Ashley Yeager: The Brilliant Legacy of Astronomer Vera Rubin (#175)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Science, Physics, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ashley Yeager is an associate editor at The Scientist. Previously, she worked as a freelance writer, editor and multimedia producer, and also at the Simons Foundation as a science writer, at Science News as a web producer and at Duke University as a writer and multimedia producer. She has an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee and a master's in science writing from MIT. She co-chairs the education committee of the National Association of Science Writers. Twitter: @ashleyjyeager In Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond, Ashley Jean Yeager tells the story of Rubin's life and work, recounting her persistence despite early dismissals of her work and widespread sexism in science. Yeager describes Rubin's childhood fascination with stars, her education at Vassar and Cornell, and her marriage to a fellow scientist. At first, Rubin wasn't taken seriously; she was a rarity, a woman in science, and her findings seemed almost incredible. Some observatories in midcentury America restricted women from using their large telescopes; Rubin was unable to collect her own data until a decade after she had earned her PhD. Still, she continued her groundbreaking work, driving a scientific revolution. She received the National Medal of Science in 1993, but never the Nobel Prize—perhaps overlooked because of her gender. She's since been memorialized with a ridge on Mars, an asteroid, a galaxy, and most recently, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory—the first national observatory named after a woman. 00:00:00 Intro 00:03:57 Vera Rubin as a Scientist. 00:09:27 Contributions of the people that supported Vera Rubin. 00:11:09 Vera Rubin during WWII 00:15:17 The rotational model of the universe. 00:18:57 The Vassar College Plot! Did Vera "discover" dark matter first? 00:22:26 The methods of Vera Rubin and her collaboration with Kent Ford 00:25:48 How did Vera Rubin finall gain acceptance of the dark matter phenomenon? 00:34:50 Vera Rubin as an advocate for women in science. Support our Sponsors LinkedIn Jobs! Use this link to post your first job ad for FREE LinkedIn.com/impossible biOptimizers for better sleep https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
0:07.0	So today we are joined with a phenomenal writer, a deep thinker, and someone who is incredibly astute about the history of astronomy and physics and has profiled one of the Titans of all-time astronomy but in the particular last 50 or so years and
0:26.4	that's Ashley Yeager who's joining us all the way from North Carolina
0:30.2	Ashley how are you doing today? Thank you for joining us.
0:33.0	Thank you so much for having me.
0:35.0	I am, I'm super excited to be here and I look forward to talking about
0:41.0	Dark Matter and Vera Rubin and the history of astronomy.
0:43.6	These are all things that I've been reading and thinking about since I did my
0:47.8	graduate work, so I'm excited to share more.
0:50.5	Yes, and you are a renowned writer and member of the scientific writing community, but also an expert on the topic
0:58.7	on the subject matter.
1:00.1	And I always like to begin my episodes with authors who are joining me.
1:04.8	Honor me by coming on like yourself is play a game called ignoring advice.
1:10.0	So the advice that we always get, right, Ashley, is,
1:12.7	don't judge a book by its cover.
1:14.3	Why would you do that?
1:15.7	But in most cases, it's the one thing
1:18.5	that you have to go on.
1:19.7	How do you know the book is good?
1:20.7	Unless you know the author, you know she she or he has written something before I hadn't done that and the publisher wouldn't let me or most authors really touch the cover.
1:29.2	But this is an MIT press another MIT press smash soon to come out.
1:35.0	And I just wanted to play that little game with you.
	...

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