AaS! 204: How did Annie Jump Cannon Bring Order to the Universe?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2023
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
How was massive astronomy done in the 1800’s? Who were the Harvard Computers? How did Annie Jump Cannon figure out how to classify stars? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There was the time. |
| 0:09.8 | Not as long ago as you might think that the word computer wasn't for an electronic device, |
| 0:16.3 | but it was for a job description. |
| 0:20.1 | Physics, and really all of science, but physics in particular, is a mathematical exploration |
| 0:25.4 | of nature. |
| 0:26.2 | We use mathematics to describe, to understand, to predict the many wonderful patterns we see in |
| 0:32.1 | the universe, and how we do that deserves an entirely separate episode. |
| 0:36.3 | Feel free to ask. |
| 0:38.2 | And mathematics often requires a serious amount of number crunching. |
| 0:43.5 | Today, that number crunching happens on our computers and our calculators, everything from |
| 0:49.4 | computing a simple formula to solving complex equations. It all happens on the machine. But we scientists in |
| 0:57.2 | the 21st century aren't the only ones who have needed to compute simple formulas and solve |
| 1:03.2 | complex equations. So what do you supposed to do? If you're a pre-20th century scientist that |
| 1:08.6 | needs to get some math done, but you don't have a magical |
| 1:11.5 | little box that does it quickly, efficiently, and correctly for you. What do you do? Well, you hire |
| 1:16.7 | someone to do it. You go out on the job market. You say, hey, I need someone to do all my math |
| 1:22.0 | for me so that I can do the higher level thinking or the data collection or the analysis and the |
| 1:28.4 | inferset, but I need someone to crunch the numbers. I need someone to go through all |
| 1:33.6 | the data, find the commonalities. I need someone to apply this equation. I need someone to |
| 1:39.0 | calculate this or that. A famous example of this computer was Johannes Kepler. |
| 1:46.3 | He was the computer. |
| 1:47.2 | He was hired as the computer for Tyco Brahe. |
... |
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