#Caroline Herschel

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings At its dawn, every technology — like every new love — is aglow with the exhilaration of endless possibility. Its dark sides and eventual demise are unfathomable to the wildly optimistic psyche of the besotted, and besotted we invariably are with each

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings Born in Germany in an era when no woman could obtain a formal education in science anywhere in the world, Maria Clara Eimmart (May 27, 1676–October 29, 1707) predated Caroline Herschel — the world’s first professional woman astronomer — by a century.

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings The tenderness of feathers meets the grandeur of trees in the otherworldly life-forms of the seas, which offered an unexpected entry point for women in science. Although the Victorian botanist and photographer Anna Atkins became the first person to

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings Caroline Herschel, the first professional woman astronomer, was a remarkable woman who lived a long and pathbreaking life. Her parents deemed her too ugly to marry and envisioned for her a life as a servant — she became the Cinderella of the

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “The fundamental fallacy of utopianism is to assume that everyone wants to live in the same utopia.” In her memoir, the trailblazing astronomer Caroline Herschel recounted frequently having to “measure the ground with poles” when she first began