The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel (Epub)

Description

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women’s colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates.

The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair.

Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.

User’s Reviews

Named one of the best books of the month by Flavorwire, Bustle, Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Refinery29, Men’s Journal, BBC, and The National Book

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ I was hoping for more from this book considering it was a 2017 New York Times Notable book than what I got. The book does describe the contributions of the many women who worked at the Harvard Observatory from the late 1800s to the early 1950s. Those contributions were significant. (Even though they were grossly underpaid for what sure seems like scut work to me.) And it was nice to see women get an opportunity in a technical field during that era. So, yes, Sobel does a good job of describing their contributions. But her narrative is on the dry side. I’m a big astronomy fan so I liked this book. But I think if you are coming at this book from the “women in science” viewpoint rather than from the science viewpoint, you’re going to find this history a little tedious. Recommended for science and astronomy buffs. Recommended with reservations (for the dry narrative) for others.

⭐ Like earlier books by Dava Sobel (Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter) this book gives opportunities to learn about the history of science, blending little-known facts of astronomical and astrophysical discovery and invention, with the appreciation of underappreciated folks, in this case the women “computers” of Harvard Observatory. These women worked for a fraction of what men would get, initially without any title, recognition or reward. Yet they laid the foundation of the modern understanding of star structure, lifecycle, and evolution. We meet on a personal level such giants as Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941), inventor of the well-known star classes, O-B-A-F-G-K-M, Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) who established the Cepheid variable relation that enabled the gauging of our galaxy and other nearby galaxies, and Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) who first established that hydrogen dominates the composition of stars, and provided the first estimates of many other trace elements of the stars, and that was in her Ph.D. thesis, when she was just getting started! We also learn of instances of insensitivity to these women from certain well-known male scientists of the time, but also much encouraging forward-looking behavior of certain directors of the Harvard Observatory, such as Pickering and Shapley, which lends inspiration from which we men of our own time might learn. An engaging, inspiring, and exciting read!

⭐ I’ve read Dava Sobel before, so I was prepared to like the book. But I was amazed by how beautifully she describes the work and lives of these 19th century women who really jump-started astronomy. Their dedication to knowledge is stunning. Equally stunning (to me, anyway) was the attitude of the men they worked with and for. I kept waiting for the “don’t give her credit, she’s just a woman” attitude that was prevalent in the 20th century, but the vast majority of their male colleagues were supportive, giving credit where due, giving them honorary memberships where “real” ones weren’t possible, inviting amateurs (especially those who funded the enterprise) to play meaningful roles in the work. I was riveted from start to finish.

⭐ This is a well researched depiction of the history of the observatory program at Harvard University at the turn of the 20th century with an emphasis on the role played by women in the research and scholarly publications by the university. Written in a conversational style and aimed at general readers, this is an engaging story of clues and discoveries made possible by the ambitious astro photographic efforts of the Harvard Observatories and the contributions made by “computers” primarily women who examined, measured and cataloged the glass plate astro photographs, hence the title “Glass Universe”. In so doing, critical understandings and the organization of astronomical knowledge became the foundation for astrophysical discoveries made at Harvard and at other observatories including Mt. Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, CA. This book can be particularly enlightening to high school age readers who are interested in discovering role models for women in science.

⭐ This beautiful book tells the story of the women who helped define “Modern Cosmology.”This book is important because other people have mainly received the credit for this great intellectual achievement. “Modern Cosmology” and the atomic structure of matter are two of the greatest intellectual achievements of human beings.From my review of Robert Smiths “The Expanding Universe- Astronomy’s ‘Great Debate’ 1900-1931:”Hubble gets all the credit but many other people made significant contributions to the discovery of the “Expanding Universe” which are contained in this great book. For instance:Miss Henrietta Leavitt at Harvard College Observatory, who (in about 1908) first proposed a fundamental hypothesis that Cepheids variables exhibit a relationship between the periods of their light variation and their absolute magnitudes. However, Hertzsprung calibrated the relationship between period and luminosity. This information was used to “secure the distances to those aggregates of stars,” (the Small Magellanic Cloud). “The Expanding Universe,” (1982), Robert Smith, page 71. As I said, a lot of other people were involved in this pursuit, but Hubble got all of the credit.”See also Robert Osserman’s “Poetry of the Universe- A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos,” (1995), which is a beautiful book (see my review of same). The unannotated footnotes in the back of the book are crucial, but difficult to read, but are worth the effort.See also John Farrell’s “The Day Without Yesterday- Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology,” (2005), which is also highly recommended.

⭐ In “The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars”, Dava Sobel examines the spectroscopy work performed at Harvard under the auspices of the Henry Draper Memorial. Sobel’s narrative begins with the work of Draper, who took spectroscopic photographs of the stars through a telescope, but died before having the opportunity to examine them. His widow, wishing to see the work completed, endowed the Harvard Observatory with a grant to catalogue the images and make further photographic and spectroscopic examinations, leading to the discovery of the chemical nature of the stars. Sobel’s work examines the lives and work of the women who worked as computers, counting the Fraunhofer lines on the stellar spectra and creating a system to interpret it. Most interesting of all, despite working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a field dominated by men, the ladies and their contributions were recognized both in the United States and abroad. Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming, who worked as a maid before establishing a system to classify the stars, and Annie Jump Cannon, a Wellesley graduate, both stand out in this narrative for their dedication and exactitude in their work as well as their lasting contributions to science. The history Sobel examines is fundamental to our understanding of the universe and so has appeared before, in “Cosmos” and Alan Hirshfeld’s “Starlight Detectives”, but her examination brings an unprecedented level of detail that demonstrates the significance of the women of the Harvard Observatory in their own time along with the challenges they faced, often working on a shoestring budget or without pay. Beyond her subjects’ research, Sobel explores the nature of academia and academic funding in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how research that would easily receive university and financial support in the twentieth century struggled at times in the era on which she focuses. Sobel’s title refers to the massive collection of glass photographic plates accumulated in the Harvard collection as a result of their research (pg. 203). The research and writing are everything readers expect of Sobel and a delight to delve into, sharing in her narrative. Though unrelated to Sobel’s work, the appearance of the book is rather lovely as well.

⭐ I read this book for a book club that I am in. If you are a physicist or astronomer, you will probably enjoy the story because it is well researched and describes women’s significant contributions to astronomy. If you are not in those fields, then you will probably find this book tedious and frustrating. A chronology of the events would probably have been as interesting as the book.

⭐ The Glass Universe tells the thrilling (yes, I’m using that term advisedly) story of how women drove some of the major advances in the science of astronomy. Today, we believe we know the age of the universe (13.7 billion years, plus or minus 100 million), the size of the universe, and the contents and theory of how the stars shine. The women of the Harvard Observatory, among others, helped us find these answers.In a time where science was dominated by men, and women had no place, astronomy was different. Women worked as computers, a name for people who computed rather than the machine we use today, though a better description of their work may have been analysts. They examined photographic plates produced by the large telescopes operated by Harvard and measured position, brightness, and variability. Henrietta Swan Leavitt deduced during her examination of plates of the Magellanic Clouds that a variable star’s (a star that vary their brightness over time) intrinsic brightness is related to its period (the time it takes for the star to come to full brightness, fade, and return to full brightness). This one insight allowed astronomers to measure distances to the stars, and thereby begin the process of measuring the whole of the observable universe.Anyone interested in the history of women in science would enjoy this thoroughly researched, and lyrical work by Dava Sobel. Any young woman interested in a career in science would be inspired by it. For the rest of us, this is an upbeat, insightful, and hopeful work that shows the work of exploration is not just for the boys anymore.

⭐ If you enjoy astronomy, you will be delighted to read this history book about the discovery of such fundamental knowledge like Cepheids and methods to determine distance. But, it is terrific to read about the large numbers of women who staffed the Harvard astronomical research and the honors they were given for their work. Who knew?? Also, we in my generation don’t appreciate how recent certain discoveries have been. In the early 20th century, they still were debating the size of the Milky Way and arguing if there was a bigger universe. Great reading. Also enjoy Longitude by this same author. Great writer.

⭐ This year’s Oscars put the attention on the women computers who helped NASA get to the Moon in the 1960s but even before NASA there was another group of female computers who were responsible for many of the systems we use today to classify stars.Sobel does an excellent job of telling these ladies stories in The Glass Universe. This book is very science heavy but the author writes in such a way that a non-science person can understand.It is also very people heavy and sometimes the story can get lost in all these women’s threads but you still come away with an understanding of who these women were and how the work they were doing for Harvard was pretty revolutionary for the time.A must read for fans of astronomy, science, women’s history or history in general.

Keywords

Free Download The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars in Epub format
The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars Epub Free Download
Download The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars 2016 Epub Free
The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars 2016 Epub Free Download
Download The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars Epub
Free Download Ebook The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars