“Pickering’s Computers” The final installment of this series on science’s elusive women will focus on English-American astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and the women of Harvard Observatory. Payne-Gaposchkin was the first scientist to assert, against conventional wisdom at the time, that stars are primarily made of hydrogen and helium. Presented in her 1925 thesis, this conclusion was so radical that she was talked out of presenting it by the senior astronomers with whom she studied. Years later, the community, of course, came around. Her work at Radcliffe was the first doctoral dissertation in astronomy from Harvard, and it marked a turning point in the establishment of astronomy as a field that is independent from mathematics. She climbed the nomenclature ladder from “assistant” to “astronomer,” becoming Harvard’s first female professor, and later, being named the university’s first female department chair. But she did not climb the ladder alone. Her path was cleared by a number of remarkable women who preceded her. Working at the Harvard Observatory under the direction of Edward Pickering, they were known as “Pickering’s Harem”, or, more tastefully, “The Harvard Computers.” These women, paid 25 cents an hour, proved to be quite the processing machines. As an assistant, Henrietta Leavitt …

Science communication is difficult. It can be crippled by the complexity of its own subject matter. It can be steeped in jargon, too dense for its readership, or, conversely, too simplistic to satisfy its critics in the scientific community. It can lack warmth, or be too paranoid about its empirical rigor to engage in the metaphoric flights—the quick shifts from microcosm to macrocosm—that cue readers to an emotional engagement in any subject. The problem may lie in an inescapable tautology: to fully understand a scientific, taxonomic, objective conception of the natural world is to be so steeped in scientific idiom that poetics become impossible. And yet, there are those who are capable of communicating the invisible phenomena of science to the public. These people are essentially bilingual. The Sagans, the deGrasse Tysons, the E.O Wilsons; Angier, Attenborough, Carson and Greene; the radio producers, writers, filmmakers, documentarians, and public speakers; these are our human bridges, our storytellers, fluent in both big and small. It’s a specific skill, to be a gifted science communicator—that rare person who can straddle two divergent worlds without slipping into the valley between the so-called “Two Cultures,” someone with hard facts in their mind and literary gems …

  Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn. She the physicist and he the chemist; her creative, theoretical models and analyses based on his exacting chemical evidence; a perfect pair of scientific thinkers. Meitner’s reputation soared with the couple’s co-discovery of an isotope of protactinium, element 91, and her legacy seemed assured. She was the second woman to receive a doctoral degree from the University of Vienna, and then a prestigious faculty appointment. She gained recognition from early twentieth century luminous Berlin physicists including Max Planck, and from Albert Einstein, who hailed her as “our Marie Curie.” Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Meitner’s tragic exclusion from history began with her exile from Germany following the Nazi invasion of Austria, despite her conversion to Protestantism years before. Though geographically separated from Hahn, she continued to develop the theoretical model of the process from Stockholm, through correspondence and a secret meeting in Copenhagen. Yet in 1939, the chemical evidence of nuclear fission—the halving of atomic nuclei—was published in Nature only under the authorship of Hahn and additional collaborator Fritz Strassman, leading to Hahn’s sole Nobel Prize for the discovery. Meitner’s direction of these experiments, and subsequent physical explanation and naming of the …

Underscoring the importance of encryption in our increasingly data-driven digital lives, this year’s World Science Festival features its first-ever session on cryptography, entitled Keeping Secrets: Cryptography in a Connected World. During this discussion expect a well-rounded panel—including mathematician and computer scientist Brian Snow, scientist/journalist Simon Singh, cryptanalyst Orr Dunkelman and cryptography researcher Tal Rabin—to break down cryptography, addressing its strengths and weaknesses as well as its impact on security and privacy.