A History of Women in Astronomy and Space… by Dale DeBakcsy (.ePUB)
File Size: 11 MB
A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration: Exploring the Trailblazers of STEM by Dale DeBakcsy
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 11 mb
Overview: The first history of women astronomers in English to cover women from antiquity to the modern day.
For the last four hundred years, women have played a part far in excess of their numerical representation in the history of astronomical research and discovery. It was a woman who gave us our first tool for measuring the distances between stars, and another who told us for the first time what those stars were made of. It was women who first noticed the rhythmic noise of a pulsar, the temperature discrepancy that announced the existence of white dwarf stars, and the irregularities in galactic motion that informed us that the universe we see might be only a small part of the universe that exists.
And yet, in spite of the magnitude of their achievements, for centuries women were treated as essentially second class citizens within the astronomical community, contained in back rooms, forbidden from communicating with their male colleagues, provided with repetitive and menial tasks, and paid starvation wages. This book tells the tale of how, in spite of all those impediments, women managed, by sheer determination and genius, to unlock the secrets of the night sky. It is the story of some of science’s most hallowed names – Maria Mitchell, Caroline Herschel, Vera Rubin, Nancy Grace Roman, and Jocelyn Bell-Burnell – and also the story of scientists whose accomplishments were great, but whose names have faded through lack of use – Queen Seondeok of Korea, who built an observatory in the 7th century that still stands today, Wang Zhenyi, who brought heliocentrism to China, Margaret Huggins, who perfected the techniques that allowed us to photograph stellar spectra and thereby completely changed the direction of modern astronomy, and Hisako Koyama, whose multi-decade study of the sun’s surface is as impressive a feat of steadfast scientific dedication as it is a rigorous and valuable treasure trove of solar data.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs
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