In the early years, they were married to their work, but after the Depression, many balanced marriage and children with six-day weeks at the Observatory. Pickering and Shapley come across as smart, diligent, and decent - two scientists with a firm commitment to collaborative research, documentation over theorizing, the free sharing of information, and an insistence on crediting the hard-working women who made so many discoveries that paved the way for modern astrophysics.Īs for the women - some of whose names are still respected in the field - their fortitude and devotion are nothing short of amazing. Sobel lucidly captures the intricate, interdependent constellation of people it took to unlock mysteries of the stars, including their chemical composition and their distances across space.
Sobel lucidly captures the intricate, interdependent constellation of people it took to unlock mysteries of the stars.
Their pioneering efforts in astronomy included the creation of research grants and academic fellowships specifically for women - which, along with the Observatory's groundbreaking work in photographing and studying stellar spectra, benefited from the patronage of two widowed heiresses, Anna Palmer Draper and Catherine Wolfe Bruce. They were also fortunate to toil under the aegis of two forward-thinking men, Edward Pickering and Harlow Shapley, whose successive directorships of the Observatory spanned the years from 1877 to 1952. "The work," Sobel writes in her eye-opening chronicle, "demanded both scrupulous attention to detail and a large capacity for tedium."īut, as Sobel points out, these "willing slaves to routine" were fortunate to have the work when opportunities in science were rare for women. They were assistants, or human "computers" - math whizzes, devoted stargazers, and later physics and astronomy majors (and PhD's) who studied, compared, classified and catalogued data about stars that had been photographed by men on thousands of glass plates. The ladies who worked at the Harvard College Observatory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not initially called astronomers it took decades for their "important leaps in celestial knowledge" to earn them that designation.
Even more than her 1999 book Galileo's Daughter, this new work highlights women's often under-appreciated role in the history of science. By translating complex information into manageable bites sweetened with human interest stories, Sobel makes hard science palatable for the general audience. How?ĭava Sobel is as adept at spotting promising subject matter as the extraordinary women astronomers she writes about in The Glass Universe were at spotting variable stars. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Glass Universe Subtitle How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars Author Dava Sobel
0 kommentar(er)
