[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