#5: Vera Rubin in a glass greenhouse

TRANSCRIPT

Corinne Caputo 0:27

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Pale Blue Pod, the astronomy podcast for people who are overwhelmed by the universe but want to be its friend.

Moiya McTier 0:35

Oh, I want to be its friend. Hi, I'm Dr. Moiya McTier. I'm kind of friends with the universe because I'm an astrophysicist who studied it for a long time.

Corinne Caputo 0:43

And I'm Corinne Caputo. I am friends with the universe, I think, even though sometimes it can be scary and overwhelming. I'm a comedian and a writer and ready to learn.

Moiya McTier 0:54

Yeah.

Corinne Caputo 0:56

Moiya, where are you recording from today?

Moiya McTier 0:58

Oh, I'm so excited about today's location. We are in a glass greenhouse surrounded by plants. And all of them have been grown with love. And yeah, it's pretty warm and humid in here. But the smell is absolutely divine. It's really with lots of green and a truly intoxicating mix of floral scents. Get that Jasmine love that Lily of the Valley like oh, so gorgeous. And I am really happy to be basking in their presence, especially as we head into the winter season. Yes.

Corinne Caputo 1:30

Oh, gosh, especially in the cold. It can be really hard to power through the dark ages, which is what I call the winter.

Moiya McTier 1:38

It's what everyone should call the winter. Because you know, I I take my daily nature walks through Central Park, but all of those trees look so naked. Uh huh. They really do. And I just I like being around the leaves.

Corinne Caputo 1:51

It's just nice, you know? To be reminded of life. Yeah.

Moiya McTier 1:55

Every once in a while speaking of life, speaking of people's lives, people who have lived yes lives. Today is a very fun episode, because this is the first of our scientist bio episodes. Because I think it's easier to understand space. If you know more about the people who study it. You know, like you understand all that context, you see where we're coming from. And really what I hope you learn by hearing about the people who study space is that the study of space is not perfect. It's done by humans who are imperfect. Yes. So I want you to remember that. But today, we are covering Vera Rubin, Dr. Vera Rubin, the woman who proved the existence of dark matter back in the 1970s. She died in 2016. But we are here to honor her memory. Yeah,

Corinne Caputo 2:43

I love it. I did a little bit of research about her before this episode, and she's just so cool. So cool.

Moiya McTier 2:49

I never met her in person, but I've only heard good

Corinne Caputo 2:53

things. Yeah. Isn't that nice? When Yeah, good things about someone.

Moiya McTier 2:57

Yeah. And the astronomy community. We are a bunch of gossiping pitches. We feel so much tea so yeah, I would have heard bad things.

Corinne Caputo 3:06

I have to say I never would have guessed that I really wouldn't have I don't know why I separate science from like the frivolity of gossip but it we're all human. Of course, we all love it.

Moiya McTier 3:17

This is what I mean, people think of scientists as like robots who don't have feelings, and they just analyze the data. But Nah, man, we're real people. Yes,

Corinne Caputo 3:25

we do weird shit that needs to get gossiped about just like everybody else.

Moiya McTier 3:31

This This reminded me of what at one point was my favorite video on YouTube and it was a dramatic reading of a breakup letter. And one of the lines was if you're a weird shit who does weird shit during the day and I'm like yes, I as I identify with that I'm scientists are like they are weird shits who do weird shit.

Corinne Caputo 3:52

I love that. Yeah,

Moiya McTier 3:54

so we're going to be talking about Vera Rubin and the weird shit she did. Just briefly, I think, since so much of her story is about the big finding that she made the discovery of dark matter. I wonder if maybe we should start off with a very brief description or explanation of dark matter?

Corinne Caputo 4:14

Yes, I would love to know.

Moiya McTier 4:16

Yeah, I'm curious Corinne. Do you have–if I say dark matter, do you have any thoughts that come to mind?

Corinne Caputo 4:21

We talked about it briefly in an earlier episode, but I imagined it as this like invisible thing that is apparently everywhere in space, and we're not fully sure. Or rather, we can't see it like light does not pass through it or bounce off of it in a way that the other things we see with our eyes do. So it's a bit of a mystery, but it's also everywhere. And to me, it's so interesting because it sounds so spooky and I got to know more.

Moiya McTier 4:52

Yes. Yeah, that's That's exactly right. Dark matter is matter. It's material it has Wait, it has gravity. But for some reason that we don't totally understand yet it doesn't interact with light, so we can't see it. And I think I said this in in the galaxies episode where we were talking about it, but there's this scientist named Dr. Chandra Prescott Weinstein, who I really admire, and she's been calling for people to change the name of dark matter to like transparent matter. Because dark sounds very scary, although it shouldn't. I'm kind of dark. I'm beautiful. I love it. But transparent matter, I think will alleviate people from the expectation that it is this like, actively black thing?

Corinne Caputo 5:36

Yes, transparent matter just feels like a better explanation for what it is. And immediately it kind of clicked in my head way better than it did with dark matter. Oh, good, good.

Moiya McTier 5:48

So what we do know about dark matter is that it seems to be everywhere. Like you said, most galaxies that we see, like almost every galaxy that we see has a large cloud of dark matter surrounding it. But we we had to learn that and we didn't really understand that until the 1970s. Thanks to Dr. Reubens work. There are ideas for what it could be what like types of particles could make up dark matter, but we still don't have the evidence to make a claim about one of them over the other. This is an active area of research, which I think is very exciting, and also a little bit scary.

Corinne Caputo 6:24

Yeah, it definitely is. But I'm really hoping I get some kind of fun answer in my lifetime. And I feel like we will

Moiya McTier 6:32

need to. Yeah, they're actively trying to figure this out. I think it's, it's something that kind of embarrassed as a lot of astronomers because Dark Matter makes up 85% of all of the matter in the universe. It makes up my God, it makes up like 20% of all of the matter energy content of the universe. And we don't know what it is. That's pretty embarrassing. So yeah, we're working on it.

Corinne Caputo 6:57

Oh, my God. 85% is so big.

Moiya McTier 6:59

So big. If you think of it in terms of Venn diagrams, there's there's all of the energy matter content, and most of that is dark energy, like 75% of that is dark energy. And then 25% is matter. And most of the matter is dark matter. That's wild. So that's that's dark matter. We will meet it later as Vera Rubin meets it. But this is not an episode about dark matter. This is an episode about Vera Rubin. So let's learn about her. Yeah,

Corinne Caputo 7:31

let's do it. I have a little bit about her early life, which I would love to catch you up on please, before she became who she you know, became famous for this

Moiya McTier 7:40

is the origin of the legend. Yes, exactly.

Corinne Caputo 7:42

This is the origin story of the superheroes here. Ruben. She's hit by a spider. And

Moiya McTier 7:48

she's a dark matter.

Corinne Caputo 7:52

And it's given the gift of vision and you can see it. No, she hurt. She was born Vera Cooper. She was born July 23 19/28. So she is a Leo Oh, which I think makes sense. She's right on the cusp of Leo.

Moiya McTier 8:05

I have no idea what that means. But why Why does that make sense? So I think So

Corinne Caputo 8:09

Leo kind of is I'm a Leo. And I'm gonna claim her as my kind of what I'm saying. It's kind of your, your like, not attention, grabby, but like you're kind of maybe the center of your world. And I love that she was able to kind of figure out the world or not earth world but the universe. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a place that still exists today.

Moiya McTier 8:36

Does not every place can see that. Not

Corinne Caputo 8:39

every place can see that. And she has one older sister. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. And her dad his name. He was born Pesach, kulczewski and Lithuania. But he anglicized his name when they moved and he changed his name to Philip Cooper.

Moiya McTier 8:57

That's a very different name.

Corinne Caputo 8:58

I know it's a very different name. And it's like, it sounds like a fictional name. Like completely made up for sound whatever sitcom is airing in the 50s.

Moiya McTier 9:09

Hi, Cooper. I have a totally normal job and I have a perfectly nuclear family a totally

Corinne Caputo 9:14

anonymous name, but he anglicized his name to Philip Cooper. He became an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone and he married rose Applebaum from Bessarabia which is now Moldova or Moldova. Autopia that's like That's me trying to pronounce his diaries of phi something.

Moiya McTier 9:34

Moldova by the way, excellent Eurovision entries for the last few years who I

Corinne Caputo 9:39

Okay, this is a gap of knowledge I have about Eurovision I don't follow it, but I really should because so many people I love do. And it seems fun. So but they various parents met at Bell Telephone where rose worked until she got married as a like sekret I don't know what she worked as but I gotta think it was a secretary But maybe that's me being I'm not being sexist, though time period was, but I'm not sure what she did there. But she did stop working and they got married and had kids. So hopefully it was a job she didn't like. The Cooper family moved to Washington, DC in 1938 when Vera was 10, and she got really interested in astronomy, so she's watching stars from her bedroom window was just the cutest. And she has a quote that says, even then I was more interested in the question than the answer. I decided at an early age we inhabit a very curious world. So cute. So she built a very simple like DIY telescope out of cardboard with her dad, and began to observe and track meteors. Oh, so cute. And she was inspired to pursue an undergraduate at Vassar, which is then an all women's school. And she was inspired by Maria Mitchell, who's a famous female astronomer love her too. So Maria Mitchell discovered a comet and became separately the first internationally known woman to work as both a professional astronomer and a professor of astronomy at Vassar where we are aware, VR was advised by a high school teacher to avoid a scientific career entirely and become an artist, is what it said on her Wikipedia page. But she did not take that advice. And I am desperate to know what kind of artist that they wanted her to be. I could not find any info about it.

Moiya McTier 11:25

Just imagine like today, who your high school teacher No, it was so backwards

Corinne Caputo 11:29

or they're like, you should definitely do art, not science.

Moiya McTier 11:33

You're gonna have a more successful career as an artist. That's so crazy. Don't go into STEM. There's nothing for you there.

Corinne Caputo 11:40

Yeah, there's nothing for you in STEM. It's gonna be hard life and stem for you. I mean, it was. But that takes us to her graduate career. Okay,

Moiya McTier 11:49

yes, I did some some looking into of this. That's how it works. So after Vassar, Vera tried to study at Princeton, she applied to Harvard for their graduate programs and astronomy. But she actually was not allowed to enroll because the Princeton astronomy graduate program didn't admit women until 1975. And this was like, 1848.

Corinne Caputo 12:17

Oh, my God. I know, it is a long time to wait. Yeah,

Moiya McTier 12:21

yeah. She she would have been waiting decades like she she would not have gotten into Princeton, of course, not based on merit, based solely on other people's faulty assumptions of her gender, or like, assumptions of the skills that she could have given her gender. Right. Right. Yes. So instead of going to those schools, which I imagine like were probably some of her dream schools, because they were my dream schools. Yeah. She went to Cornell also fantastic school. They offered a master's program and astronomy and let women in. So she went there. Imagine that. Imagine that. Yeah, her her husband, who she married just a little bit before she entered the program was a math grad student at Cornell at the time, so she had that connection. Or her advisers were Philip Morrison, Richard Fineman, who was brilliant, but an asshole and Han Betha,

Corinne Caputo 13:15

Beefy, Beefy, Beefy,

Moiya McTier 13:19

baby, the name pronunciation on this show is always going to be a struggle, if you are a listener, who cares about that just like stop now, or,

Corinne Caputo 13:26

you know, like, feel free to let me know later.

Moiya McTier 13:29

She was studying the motions of galaxies. So like, take a galaxy and look at how they move through space. Because this was the 1950s We didn't know much about how stuff in space moved back then. This was only 30 years after we realized that there were other galaxies to begin with. You know, at first we thought that, like the Milky Way was all there was. And then it's 20 years after Edwin Hubble observed that distant galaxies are moving farther away from us. At the very end of the 1920s, Edwin Hubble realized that the universe is expanding galaxies are moving away. So they came up with this idea of the motion of galaxies in the universe called the Hubble flow. And it was the idea that whilst clearly we see these galaxies moving away from something. So Hubble flow said that they were moving away from the central point after the Big Bang, cool. Vera Rubin, in her master's degree work, took observations of 108 different galaxies, and showed that the Hubble flow hypothesis is wrong, that all of these galaxies aren't just moving outward from some central point, but that they are moving in what she thought were orbits around some central point so they're not like moving in a straight line away from something instead they're orbiting something Central. Interesting.

Corinne Caputo 14:50

Okay.

Moiya McTier 14:52

That was wrong. Yeah, that was wrong. But it was the 1950s. Either way, people did not treat her work. With the respect that it deserved, because it didn't match all of the observations that were available at that time, but they just didn't want to listen to her because she was a woman. And so she she actually almost wasn't allowed to present her findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting, because she was a woman who had the audacity to be pregnant. No. She did. She did go and present her findings. People were kind of crappy to her. And then I don't think that paper ended up getting published, people wouldn't wouldn't publish our findings.

So that sucks. She couldn't talk just because she was pregnant. Yeah,

like her advisor was like, you know, you're gonna be pregnant, and you're not a member of the double as so I can go and present your work for you. But I'll have to put my name on it. And she was like, No way. Out here. Yeah. So she went and she presented and then people were dicks. Wow. Wow, very unfortunate. You'll that continues, you'll see that as a trend in their ribbons life. She graduated from Cornell in 1951. She did her research, she got her master's degree. And then she went on to continue her doctoral work at Georgetown University, going back to DC, where she used to live. Her graduate advisor at Georgetown was George gamma of a Russian scientist. And together, they were studying the spatial distribution of galaxies. She wanted to steer away from any of the controversial subjects that she used to research like the motion of galaxies, and instead was just like, No, let me figure out where the galaxies physically are, like, how are they distributed throughout space? That was really awesome work. She had a groundbreaking discovery, which was that galaxies are not just randomly scattered around the universe. In stead, they tend to cluster together. And now we talk about galaxy clusters and galaxies, super clusters. We know, gravity will gather these these galaxies into larger groups. But people ignored her findings for decades. Oh, no, she learned that galaxies cluster together. And then it took like another 20 years for people independently to make that discovery, again, with different newer, better data. And people paid attention to that, but did not pay attention to her. Ah,

Corinne Caputo 17:28

I hate this.

Moiya McTier 17:29

I know it really sucks. So she she did that research. I'm really glad she did. She graduated with her PhD in 1954 from Georgetown, and then stayed in that area for about another decade. She did some teaching at a local junior college, she did some research at Georgetown and eventually did become an assistant professor at Georgetown, which is awesome. But after 10 years, she was like, I want to do more observations. I want to use telescopes I really love, like directly observing the night sky. So she left Georgetown, and in 1965 started working at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, which is now the Carnegie Science Institute in DC. Cool.

Corinne Caputo 18:12

Well, we know she loves to look at the sky because she made all those DIY telescopes with her dad. I absolutely

Moiya McTier 18:18

love that part of her story. Like it melted my heart a little bit makes her so like adorable and approachable. She's so

Corinne Caputo 18:24

relatable. Yeah, exactly. It's like we were all kids who had that one obsession. And if we were all kind of fostered or like have the kind of drive to pursue it. As we got older, I would be a veterinarian.

Moiya McTier 18:39

I would be a professional bed tester. Oh

Corinne Caputo 18:42

my god. That's brilliant. That's

Moiya McTier 18:43

what I want. I would not

Corinne Caputo 18:44

be a vet. I was obsessed with being a investigative journalist. But like in concept only not in practice, like the thought of like devoting my life to a story and like hunting it down and interviewing people and like talking to strangers is so far away from who I am as a person. But as a kid, it was like, Oh, wait, that job seems like it has a lot of glory. That's what we're after.

Moiya McTier 19:08

Oh, what a different time when news. Like media, actually was like it had integrities actually.

Corinne Caputo 19:16

Yeah. And like, society was like, Yes, we trust this. Oh, different

Moiya McTier 19:24

different times.

Corinne Caputo 19:30

Hi, it's Corinne. I wanted to give a quick shout out to our amazing patrons who are keeping this podcast going. Thank you to our sunlike star Siân Llewellyn. Thank you to our red dwarf stars Sean Reynolds, Anne Musica, Scott Sheldon. Phil see and a lot of our Toba and thank you to our pre-main sequence stars Sam Jackson, Mike Caputo, Danny, David Grober. Andy Cracksberger, and Christopher Payne. And you too can support us hear your name on this podcast. Make it to our patron star chart all by supporting us on Patreon. You find the search our Patreon info and more at our website palebluepod[dot]com.

Moiya McTier 20:05

Hey there space friends. I don't know if you knew this but Pale Blue Pod is actually a part of a bigger podcast collective full of other shows hosted by amazingly funny and smart people. That whole collective is called Multitude. And there are plenty of shows for you to choose from. But right now, I want to talk to you about Join the Party, which is an actual play podcast with really tangible worlds and fun stories and plots. It's actually the first real play podcast that I ever listened to. And it got me back into the mode of wanting to play Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop role playing games. DM Eric and the emphatic players, Amanda, Brandon and Julia will welcome everyone to the table. That's why it's called Join the Party. They didn't just want it to be for longtime TTRPG players. They also wanted to reach folks who have never touched a role playing game before. If you're not sure where to start, you can hop into their Camp-Paign, which is a punny word for their Monster of the Week story set in a weird and wild summer camp. But they also have two full campaigns, one in a high fantasy epic and their campaign number two is a modern day comic book super powered story. It's really fun. So what are you waiting for? Pull up a chair and join the party search for Join the Party in your favorite podcast app, or you can go to jointhepartypod[dot]com

Corinne Caputo 21:28

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Moiya McTier 22:20

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All right, so it's 1965 Vera Rubin, Dr. Vera Rubin at this point is like I want to observe through some telescopes. So she started doing research at the Carnegie Institute on the rotation speeds of galaxies. In other words, how fast are stars orbiting around the galaxy at different distances from the galactic center? Because we have, we have theories, we have math, we have like an understanding of physics that tells us how the motion of stars should work. But we wanted to see that with our own eyes. We wanted to observe that through the telescopes. So she observed with the McDonald Observatory telescope in Texas in 1963. And then applied for time on the Palomar Observatory, the Palomar telescope in California. Oh, no. In 1965 she became the first woman to be allowed to use the Palomar Observatory.

Corinne Caputo 24:40

Oh my god. Hmm. So was this like, were there other women who tried and didn't or it just like was I'm sure she was one of the only women in the field or one of the few women right because

Moiya McTier 24:54

you know, Maria Mitchell was there. There were other women in the field but

Corinne Caputo 24:58

1865 I can't

Moiya McTier 25:02

find it. I know. So the thing about observatories now is that actually, a lot of astronomers don't go to visit them. There are telescope operators, a lot of things can be operated remotely. But most astronomers don't end up going to observatories. Some do. But in the past a lot more did. And so observatories have, like dorms, they have rooms where you can stay, they have cafeterias, they have like little voters. And because of that, they were like, well, we have all these men scientists here, we can't let a woman stay. Yeah, so they didn't have bathrooms for women, they didn't have dorms for women. So like, she really had to break a lot of rules, or get a lot of special ration to go observe at this

Corinne Caputo 25:42

at this time. That is so crazy. And I know that this is true in across industries and across history. But every time I'm reminded that women were just not people, I lose my mind.

Moiya McTier 25:58

Every time I hear someone talk about the Harvard computers, I get really angry. And then I remember that that is the nice name for them. But that's the polite name used to refer to that group of women who did a lot of calculations. Last night Nice name is pickerings. harem. No. Yeah, there's this researcher named Pickering, who hired a lot of excellent, they were probably paid a little bit hired a lot of women to do his research and the quotations for him. People called

Corinne Caputo 26:28

Yeah, I am. So I am too stunned to speak the woman was to sun to speak. That's me.

Moiya McTier 26:36

Yeah, okay. So she broke that ground, she broke, she broke that glass ceiling, observing at Palomar as the first woman hate that. She was studying the speeds of stars to try and get the rotation curve for a galaxy. So we our understanding of the motion of things in space comes to us from Newton's and Kepler's laws of motion. And according to those laws of motion, the closer something is to a massive object, if it's orbiting it, the faster it has to move, in order to avoid being sucked in by the gravity. So we see this in our solar system, the planets that are very close to the sun, like Mercury and Venus move a lot faster than the planets that are farther away, like Jupiter and Saturn. So we would expect stars closer to the center of the galaxy to move very quickly. And we would expect stars farther away closer to the edge to move very slowly. And if you were graphing this, the the speed of stars at different galactic radii, we say are at different distances from the galactic center, it would start off kind of low, it would go up for a little bit, you get a little peek, and then it comes down. So that by the time you are at a large galactic radius, by the time you're far from the galactic center, the stars are moving very slowly. But what she found instead was a flat rotation curve. So that curve started kind of low, it went up a little bit, and then it plateaued. It never it never dropped down. Interesting. So the stars on the edge of the galaxy. And she she wasn't observing, I don't know she was observing the Milky Way. But she was observing lots of other galaxies like Andromeda, she saw that the stars closer to their edges were moving a lot faster than they should. And because she was a scientist, she understood that that meant the distribution of matter, the distribution of stuff that has gravity was not what we expected. Interesting. So she, she concluded that there must be something out there with five to 10 times the mass of all of the visible stuff. There is a big chunk of matter out there that we can't see. But it's still affecting the motion of the stars with its gravity. And so that was the first like kind of irrefutable evidence of dark matter, even though people had been thinking or talking or like proposing dark matter since the 1930s. I think it was first proposed by a man named Fritz Zwicky. Love his name. Yeah,

Corinne Caputo 29:09

Australia, you might have the best names. All of these names you're always bringing into me are cuckoo.

Moiya McTier 29:16

It's because people from all over the world can do astronomy, and yeah, there are some fun names. Exactly it Yeah. So he he proposed that in 1933. There were several people in the decades between 1933 in the 1970s, who came up with other evidence of dark matter, they observed it multiple times, but it was Vera Rubens work that made the whole community agree like okay, yeah, dark matter is real and it's everywhere. That's very cool. Yeah. So she did really important work. And she did it as a woman not getting much respect from her colleagues and actually at many points in her career like being held back from her full potential. Oh, I did want to tell her a very cute story when she was in grad school. Her husband would drive her to her grad school classes, and just wait in the car eating his dinner while she was in class. And then he would drive her home after oh my god, that is so sweet. They seem very sweet and very in love, and I don't want to learn anything that will make that

Corinne Caputo 30:25

they were both good people. Yes.

Moiya McTier 30:27

Yeah, she changed the way that astronomers see the universe. She clued us into the existence of something dark matter that we now know, was so important to the creation of the Milky Way galaxy in the first place. Like if there hadn't been dark matter, it's likely that the Milky Way galaxy wouldn't have formed wouldn't have grown as big as it currently is. Yeah. And yet she got very little acknowledgement. But she did get she did get some. So here is a list of the awards, that Vera Rubin Dr. Vera Rubin one for her work in discovering dark matter. She won the United States National Medal of Science, the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society over in the in the UK, the Gruber cosmology prize, and the Watson medal of the National Academy of Sciences, all very prestigious, impressive awards for smart people who do great work. But you know, what other big award for smart people who do great work that Vera Rubin did not win

Corinne Caputo 31:30

an Oscar?

Moiya McTier 31:34

No, actually, she has an EGOT she didn't she didn't eat got she did he got? No, that's wrong? No. That was so funny. You're right, she did not want and

Corinne Caputo 31:47

now I know what it is. I just don't want to say it. Is it a Nobel Prize? It is a Nobel

Moiya McTier 31:53

Prize. So Vera Rubin did this work in the 1970s. She died in 2016. And even after she died, the Nobel Prize Committee was like, Nope, no crying for you. Why do you want pregnant? Pregnancy, Ada so that she did not win a Nobel Prize, just for some numbers. Because I think a lot of people when they hear about the shockingly low number of women and people of color, like, let's focus on women right now, the shockingly low number of women who have won Nobel Prizes, I feel like people are like, Oh, but you know, they're rare. And like, a lot of women scientists, bla bla, bla, no, no, they give out six Nobel prizes every single year, and multiple people can win one prize in a year. For example, in 2019, the Nobel Prize in physics was split between three different people, James peoples who did something about like dark energy or whatever. And Michael Meyer and Didier Queloz who both worked on discovering the first exoplanet

Corinne Caputo 33:07

I didn't know that they could split the award like that now even more mad Yeah, they split

Moiya McTier 33:11

the award. They split the cash and they often do it. Yeah, mostly just for dudes. Yeah. So from–God, Corinne, you're going to hate this–from 1900 to now, the Nobel prizes have been going on since like the 1860s. From the year 1900. To this the year of Our Lady 2022. How many women do you think were awarded a Nobel Prize? And that's that's six prizes from 100 100. Okay, there are there have been 600 Plus Nobel Prizes given out Oh, my God, many to women.

Corinne Caputo 33:49

Okay, I want to give like a realistic guess. Because I know that it's so bleak. So I want to say 32.

Moiya McTier 33:58

Oh, that's oddly specific. And I really appreciate that. It is 60. That's good. For me, women. Yeah, it's twice, twice,

Corinne Caputo 34:10

but I almost had 16 Because I'm not I was being that dramatic. So a 10th. Yeah,

Moiya McTier 34:16

less than a 10th. Because the prizes can be awarded to multiple people. Right? Yeah. There are some Nobel Prizes where women are more common. Yes. recipients, you know, like there's a Nobel Prize in literature. And that's not me saying that. It's like, oh, it's easy for women to do stuff in literature. No, I'm just saying that the people who are in charge of this prize clearly have ideas in their head of what type of person can do what type of work completely Yeah. If we were to limit it just to the Nobel Prize in Physics. In in the entire history of the Nobel Committee, how many women do you think of one Nobel Prize in Physics Corinne

Corinne Caputo 34:56

1604. Boys holding up Attention readers. I mean, listeners, why is all they got four fingers for mix

Moiya McTier 35:06

the fact that I can do this with one hand, not even my whole fan and not

Corinne Caputo 35:10

even the whole hand.

Moiya McTier 35:11

So those four women were Marie Curie in 1903. She's actually the only woman to have won two Nobel Prizes she wanted in physics in 1903. And in chemistry sometime later. The second is Maria Mayer in 1963. The next one was Donna Strickland in 2018. So from 1963 to 2018, no woman won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and I am putting it out there I genuinely believe because it's in 1963 is like right before Vera Rubin was doing her dark matter work. I I would not be surprised if I was a fly on the wall in that Nobel committee room. Like, if they were like, oh, a lot of people are talking about this Dr. Vera Rubin chick, but we just gave the prize to a woman like 10 years ago. Yeah. Can't do it again. Yeah.

Corinne Caputo 36:02

We did We did she win last year.

Moiya McTier 36:07

Women are the same. Yeah. So then it's Donna Strickland in 2018. And then Andrea Ghez. In 2020. She watched it with multiple other people all for, like confirming the existence of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Corinne Caputo 36:22

For women. Wow, that is so infuriating, and only two of those women are living. Wow, that is so evil. Why does everyone hate women so bad? Geez, get over it.

Moiya McTier 36:35

We need we need we need a longer podcast. podcast. Yeah, so those are those are the four women who have won Nobel Prizes in Physics. Not including Vera Rubin. She never got one. But she has been acknowledged and recognized in a lot of other ways. There is a prize that the American Astronomical Society gives out every year called The Rubin prize for early career researchers studying dynamical astrophysics, which is a broad term that just like, hey, do you study how things move in space you can come away to is actually Hey, do you study things that move in space and you haven't had your PhD for more than 10 years, you can win this prize. The prize comes with 1000 US dollars and 1000 US dollars, and you have to give a presentation at a conference. It's $1,000 and extra work. And I don't even know if they'll pay for you to come to the conference.

Corinne Caputo 37:34

Yeah, I don't know about this one. But okay.

Moiya McTier 37:38

Yeah, so there are a bunch of other awards like that, that different schools will give out are different, like institutions and organizations give out. I think one of the most exciting acknowledgments of VR, Rubin's contribution to our field since the fucking Nobel committee refuses to do it was in 2020, when the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope which was being built in Chile got its name changed to the Vera see Rubin observatory. Oh, I know. So now she has a big old telescope named after her and let's just all have a moment of silence for the fact that clearly some telescopes can get their names changed, but apparently not all telescopes together names change hashtag GWS T. V. The voc Rubin observatory, formerly known as the LSST, is expected to have its first light so it's expected to have its like first observation. Next year in 2023. We'll see if they actually make it. Most telescopes don't make their first light, expected date. But it's gonna be a really cool telescope, it will help us learn about obviously, dark matter. That's one of the reasons that they named it after Vera Rubin is going to help us learn about dark energy and how that behaves and like, honestly, what's doing it.

Corinne Caputo 38:58

So this observatory has not witnessed something yet. Correct. It's still

Moiya McTier 39:02

being built, takes a long time to build these telescopes. And I was supposed to visit it. And when I was in Chile in 2018, I was supposed to visit this telescope, but they had a huge rainstorm. The day before I was supposed to visit and we physically could not drive up to it too. Yeah, damn, very sad. But I did get to see it from afar because we went to another observatory on top of another mountain in Chile, where you could just like, look, look across Yeah, across. Oh, that's so cute. Like this little bump. In the distance

Corinne Caputo 39:34

observatories have like the coolest architecture.

Moiya McTier 39:38

Yeah, no disagreement here.

Corinne Caputo 39:39

I'm a fan. I'm a fan.

Moiya McTier 39:42

So the Vera Rubin observatory will tell us about dark matter and how it behaves and how its distributed. It will tell us about dark energy and how we can expect that to like change over time. It will help us learn more about how our solar system formed. And the really cool thing about this telescope is that it will take a full like image of the sky pretty much every night, whoa. Which means we'll be able to see how the night sky changes over time, which will help us learn about what astronomers call transients. These are like phenomena or objects that are there one moment and then gone the next like a supernova explosion or a gamma ray bursts these things that have like sharp, short bursts of energy. Oh, that's so cool. So yeah, those are, unfortunately, all of the flowers like all of the accolades that Vera Rubin got for her work after decades, committing ourselves to this field, learning new things about the universe fighting sexism along the way. And then after husband

Corinne Caputo 40:44

had to eat dinner in the car. I mean, I don't,

Moiya McTier 40:48

I don't care about his sacrifices, could not care less. But this woman, she, she mentored other women coming up in the field, she made sure that she wasn't going to be the last even though she was the first to do many things. I just love her so much. And she died in 2016. And I just Yeah,

Corinne Caputo 41:07

I have to say when I was looking at pictures of her, there's this like, classic black and white picture that comes up a lot when you google image her and it's like her at a microscope. It looks like a microscope. I guess it's probably a telescope. But she's wearing the coolest like seven D shirt. The pattern, it's the back of my picture, but the pattern of the shirt looks just incredible. And I'm like, This must have been a really cool person. You can just tell.

Moiya McTier 41:35

can just tell sometimes. Uh huh.

Corinne Caputo 41:38

I'll put that picture on her Instagram. Yeah. So

Moiya McTier 41:41

I thought that since we were covering the the work and life of someone who was obviously overlooked again and again, that maybe we could spend some time recounting our own accomplishments that have also gone ignored by the Nobel Committee. Hell yeah. So I woke up today, and I fed myself and I have yet to hear anything from the Nobel Prize Committee.

Corinne Caputo 42:08

Yeah. Why didn't I get that midnight call from the Nobel Prize Committee saying that I won? Why can't

Moiya McTier 42:14

I win a million dollars for doing basic human maintenance on myself? I

Corinne Caputo 42:19

completely agree with that. I do think that that is incredibly impressive. I went into the office today,

Moiya McTier 42:25

you should get two Nobel Prizes. You could be the second woman, the second ever get to know, me and

Corinne Caputo 42:30

Marie Curie. And guess what we probably both have, like Marie Curie. I'm being secretly poisoned by something in this house, I'm sure. almost definitely seen the paint on these walls. There's got to be led here.

Moiya McTier 42:43

I mean, if there's anything that internet slash WebMD has told me, it's that everything is giving me cancer. Oh, I'm

Corinne Caputo 42:49

dying all the time. And where's my prize for that for being brave? You know what Tommy hurts. My tummy hurts a lot. And I'm brave every day.

Moiya McTier 43:01

Corinne, what? What do you think you could do? Like we've established that we have both done very impressive things. Yeah. But looking forward. What do you think you could do that would go ignored by the Nobel Committee go

Corinne Caputo 43:15

ignored. Wow. Okay. Well, actually, what I did do is a few years ago, as you know, I wrote a silly humor book. That's a self help parody book. It's called How to success and writers guide to fame and fortune complete comedy book. So silly. I did submit it for a Pulitzer Prize. And that is because it is so easy to submit your own Pulitzer Prize. You just have to mail five copies of the book to Columbia. That's it. I think it might also be there might be some $20 fee like I don't know. Why

Columbia University. Yeah, because they apparently they are the keepers the gatekeepers. Um,

I wrapped them up in a cute bow and I mailed it off and never heard. So I think the jury's still out on if I want

Moiya McTier 44:05

the bullets are just gonna come through next year. They were delayed a year.

Corinne Caputo 44:09

Yeah. Oh my god. Totally. It must mean COVID blades.

Moiya McTier 44:12

Worse. Yeah, that makes sense.

Corinne Caputo 44:15

But you can do a lot I know more. You can do a lot. You tell me what you can do.

Moiya McTier 44:18

I could do I feel like I could find aliens. Yes. I really think that they would not give me a Nobel Prize. They'd be like, in 2019. We gave we gave two dudes a Nobel Prize in Physics for finding the first exoplanet. But this boy chick I just don't think that she deserves something for finding the aliens because because it's you know, the guys did all the work and finding the planets.

Corinne Caputo 44:44

What is that Amy Adams movie about aliens arrival. I'm like you could have an arrival style interaction with aliens. They would be like, I don't know. I don't know about that. I could be

Moiya McTier 44:55

the first person to communicate to communicate with aliens to like be Come in Alien link published

Corinne Caputo 45:01

like a university wide language for aliens. They're like no, not impressive

Moiya McTier 45:08

enough. Yeah, we're a little busy right now just in 2012 we just gave a prize to a woman like we can't we can't do it again. Be

Corinne Caputo 45:15

like, Boy Yeah, boy. Yeah. Why don't you do that name? Did we give her an award last year?

Moiya McTier 45:23

Yeah, you know, I've never once won a Nobel Prize for EXO lore. Nothing for my Milky Way book. I I talked to the galaxy. I channeled the Galaxy

galaxy. I have heard so retiro I've had zero

contact from the Nobel Committee. We have to do something about this. None of my research. I don't think any of my research was as groundbreaking as we are Reubens like she discovered dark matter. And I came up with a method to maybe find mountains on exoplanets with telescopes that won't be built for another 20 years. Wait, that sounds really cool. It is very cool. But it's also like totally hypothetical, because we don't have telescopes that could find it now.

Corinne Caputo 46:05

We're only one incredible telescope away from YouTube. From you finding a mountain we wouldn't

Moiya McTier 46:10

need an eye I'm not kidding about the name of this telescope. Corinne just so you know, we would need the overwhelmingly large telescope. No, that's that is what it's about is actually what it's going to be called.

Corinne Caputo 46:23

Okay. It's hard to understand what is real and what is not in science. Because something

Moiya McTier 46:30

like Sorry, someone on the internet made that up.

Corinne Caputo 46:33

Yeah, that is so funny. Okay, well, we're just one overwhelmingly large telescope away from the award you deserve for

Moiya McTier 46:42

finding the bumpiness of exoplanets. Bumpy? I did. quick tangent. I did. I did a year on this project. I worked on this method for a year and only at the end of that year after I had published my paper on it. Then someone pointed out that the unit I created to determine how like topographically diverse and exoplanet is was bum penis bomb penis. That is so funny paper about about Planet bumpiness is bumpiness.

Corinne Caputo 47:18

Okay, good. We should be insulting Venus's at every chance we get because women have had it too hard for too long.

Moiya McTier 47:26

And that's why we should get more Nobel Prizes. I won the Nobel Prize reparations.

Corinne Caputo 47:33

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And you deserve it.

Moiya McTier 47:40

Those are all my thoughts between me and Vera Rubin. I was I was briefly considering doing like a Kevin Bacon style game where I've figured out how far removed I am from Vera Rubin.

Corinne Caputo 47:50

You're probably not that far. Honestly. Like,

Moiya McTier 47:53

I bet I could do it in just like one or two generations.

Corinne Caputo 47:58

I think I can connect to her because I swear to God, I have a shirt just like this pattern. I'll never get over the pattern of this shirt. That's really quick.

Moiya McTier 48:06

If you if the Kevin Bacon game obviously goes You have to know someone who knows someone who knows Kevin Bacon or you just have to have the same article.

Corinne Caputo 48:16

If you have the same piece of clothing then you're practically sisters.

Moiya McTier 48:21

Basically, Mmm hmm. All right, I am getting kind of sweaty in this greenhouse. Yeah, and I think the tea that we made with all of the herbs from the greenhouse, I think it's done studying. So let's go drink that. But until, until the next episode, listeners we have something we want you to remember.

Corinne Caputo 48:42

Never forget you our space.

Moiya McTier 48:53

Pale Blue Pod was created by Moiya McTier and Corrine Caputo with help from the Multitude Productions team. Our theme music is by Evan Johnston and our cover art is by Shae McMullin. Our audio editing is handled by the incomparable Mischa Stanton.

Corinne Caputo 49:08

Stay in touch with us and the universe by following @PaleBluePod on Twitter and Instagram, or check on our website palebluepod[dot]com. We're a member of Multitude, an independent podcast collective and production studio. If you like Pale Blue Pod, you will love the other shows that live on our website at multitude[dot]productions.

Moiya McTier 49:26

If you want to support Pale Blue Pod financially, join our community over at patreon[dot]com/palebluepod. For just about $1 per episode, you get a shout out on one of our shows and access to director's commentary for each episode. The very best way, though, to help Pale Blue Pod grow is to share it with your friends. So send this episode, this link, to one person who you think will like it and we will appreciate you for forever.

Corinne Caputo 49:52

Thanks for listening to Pale Blue Pod. You'll hear us again next week. Bye!