23F Week 1. Exciting Discoveries about the Universe Enabled by New Tools

Welcome to the 51st year of WomenExplore!

This series is entitled WomenExplore Reimagined  Fall 2023

What does this mean?

When covid caused the Spring 2020 lectures to be postponed, we spent our meetings learning how to use Zoom instead.  Thankfully every one of our wonderful speakers was able to transition to the fall and we had a very successful online lecture series.

We had been expecting that everything would return to normal and we would soon be back in our old home at the Democracy Center.  However that was not to be, and through the succeeding series we discovered the advantages and disadvantages of operating online.

The risk of disease transmission disappeared, as did our travel time and parking problems.  Distance now presents no obstacle and we can welcome people from across the country or even across continents.  It was certainly safe and convenient for the participants.

There was no more need to pay rent and even the need for a postcard disappeared as everyone had an email address.  So WE has been able to operate without asking for a registration fee.  Another big advantage is the vast reservoir of online material in the form of video or audio, images or text,  material that can be incorporated into our meetings.  Mary Rose Muti demonstrated this when she organized a lecture with excerpts from two videos on the topic of “Our Home: Taking Care of the Earth”.  Robin Wall Kimmerer would never have been able to speak to us in person, even on Zoom, while for us on the other side of the screen it was almost like having her there.

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud!  We quickly found that free-flowing discussions didn’t translate very well to Zoom.  It was necessary to have a facilitator to call on people.  Even going around in order doesn’t work because everyone’s order is different.  This made our traditional planning sessions difficult to implement.  To add to the difficulty, sitting in one place in front of a screen for 2 or 3 hours is very uncomfortable.  To then transition to another hour of planning becomes impossible.

By far the biggest drawback is the loss of the one-to-one personal contact that we all shared: the hugs and the laughter.

Once it became clear that the future of WomenExplore was going to be online, we needed  to examine how to exploit the advantages while minimizing the negatives.

The result of this examination is “WomenExplore Reimagined”.  

Notice that I have not called this series of meetings a lecture series,  nor does the series have an over-arching theme.  The Fall 2023 series of meetings will continue our focus on identifying and exploring the important issues of our day, along with investigating topics of interest to the women who attend. 

This Fall we are having alternating formal and informal weeks.  We have called the formal weeks “Exploring and Discussion”, and the informal ones “Painting and Conversation”.

What? “Painting”?   An exciting bonus this fall is watercolor lessons entitled "Virtual Painting Across Continents!" by well-known artist Ival Stratford Kovner, MS, MFA.  These workshops will take place on informal weeks from 11 am to noon, when these meetings are Zoom.  The second hour (noon to 1 pm) will be a sharing and caring meeting with the option to ask for feedback or support. Finally, from 1 to 2 pm participants share their reflections on the most recent Exploring and Discussion meeting.

The more formal weeks begin with an hour in which everyone has a couple of minutes to describe what is happening in their lives or their reflections on current events.  One, two, or even three (we haven’t tried that yet) individuals take on the task organizing the final two hours on a topic that is of interest to them. This presentation has no set format.  It can even be an in-person gathering.

One thing that remains constant is that the online forums each week will go from 11 am to 2 pm, whatever takes place.  In-person gatherings may vary from this timing.

Today we are having a lecture preceded by three short talks to ground the topic “Exciting Discoveries about the Universe Enabled by New Tools.” in the experiences of our participants.  As some of you know, I myself work part-time at the Center for Astrophysics.  Although I was not trained as an astrophysicist I have always called myself a physicist and one of the biggest influences in making that career choice was spending my formative years in the dry and isolated outback of Australia.  Lying on the ground, facing the sky the stars surround you and they feel so close that you can reach out and hold them.  Furthermore in the Southern Hemisphere we are privileged to get a good view of the center of the Milky Way and our two small companion galaxies the Magellanic Clouds. These are hidden below the horizon when you are in the north.  The picture on this series’ postcard is of the Andromeda Nebula our sister galaxy. 

The person who instigated  this topic was Barbara Sweet.

Barbara was born and brought up in Holyoke, Massachusetts.  She attended nearby Mount Holyoke College, majoring in psychology.  After graduation, she moved to Boston and joined Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company.  She worked there for 27 years, mainly as an editor in their social studies textbook department.  Afterwards she became a freelance editor, did volunteering -- and discovered TOP, which became WE!

Lindsa Vallee

lindsa has been enjoying stars and constellations since her mother painted orion on lindsa's bedroom ceiling with glow in the dark paint.............lindsa has been singing to the moon for most of her life as a woman, mother and crone............as well as calling to the mysteries of the galaxies for inspiration and magic……..

Mary Rose Muti

MaryRose Muti is a retired nurse, a wife, a mother and grandmother of seven. she is very curious and loves learning new things. One of her grandsons is very excited about learning about the cosmos. He already knows a lot more than she does so he has piqued her curiosity about the Night Sky. She will share more in her brief talk. Thank you.

Click here to hear some of the introduction and the three focus talks.

Today, 14th September, the first meeting of this series is a formal lecture by astrophysicist Dr Saeqa Vrtilek of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, author of New Windows on the Universe. She will discuss new means of exploring the universe. 

Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Saeqa Vrtilek has a BS in Physics from MIT, an MS in Physics from Brandeis University, and an MS and PhD in Astronomy from Columbia University. 

She first got interested in Astronomy her freshman year in college when she took a freshman seminars on astrophysics, biophysics, and nuclear physics.  The astrophysics was taught by Phillip Morrison (who used to write book reviews for Scientific American).

She is currently a Research Associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian where she has worked as an Astrophysicist for over 30 years.  She has been a visiting Professor at U. of Maryland and Harvard University and an NAS/NRC Fellow at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center .  She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  She has been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship by the American Association of University Women and a Science Fellowship by the Radcliffe Bunting Institute. Her areas of interest include the physics of accretion disks and jets, multi wavelength studies of X-ray binaries and planetary nebulae, science education, and public outreach.

Click here to hear Saku's lecture.

22 Fall Week 2, 29th September 2022 : My Search for Magic

I always knew that fairy tales were simply made-up stories and I never believed in the tooth fairy or Easter bunny. I tried to convince myself that Father Christmas was real. I had glimpsed a rotund figure clad in red in my bedroom one Christmas Eve when I was five or so, but I knew that my grandmother, who was staying with us that night, had a red dressing gown. Dev, the man who later became my grandmother's second husband, was able to pull a shilling out from behind my ear. I wasn't fooled. Even though I didn't know how it was done, I knew it was just a trick.

Around the time of my seventh birthday I spent a while in hospital and as a consequence a friend persuaded her mother to buy me a book, Cherry Ames at Hilton Hospital. It was the first book I ever read that wasn't a picture book. I was engrossed. Not only did I learn all about amnesia and how to treat it (late 50's style), but I became an instant avid reader. I would visit the library regularly with my younger sister. It was only down the road and across the park. On the way home I would get my sister to walk in front of me so I didn't need to move my eyes from the page. (Only the other day I saw a young boy leaving the local branch library here doing exactly the same thing with his mother, who walked ahead laden with books.) I wanted to read all the children's fiction. The only trouble was that, although we were allowed to have out six books at a time, only two could be regular fiction and the remaining four had to be non-fiction. I soon discovered the loopholes. The library had one bookcase devoted to the classics and a non-fiction card sufficed for these. I generally found them quite heavy going.  The Lady of the Camellias, for example, went way over my head, and I didn't even follow The Three Musketeers completely. However the non-fiction section that included books on myths and legends from around the world was full of magic. I couldn't get enough.

All the while, I should say, I was regularly attending Sunday school where we had the story of just about a miracle a week. This magic didn't satify me – God could do anything. I wanted magic that was in the domain of ordinary people, magic that I could experience myself.

When I was nine we moved town to a new library, a new collection of books. I learned how to use the libray catalogue so that I could find what I wanted. This was not always successful.  The Talisman Ring turned out to be a boring, or so I thought at the time, romance novel. (A few short years later I was to change my opinion about that.) I did discover the Salem witch trials. As horrifying as this was, I clung to the fact that responsible adults, or at least adults who ought to have been responsible, firmly believed in witchcraft, so it must be real. And it wasn't just confined to Salem. Also, like millions of others, I was led into an exploration of Tibetan Buddhism through the works of Lobsang Rampa the author of The Third Eye. I became a believer in reincarnation.

My grandfather had drowned at the age of twenty-six in 1932. In her own quest for a way of contacting him, my grandmother turned to spiritualism and Theosophy. According to Theosophers: “Devotion to truth, love for all living beings, and commitment to a life of altruism are the marks of the true Theosophist.” My grandmother taught me that all religions are just different facets of the truth. She was a hairdresser and as a young child I sometimes accompanied her when she made home visits for housebound women. I also went with her delivering meals for Meals-On-Wheels. I think she enjoyed the company and the old people liked to see young children. I did not think much of the food though – I particularly remember the disgusting prunes in rice custard! My grandmother showed me a book containing photographs of fairies taken by a couple of young cousins. These are known as the Cottingley fairies. They were finally exposed as a hoax when one of the, by then, old, ladies admitted the fairies were paper cutouts propped up with hat pins or suspended on fine threads. Modern image processing a few years before the admission had indeed revealed some threads. At the time I first saw them there was no solid evidence that these photographs were not authentic. I found them intriguing but I kept an open mind.

Meanwhile as I progressed at school I was discovering more and more about the magic of mathematics. The world of numbers was opening up to me. And it wasn't just numbers. With a very few basic axioms and some definitions, the application of logic suddenly created the whole of geometry. It was mind-boggling and extremely powerful.

I still continued to search through the libraries. In my school library I found The Man Who Was Magic by Paul Gallico. This is a book that I would like to read again. It was about a man who really was magic in a town of magicians who performed standard magic tricks. Of course, I had no illusion that this novel would reveal real magic to me. The book did suggest that nature is magic and magic is all around us. This is something I was coming to discover for myself. I started reading a lot of science fiction and historical novels. I did not expect to find magic there either but they did allow me to explore a lot of what-if scenarios. What would happen to society if .. if, for example, someone created a machine that could duplicate any object at no cost. Maybe that one should have been called “economic fiction”.

I was the only person in my family still going to church when I stopped attending at around the age of fourteen. It was not for any big principle but simply because we moved again. However I didn't stop thinking and philosophizing about God and religions.

My search for magic was now leading me into the realm of the supernatural and the paranormal. My boyfriend at the time, my husband now, and I even tried a series of experiments in telepathy. I thought that if ever two minds were in tune it ought to have been ours. Needless to say we had no success. 

I was also beginning to discover how magical the real world was. When I went to university I knew I wanted to study science and mathematics. It was only as I learnt more that I was particularly drawn to physics. Physics is real. It is not speculative but must demonstrate that it describes the real world. Physics is the study of the most simple and basic properties of this amazing universe that we are part of. It covers everything from smallest subatomic particles and the forces which glue them together to the vast reaches of space where we are able to literally look back in time to almost when the universe came into existence. This is precisely what the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to do. Just as we think we are getting to the bottom of things it always seems that the universe throws up surprises to show how little we know. In the twentieth century it was quantum mechanics and relativity, which have still not been entirely knitted together, and now it is the great mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is the term used to describe the large proportion (27%) of matter or energy that we cannot see but which we can “weigh” by looking at the motions of the matter we can see. Dark energy (68%) is something even more mysterious – it doesn't behave like anything else we know. It has a constant density even as the universe expands. It seems to come into existance and cause space to expand, or maybe the causality is the other way around. I am now working mainly in x-ray astronomy which is able to capture some of the most high energy events that take place as the universe evolves. At lower energies, which means lower temperatures, we get atoms which are able to bond together to form compounds and suddenly we are in the field of chemistry. As we get more complex molecules we find that life emerges and we are now looking at biology: ourselves and our fellow lifeforms. People are amazingly complex, as you all know first hand, and, to ourselves, exceedingly interesting. I have always been interested in language and have now spent some time studying spoken language, one aspect of human complexity. 

We went to England for my husband to do his PhD in astronomy. While we were there we became friends with a fellow student, Bernard Carr, who was in fact one of Stephen Hawking's students. Because of his own interest in the subject Bernard later became involved some serious scientific investigations into phenomena such as reports of ghosts. Despite his very best efforts all he was able to do was disprove every case he could investigate fully, much to his own great disappointment.

I have become comfortable with the idea that when I die I will be no more. I promise not to haunt you! I admit that I find it less comfortable thinking about the the end of the human race. Perhaps it is for that reason that one of my favorite stories is a short story by Isaac Asimov in which he describes the evolution of computers as the universe slowly dies until the last star blinks out. By then the whole universe has been integrated into one massive omnipotent computer. And then the computer says “Let there be light!”

Having children unexpectedly gave me a totally fresh view of the world around me, a perspective I have not lost. I found new wonders every day as I introduced these new people to this place they had never been in before. I can remember one day seeing a new-born foal as we were driving somewhere and trying to draw my children's attention to it. They barely looked up from the books they were reading in the back seat. Did I used to be like that?

Now I find magic everywhere I look. For example, one thing that always amazes me is that bees and humans, who could not be more different animals, are both able to appreciate the exquisite beauty of flowers. I can see no evolutionary reason for this. Flies, for example, don't think the same way.

Above the entrance to the Cavendish Laboratory, which is the physics department of Cambridge University and which is where I worked for nine years, is an inscription which reads “The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.”  I always remembered it as “Great are the works of the Lord, sought out by all those who have wonder therein”. In either case it is expressing the view that this universe is an awesome place. Looking up at the sky on a dark night on my mother's farm, or in any dry and dark place, truly fills you with awe as the stars blaze overhead and reach down to the ground in every direction. You feel as if you are right among them.

I want my children and their children, and all your children's children's children to be able to continue to experience this wonderful world that we all know today and knew when we were children.

That is all I have to say for now. Thank you for listening.

—Susan Nulsen