Dava Sobel: The Women Who Brought the Stars to Earth

Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

Bobi NYC

Science, Society & Culture, Comedy

4.8 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Starting in the late 19th century, a group of women at the Harvard Observatory pored over hundreds of thousands of glass photographic plates bearing images of billions of stars. It was the beginning of a revolution in understanding what stars are made of and how far away they are.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.
0:15.8	Willamina Patton-Stevens Fleming. Was this Fleming if she was known around the observatory?
0:23.3	She had taken the main job because she was really in distress. She was a recent immigrant from Scotland.
0:33.3	She was pregnant. She was on her own. Pickering and his wife immediately realized that she was intelligent.
0:42.0	She had taught school in Scotland. So they just moved her into the observatory and taught her how to do the work.
0:49.7	But this was the first time people were using photographs of spectra to try to create a classification system for the stars.
1:00.4	Is it known how many stars she categorized? At least 10,000. And she published that about 1890.
1:08.4	That's David Sobel. Over the course of several books about the history of astronomy,
1:14.6	she's woven wonderful tales of people who made the discoveries that revolutionized our understanding of the heavens.
1:21.6	Her most recent book is not only Clear and Vivid. It also shines a light on the subject that I think is really important.
1:29.4	That the role that women have played in science is all too often ignored.
1:34.3	The book's title, The Glass Universe, refers to a collection of hundreds of thousands of photographic glass plates.
1:42.0	They revealed new information about stars that a group of women in the late 19th century played a key role in interpreting.
1:52.0	This is so great to be talking with you because you do something so wonderful in the book The Glass Universe.
1:58.8	You hooked me on the characters and what was happening in their lives as people.
2:04.9	And then I cared about their achievements even more.
2:08.6	Oh, thank you. I think that's so important, especially with a complex subject to realize that the people doing that work
2:18.7	are just people. They have love lives. They have problems. There's an old sense of scientists as people who are just
2:27.5	interested in facts that that persists. Do you find that?
2:32.0	Yeah, it takes the blood and pain and anxiety out of it.
2:37.2	And there's a lot in it.
2:38.4	Kind of gives you the answers before you ask the question.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bobi NYC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Bobi NYC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.