that the work was toilsome. Yes. Once we get to the slide will have all the numbers. They were working insane hours, incredible there is a good deal of tedium involved in the task and you never got the sense you got the sense that they were fatigued at time. You never get the sense that they are ungrateful or that their resentful of the men. They were well aware that they were involved in groundbreaking research. They felt, including pickering, that science was more important than the other luxuries or other sort of things that we value socially. Pickering, even his attitude toward these women, i felt from reading his history was that science is going to benefit from this work and it made no sense to be concerned about anything else about whether they were women it may no sense at all. Except he paid them much less. I will read this from his diary, he seems to think that no work is too much, or too hard for me. The. No matter what the responsibility or how long the hours. Let me raise the question of salary and im immediately told that i receive an excellent salary as womens sour sand. Does he not know that i have a home to keep an a family to keep as well as the men. Im surprised women have no claims to such comfort. This is considered an enlightened age, she says. This entry was written right before the women had the right to vote. She was living in. It was very interesting that this is an critical. And we will live with this legacy of on equal gender pay. Women have to support their families to and this is deeply rooted in our history, this idea. Starts to feel that her work while shes told over and over that its valuable must not be if shes not paid equally. I thought this was very strong. Did you read her journals, leah . I was so focused on the visuals that i was drawn to the annie joan cannon scrapbook and archives because its amazing lineage and history of scrapbooks that annie is putting out of the current newspapers where theyre getting all this credit and the story that i heard, the themes are you heard is that they were unappreciated in their time, story flips quickly when you see that theres a seemingly unending source material of newspaper clippings from all over the world of recognition of these women but at the same time when Wilhelmina Fleming passes away and her successor annie joan cannon becomes a curator of the astronomical place the president of to give her the title. She. It was a different president. Its not until the new president that she assumes the acknowledged position. So shes known worldwide and had set the classification system of stars that we still used today but at the same time, astronomers are speaking openly that the president himself is not even recognizing this brilliant scientist within the corral at harvard. I was really fascinated i annie joan cannon in the way see visually recorded all of her travel to these incredible observatories and lenses and comments in hunting. She was relentless. There so many pictures of her on horses. I wish i had those pictures. We have the next night . Heres a picture of the actual glass plate. Women worked in pairs and one would be looking at the plate and speaking aloud her observation to regular recorder who would write things down. The glass plates what was so innovative about the technology . We think about it is using emotions and almost photography. It was photography. These were glass negatives and pickerings genius was to create this photographic archive which still exists as leah pointed out. All half a million glass plates are today in the building that it was constructed to hold them all and to keep them safe from fire. People were very worried about fire. Things used to burn down a lot, like in colonial. By introducing photography and 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 can study a series of photographs to see how the stars changed over time. All of this kind of work was new and they needed so many women to be looking back we see the next slide . Leah go ahead. Whats amazing about this story that dava is talking about that this is the record about we have 100 years ago about looking at the sky itself. Even though were looking at archival material this is still very relevant imagery because this is the birth of photography itself. Some of the very first images of the sky were taken with the draper and at harvard different objects. Its relevant now. When new objects are discovered it pays to look back at the harvard record and see what was in that part of the sky 100 years ago ago. And variable stars were one of the most important discoveries that came out of this incredible catalog of information. Can you tell me about this . Shadow is a penny and this little tiny strips that you seen are the specter of all the stars that were captured on this plate. The plates about 8 inches by 10 inches and theres a prism over the telescope. Instead of seen the stars as points of light, youre seeing the light spread out into its component colors. If the blackandwhite photograph you dont see the colors. So you just have to know blue is over here and it varies all the way to read. Right. Looking it at a magnifying loop and you see the lines that are in the spectra and from that, the patterns of alliance, creating a classification system , deciphering the chemical composition of the stars. One of the most interesting discoveries, discoverer and i cant remember which one of the women made the discovery but the discoverer that didnt really believe it and that was the abundance of hydrogen. Remind me . You. It shocking if you look at the composition of the earth we dont because hydrogen is being overwhelmingly abundant but where the product of stars having synthesized, and having your elements youd back out into the universe to make second and thirdgeneration material. Most of the universe is prime or early hydrogen. She didnt think about the big bang, the spry at but what we now know is when the universe was created, it was mostly hydrogen. You dont have the means to make carbon and oxygen and nitrogen until you make stars. This is a deep discovery that she made. Her colleagues, professional colleagues, dismissed it. People thought the stars composition of the stars would match that of the earth. That they have a elements would be more trouble and in the idea that most of the universe consisted of the two vital elements seemed ridiculous. Its only four years from her paper. And by setting the spectra and noticing in the spectra that theres evidence of hydrogen observing a particular color and so you look at the spectra and you say hydrogen is responsible for eliminating particular color in the spectrum and isnt that a lot how it was done . Is it fair to say . She knew about atomic physics. These are the early days of quantum physics. They didnt know they would be relevant in the interior of stars in terms of explaining our history. Whats interesting about that is that her advisor had discouraged her from publishing in such a way that thats probably not the case so in your book where she writes us to full phd thesis and shes talking about the abundance of hydrogen and theres this one sentence where she says which is probably not the case which undermines a spurious result. She undermines himself to external pressure. At first he thought this is what i observed. Sheet questioned it to. Is 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 been discovered at that time. Now we realize she was absolutely right and this predates einsteins prediction that led to the predictions of the big bang im not exactly sure the year. 191619 talks about both close but but its not in the vernacular of everybodys einstein didnt believe in the big bang. Even after people tried to from his own theories so its a long time between that and people understanding the created universe. Its pretty amazing. Can we see the next slide . This is Henrietta Levitt who was looking at and will get to these magnificent images looking at images taken from south america because the whole sky had to be covered there was a second observatory built in peru to photograph the stars of the southern hemisphere. He was looking at images of the clouds and she discovered thousands of variable stars and made a fundamental discovery about the pattern and variation that the stars the longest time to go through their cycles tended to be the brightest stars and she figured all of the stars that she was looking at were roughly the same distance away. The ones that look brighter were really brighter. That observation led to the first usable yardstick for measuring what we would call galactic distances and intergalactic distances in space. Her work enabled the size of the milky way to be determined and i may be getting ahead of the slides here but she figured out the milky way was not the only galaxy in the universe. That the universe in fact consisted of multiple galaxies. So would be fair to say that at that time they werent sure if the universe was maybe just a few hundred thousand lightyears across maybe that was it. In the shape of the