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Oct. 31st, 2017 09:24 pmBook Review: The Glass Universe, by Dava Sobel
It's always good to discover a book in the work book sale that's already on my "to-read" list. This is the story of the women who analysed astronomical photographs at Harvard from the late nineteenth century through to the Second World War and who were, in common with people in other disciplines doing calcultions, often referred to as "computers".
Dava Sobel begins with the death of Dr Henry Draper in 1882, which led Mrs Draper to fund work related to his research and practice in the early years of astrophotography and spectroscopy. Ultimately, the result of this was the Henry Draper star catalogue, by which many stars (prefixed "HD") are known today. In this emerging discipline various discoveries were made, such as spectroscopic binaries, Cepheid variable stars, the element helium, the elemental distribution in stars, and red-shift. As the computing power behind the analysis of photographs, many of these discoveries were by women, though poorly paid and clearly regarded as second-class citizens in the academic community. I'd previously been aware of the work of Henrietta Leavitt (whose period-luminosity law for variable stars was of fundamental importance in Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe and settling the question of "the nebulae"), but there are many other names in this book that deserve to be better known too, such as Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne.
The book combines the story of these women with the story of the Harvard Observatory, and its outposts in South America and later South Africa, and with general astronomical topics and progress of the time, such as eclipse observations, stellar classifications, national and international relations in astronomy, and the perennially parlous state of funding for research. Whilst these are all interesting topics and provide a necessary background for the work of the computers, the end result can be a bit dry and does somewhat lack the focus that a book on a single individual would have.
It's always good to discover a book in the work book sale that's already on my "to-read" list. This is the story of the women who analysed astronomical photographs at Harvard from the late nineteenth century through to the Second World War and who were, in common with people in other disciplines doing calcultions, often referred to as "computers".
Dava Sobel begins with the death of Dr Henry Draper in 1882, which led Mrs Draper to fund work related to his research and practice in the early years of astrophotography and spectroscopy. Ultimately, the result of this was the Henry Draper star catalogue, by which many stars (prefixed "HD") are known today. In this emerging discipline various discoveries were made, such as spectroscopic binaries, Cepheid variable stars, the element helium, the elemental distribution in stars, and red-shift. As the computing power behind the analysis of photographs, many of these discoveries were by women, though poorly paid and clearly regarded as second-class citizens in the academic community. I'd previously been aware of the work of Henrietta Leavitt (whose period-luminosity law for variable stars was of fundamental importance in Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe and settling the question of "the nebulae"), but there are many other names in this book that deserve to be better known too, such as Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne.
The book combines the story of these women with the story of the Harvard Observatory, and its outposts in South America and later South Africa, and with general astronomical topics and progress of the time, such as eclipse observations, stellar classifications, national and international relations in astronomy, and the perennially parlous state of funding for research. Whilst these are all interesting topics and provide a necessary background for the work of the computers, the end result can be a bit dry and does somewhat lack the focus that a book on a single individual would have.