Dava Sobel, an award winning author who specializes in scientific topics, will be at the East Hampton Library on Saturday, June 22 for an afternoon discussion about her latest book, “The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.”
“The Glass Universe” tells a story of five women who were among those hired to work as calculators—or human computers—to augment the telescope observations made by their male counterparts from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. In this role, these five women became astronomers in their own right, enabling them to discover new celestial objects, derive the nature of the stars and develop a means for measuring distances across space, techniques still used today.
This free event will be held at the East Hampton Library at 159 Main Street, East Hampton from 1 to 2:30 p.m. in honor of the East Hampton Library’s summer reading theme, “A Universe of Stories.” For more information, call 631-324-0222.