22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Forgotten Astronomer, July 2, 2005
If you look up at the night sky (unobscured, if possible, by city lights), you cannot help but see that some stars are bright and some are barely perceptible. There are explanations for these differences; a bright star may be an ordinary star but simply closer, or a bright star might be at an ordinary distance but simply bigger. A big part of the challenge of astronomy is trying to figure out just this sort of problem, because it involves basic measurements of our universe. One of the greatest breakthroughs on the way to understanding how to measure stellar distances was made by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and if you have never heard this name, there are many reasons, all of them a little embarrassing. In _Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe_ (Atlas Books / W. W. Norton), George Johnson has brought Leavitt to us, so that we can consider what she accomplished, and why she remains obscure. There is not actually much material on Leavitt here; this is a small book to begin with, and few of the pages actually have to do with her life. Johnson himself says she deserves a proper biography, but unless some heretofore secret material is found, she won't get one. She didn't leave diaries or memoirs, and there are few letters. What she left astronomers was a celestial yardstick, and it was used to change fundamentally our knowledge of the size and age of the universe we inhabit.
Photography became a great help in astronomy, and eventually Harvard had a half million glass plates that were a precise a record of the night sky. But this was very raw data. To analyze the images, the director of the Harvard observatory, Edward Pickering, employed computers. A computer at that time was not an electronic gadget, but a human, a person who was hired to compute, when computing was monotonous and repetitive work. Leavitt was merely a computer, paid a minimal wage to do the drudgery of looking at the plates and toting up the brightness, color, and position star by star. Astronomy certainly was benefited by Leavitt's powers of observation, but she is one of the greats in astronomy because she organized her observations in an exceedingly useful and explicatory way. She concentrated her thinking on variables known as Cepheids (the first one having been found a hundred years before in the constellation Cepheus). She tallied up these stars, their brightness, and their rate of variation, and found that rate varied with brightness. A Cepheid that had a certain rate had a certain brightness, and this was the case whether it was distant or close. If two stars of the same rate appeared to have different brightness, it was only a matter of their different distances. Astronomers had a new measuring tool.
Johnson's book explains how over the centuries astronomers first were able to measure the size of the Earth, then the distance to the Moon, to the Sun, to more distant stars, and to galaxies. He shows Leavitt's finding as essential in the later measurements, and his explanations are clear and make good use of imaginative analogies. He also shows how her work was fundamental in changing our knowledge of the basic structure of the universe. We had already come to understand that we were not the center of the solar system, but Leavitt's discovery was crucial in our further understanding that the Milky Way was not the entire universe and that there were "island universes" or other galaxies beyond it. This book is actually a small history of astronomy. It is sad that it can contain so little about Leavitt herself. She never married and she died when she was 53. The clearest description we get of her personality is a few lines from her obituary: she "took life seriously," but "was possessed of a nature so full of sunshine that, to her, all of life became beautiful and full of meaning." Part of the problem, of course, was that as a woman, even though she has every right to be known as an important astronomer, she was assigned to lowly tasks. Even so, she carried them out with thoroughness and with the clarity of observation and spark of imagination that brings on scientific revolutions.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An honored place on every woman's (and man's) bookshelf..., July 3, 2005
No study of history - no study of scientific discovery - is complete without recognizing how women helped shaped our knowledge of the world, the heavens and society. As more and more women, such as "Miss Leavitt," are recognized for their dediction to scientific discovery and other endeavors - just imagine what wonderful insights we have yet to learn! Too many of these stories remain untold. Thank you George Johnson for telling this one. "Miss Leavitt's Stars" belongs on every young woman's bookshelf and should be read to even the youngest girls - so she, too, may reach for the stars. (Review by: Marion E. Gold, author of "Top Cops: Profiles of Women in Command" and "Personal Publicity Planner: A Guide to Marketing YOU.")
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