It gives me great pleasure to welcome you
to this Ada Lovelace Day lecture, where we
will be learning about women in science from
my colleague Dr Helen Klus. Ada Lovelace Day
Is a day all about celebrating the achievements
of women in STEM, and it fits very much with
the purpose of the mission of the Royal Astronomical
Society.
We’re here to promote the understanding
and study of astronomy and geophysics but
we also want astronomers and geophysics to
better reflect society, and for anyone to
be able to participate better in these sciences,
no matter what their sex, gender, ethnicity,
or ability. So Ada Lovelace is really important
to us.
Dr Helen Klus, our colleague, before she came
here she completed a PhD in physics at the University
of Southampton, specialising in neutron stars
and before did a master’s in philosophy
of physics at the University of Leeds.
She has a prize in science writing, she was
shortlisted for a by the Wellcome Trust and
since she has been working here, one of her
most notable contributions has been to diversity work.
Especially her initiative to set up her twitter
account tweeting about one women in science
a day for a whole year. I have learnt so much
from Helen, and I’m so pleased that she’ll
be sharing this with you this evening, and
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate
Ada Lovelace Day. Helen.
Thank you.
Hello.
Right, I’m Helen, as Sian says, I’m going
to talk to you today about how women have
shaped the history of astronomy, and our understanding
of the universe.
Then, at the end, I’ll talk very briefly
about how this has led to the situation we
are in now, and what we can do to possibly
improve things.
So first of all, imagine if you were born
thousands of years ago before civilisation.
There would be no skyline, no light pollution,
and when it got dark, it would really go dark.
So people noticed that the stars for a pattern.
They form a circle around the Northern Star
or the Southern Cross.
And people like to find patterns in things,
so people could see patterns in the stars
in a similar way to how you can see patterns
in clouds.
We call these patterns constellations, and
these act like signposts on a map, so you
could navigate at night where there’s no
landmarks, or crossing the oceans.
So there's evidence that people crossed the oceans about 65,000 years ago.
So this is so long ago that we weren’t even
the only people on Earth back then.
We shared the Earth with another type of human called
Neanderthals. And these died out only about
30,000 years ago. So I think it’s reasonable to say that Neanderthals may also have been astronomers.
So we do know that somebody carved what we
think is a prehistoric constellation into
a mammoth tusk about 32,000 years ago – and
we think this is Orion - and we know that
somebody painted what we think is the constellation
Taurus with star clusters caves in a cave
in France about 17,000 years ago.
Obviously, we don’t know the gender of any
one who did this, but we do know that women
were making similar paintings in the same
caves at the same time.
Scientists think about 3/4 of the hands in
this painting belong to women.
So, I think it is fairly safe to say that
women have probably been part of astronomy since
the beginning.
People that paid close attention to the sky,
they could see there are seven objects that
move differently from this sphere of stars.
So this is the Sun and the Moon, and the five
visible planets, which is Mercury, Venus,
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
The Sun and Moon move in kind of predictable
patterns over predictable time periods, and these
could be used to track the seasons and to work
out when summer was going to begin and end.
This became important about 10,000 years ago,
that’s when the ice age ended, around that time,
the Earth started to get warmer, and it became
warm enough for us to be able to grow crops.
So this is about thousand years after we built
the first city - the city of Jericho on the West Bank.
So to be clear, people of all genders were
using astronomy as a tool to explore the universe
back when Neanderthals still existed. And
people of all genders built the first city
a thousand years before the end of the ice
age when mammoths still walked the Earth.
Our knowledge of astronomy was so
good at the time, that as soon as it became
warm enough, we were able to start farming.
All of this meant we had more time to do other
things, so people could stay in the same place.
People began to domesticate animals, cows
were domesticated, and grow crops, rice and
wheat were cultivated, and towns and cities
began to form all around the world.
So about 5000 years ago, people developed
a written language. And one of the first person
whos name was written down was Enheduanna.
Now Enheduanna was born about 4000 years ago
in a Sumerian city, which is part of modern day Iraq.
She was born a princess but she
trained as an astronomer. And she became a
high-priestess to the Moon Goddess and the
Moon God.
About 2000 years ago, Aglaonike was predicting
solar eclipses in Ancient Greece.
People called her a sourceress and said “the moon obeys Aglaonike".
But what she’d actually done, she’d worked
out solar eclipses happen periodically, every
18 years, 10 days, and 8 hours. And the reason
that she’d been able to work this out is
because people like Enheduanna had kept precise
astronomical records.
And these had been maintained, and so we could
pass this knowledge between generations.
So I think it’s pretty clear that women have been a part of astronomy since the beginning, but as civilisations
formed, people began to develop rules about
what people could and couldn’t do and obviously
women ended up having less rights, so when women
did make discoveries, they often weren’t credited.
Their names weren’t recorded and
a lot of their stories are probably lost to history.
But fortunatly, we do know about some.
So Hypatia for example was born in 400 AD
in Egypt. She wrote and taught mathematics
and she edited two of the most important textbooks at the time. She was a Pagan and was
murdered by Christian monks, so she became
known as a "martyr for philosophy".
Mariam Al-astrulabi developed instruments called astrolabes, and these are devises that
you can use to measure your latitude just using
the stars.
Zulema L'Astròloga was an astronomer who
is said to have studied the stars from a medieval
tower on the coast of Majorca.
And of course there are lots of other examples.
So science became sort of better defined in
the 16th and 17th Centuries, with the Scientific
Revolution in Europe. When that happened,
scientists like Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler
proved that the Earth orbits the Sun.
Around the same time, Galileo used a telescope
for the first time to look at the stars, he
saw Jupiter’s moons and the rings of Saturn.
And shortly after this, Newton published his
theory of gravitation. And science, as we’ve
sort of come to know it, began.
So at this point, academic clubs, societies, and institutions like the Royal Society formed.
The Royal Society formed in 1660.
Of course, women were excluded from all of
these places.
And of course, women continued to explore
the universe.
