Dava Sobel-The Glass Universe

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of the Avid Reader. Today we are happy to have as our guest Dava Sobel, author of The Glass Universe: How The Ladies Of The Harvard Observatory Took The Measure Of The Stars, published just last week by Viking.Ms. Sobel is a prolific author whose books I have enjoyed immensely over the years including Galileo’s Daughter, Longitude, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven and others and I am automatically in love with anyone who writes about leap seconds and the transit of Venus. Many of her works have been translated into film as documentaries for Nova and Granada.The Glass Universe tells a story, lovingly, of a romance that began with a husband and wife and their devoted life of science and moves forward with a romance that deals with the search for meaning and essence in the night sky.The women of the Harvard Observatory, a veritable Harem if you will (and that is what they were called) culled through countless photographic plates coated with emulsion that accurately transcribed the night sky through painstaking and hour long exposures taken by their male counterparts night after night through various observatories. From the first photograph of a star (Vega), to the discovery of novae and variable stars, to coupled or double stars, these women immortalized by Ms. Sobel achieved a place in astronomical science that gave us the shoulders of giants upon which we now stand.The spectroscopic views that the plates give us provide a veritable window into the makeup of our universe. Chemist’s arms became a million or a billion miles long and hydrogen, helium, calcium, oxygen were winnowed out from these glass plates of which they were 100s of thousands. Now Ms. Sobel shows us the lives of those women through their work and through their personal and sometimes very emotional lives. And the result is a book that reminds us that it is sometimes the man behind the mirror, after all and the woman behind the glass that make all the difference in our understanding of the universe and how we are here. And isn’t that really the actual reason WHY we are here in the first place?Welcome Dava. Thank you so much for joining us today.