Shohini Ghose: Women’s Time and Space

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at MintMobile.com/switch. Up from payment of $45 for three month plan, $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer for three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. MintMobile.com. Meeting new people just got way more fun because now you don't have to do it alone. With Tinder's new double date feature, you and your bestie can match together. Tap the double date icon to see profiles built for two. When two pairs match, the group chat kicks off. Scope the profiles, send memes, keep the chat fun, hype each other up. Flirt a little, maybe plan a hang. It's always better when you're in it together. Try the new Tinder double date, explore all the possibilities. Tinder, it starts with a swipe. Download Tinder today. I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating. I think I've always been fascinated by things like mysteries and puzzles. I always dreamed about exploring space like in these sci-fi shows. One of my favorite shows as a kid was Star Trek. I really was that nerd, dreaming about exploring and having adventures. Eventually that led me to realize the biggest mystery out there. The biggest puzzle that one could actually start unraveling is the mystery of how the universe works. There seems to be so many parts of it that we still need to explore. It's like this being that explorer except not in outer space. But right here on earth, but exploring areas that nobody has ever really understood. That was really something that was very exciting to me. That's Johini Gorge. She's not only a leading researcher in the field of quantum physics. She's also a wonderful writer. Her new book calls her space her time. Tells the stories of many other women who, like her, have helped explore the hidden universe. But were largely and unfairly left to remain invisible themselves. I've really been looking forward to talking with you because you're such a good communicator. And you're writing and you're speaking. There's somebody at the other end of your communication, you know, I can see it in your face. Oh, I'm so glad. It's really nice. It opens up what you're talking about. It makes me responsive to what you're talking about. And I love it. And I love what you're talking about too. Your book, her space, her time. For me, it's how invisible women discovered the invisible universe. Yes, and maybe they can become more visible. They can become more visible because of your book. Yeah, that's absolutely true. What first captured your attention? And at what age about the invisibility of women, scientists especially? You know, I'd say I started noticing it only once I was at university doing my undergraduate degree. Before that, actually, I was born and raised in India. And so during high school, I went to an all-girl school. So back then, I didn't really, you know, realize that there was these sort of differences and experiences of wise versus girls and things like this. But then getting to university, I noticed, wait a minute, where's all the other women in my physics classroom? Yeah, I love that phrase. You use a couple of times where the professor would come into the room and say, good morning, gentlemen. You stab in the heart every time the guy comes in the room. So, you know, those are the kind of things that stick with you. And then, you know, there's other such situations where people assume, for example, even now, when I submit papers and I don't say my first name often, people, readers will think it's a man. Because that's the default. So, you know, things like this, they seem small individually, but they add up to this sort of feeling that somehow you're, you don't quite belong. You know, well-known imposter syndrome and you feel like, okay, they'll catch me and throw me out because you don't see others who are like you in that same environment. So you think, well, maybe the problem is in me. So that's kind of how I started feeling when I was in these classrooms and I wasn't often invited to be part of homework groups, for example, in physics. And, you know, didn't really feel like I was heard, I was seen much. So this idea of invisibility, I guess, was always there. And even though I was feeling these kinds of sort of doubts about being in physics classrooms, I didn't really engage with it much because I thought, you know what? I'll just focus on physics. If I really, really prove that I belong by doing great physics, then everything will sort itself out. Eventually, I became a professor and at that stage, I think, is when I started talking to other faculty members about these kinds of questions. And that's when I started exploring what are the experiences of other women, including who are the women who have contributed to physics. And that's when I finally got to learn about these wonderful stories in a more sort of explicit way, is when I went and started digging. You tell the story of the first day going into class to talk about one of these stories. Right. So I think you referred to when I was teaching in the classroom, yeah. So I was, you know, just starting out and I was worried about making sure that students would be engaged. And I was trying to teach about this one very important time in astronomy. When we were first starting to discover what stars are made of and what are the gases and how to identify all of that composition of stars and their life cycles. And in fact, turns out that there's an amazing group of women involved in that entire history. It was a group of women at Harvard who were known as computers because they were the ones who used to analyze all the data taken from the telescopes and try to find patterns. The first computers were women. Exactly. Absolutely. I talked about this group of women with Davas Sobel, the science writer on the podcast. But briefly go over it again so we can place the woman you're talking about. Yeah. So these women were hired because, you know, it was quite actually careful painstaking tedious work to be, you know, gazing at these very blurry kind of photographs taken on these glass plates. They had to be observed by eye using, you know, microscopes and then measuring things and recorded in books and then calculate properties such as wavelengths. All of that was done by hand and it took a lot of care and effort and focus. So women were hired to do this because the men were actually operating the telescope and they were considered to be the astronomers. The women were called computers because the idea was, well, they can do all of the sort of, you know, busy work. And they even decided that it was a lot more like secretarial work. Exactly. So they could pay them half the price. Exactly. But of course the reality was they were doing the actual scientific analysis and finding all these patterns and figuring out all these different categories of stars that we still use today. All of stellar classification was what these women came up with. So even in Star Trek, for example, sci-fi shows, you know, you'll hear some dialogue where somebody says, well, Captain, we found this class M star. Well, that class M is actually a scientific classification that is correct and it comes from the women's work. They were the ones who created all of this. And even in the work they were doing is if I remember correctly, the classification of the stars was a mnemonic for how to classify. What was the mnemonic? So all these stellar classifications, they had these letters and the order of the letter was OBA FGKM. And in order to remember that order, the mnemonic was OBA Fine Girl Kiss Me, which is just awful on so many levels. And it was used universally, was in textbooks and then textbooks around the world. Yeah, it still is actually still used. Yeah, absolutely. If you go to a search for this particular mnemonic, it's everywhere. Do you think that would be one of the things that would have been worked on? You would think so. And I hope that people will start moving away from it. One of the things that I did in my classroom was to invite my students to change that mnemonic and come up with their own versions. And some of them are wonderful. I'll leave it to the reader to discover their mnemonics. That's great. You know, one of the things that I love about the book is your crusading. You're taking this on as a challenge. And in the process, I'm glad that you talk about Pierre Curie, who made sure, because he was on the inside talking with other men. when the Nobel Committee wanted to give him and was it Becker L. The Nobel Prize, leaving out Marie, who had done at least as much work on it as Pierre had. But he was a good ally for her and spoke for her. Not so, I think, with the woman who was also working in the United States or in Canada on radioactivity at the same time as Marie. Who was that? I forget who that was. Harriet Brooks. Harriet Brooks, yes. Yeah, so she worked, she was one of Ernest Rutherford students when he was working in Canada at McGill University. And she actually did early experiments, all of which led to Rutherford's eventual theory of radioactive decay. And so let lead the groundwork for all of this incredible new, new sorts of scientific models about the nucleus and the atom, of course. And she and Curie were amazingly on par at the time. And in fact, she even discovered one of the elements of the periodic table, radon. So she was really an incredible physicist in her own right. But she eventually, she and Marie Curie had very different path. And you're absolutely right that Pierre Curie's support was, you know, very important. But that didn't happen for Harriet Brooks. She did not have that same ally ship. No. In fact, she was about to get a position at Barnard, I think. Yes, Barnard College. And wanted to get married and had to ask permission and they told her not to get married. Well, Lisa, you can, but you're not going to continue as a faculty member. So she had to make a choice. It's amazing. This was, what was this around a hundred years ago? Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of stunning, especially if you think about the fact that Barnard College was one of the key women's colleges at the time. Designed to help women have careers. Yes. But, but not designed to have careers and be married at the same time. Yeah, that was really stunning when I was doing the research into her story that really did shock me. The thing that really gets me is that decades later, you came up against the same problem. Yes. Because you found the man you loved, you got married. And then you got an offer to go to Australia. Thousands of miles away. Sadly, yes. So yeah, it's still an issue. You still have to choose. And often it's the woman who steps away. In my case, I got to continue as an academic, but my husband did not. Hmm. Well, it's positive in the sense you had such a strong ally in your husband. I did. For me, he's like my Pierre Curie. So I'm very, very lucky. In writing the book, in considering the stories of all of these women, are there one or two that stand out in your mind as really having touched you in a special way? Yeah, of course. I'll start by saying all of these women were inspirational to me. And in trying to figure out who whose stories even to include, these were sort of my top list. There was a much longer list of women actually. But I say, I don't think, you know, my publishers wanted like three volumes. So these are already all special women. But if I had to pick, I certainly will feel a very strong personal connection to the Indian physicist, Bibha Chaudhary, because she's been golly like me. And when I was growing up in Bengal, I never heard her name. She was, she's still not in any of our textbooks in India or elsewhere. What's her name? Bibha Chaudhary. And am I right that she discovered the pion and the neutrino? And yet a British man got the Nobel Prize for it. How did that happen? Well, unfortunately, a common story where she did the first measurements where she found evidence of the pion using this, you know, special new technique at the time. And she wanted to confirm it by doing better measurements. But she didn't have the resources. Keep in mind that this was in the early 1940s. She was doing her work in India. India was part of the British empire. There wasn't a lot of resources being, you know, given to Indian physicists based in India. And then, of course, on top of that, the war started. And so there wasn't really any scope for her to get funding for her work. So she couldn't really take that final next step. Although she did publish papers in top journals, she had like a series of four papers about her work in nature, which is, you know, a really major work, we're leading journal. So her work was known in the physics community. So after the war, this British physicist Cecil Powell did build on her technique, used her methods and had better resources to be able to do better measurements. And therefore, he was able to confirm using that same technique that there was this new particle called the pion. And for that, he won the Nobel Prize. And he did actually refer to Jothery's work in his publication. So he did cite her work. And later on in a biography too, he very clearly said that her technique was what was an important part of this discovery. But at the time, I guess he didn't say so to the Nobel committee because there was certainly scope to share the prize. But I guess he may have forgotten to mention it at the time. So she didn't. And then later on, she had a great physics career. She got her PhD, got hired in India, and continued working in these large experiments to try to, you know, also detect this other particle that you mentioned the neutrino. So she was involved in those experiments as well. So she did end up contributing the discovery of two fundamental particles in nature, which is kind of amazing. Who would be your second choice? Wow, there's so many. But I think I'll go with this amazing physicist, Chinese American physicist, Wu Chi and Shen. She did some of the very first experiments where she could actually observe how two quantum particles actually are correlated. And there's this phenomenon that we hear about these days quite often called quantum entanglement, which is this weird connection that quantum particles can have across space and time. So that connection was, it's a very hard thing to observe even today. But before entanglement was even something that people were really interested in, Wu Chi and Shen did one, did an experiment where she was able to observe it. So for me, personally, being a quantum physicist, that really was something that I was amazed that people don't know that she was among the first, because very recently there was even a Nobel prize awarded to three men for their entanglement experiments. But long before they did it, she had already done some of the very first steps in that. You know, one thing that occurs to me as we talk is the idea that the work that gets the ball rolling when it's a man, it's more likely that he's going to get credit for getting the ball rolling than a woman who gets the ball rolling. Am I seeing it wrongly there? Well, it's kind of what I get into, of course, in the book of law, to where if you look at all these different stories of all these women who've done work, sometimes it's the initial work, sometimes it's even the, you know, the final discovery itself, for example, in the case of Vera Rubin, who discovered dark matter. No matter at what stage in the discovery, it happens, if it's a woman, somehow that part becomes the least important part. So, later in the, when the story, the full story is told, the part that's chosen to be important somehow never seems to be the woman's part. It's sort of like nobody says, well, rather for it didn't actually discover everything about the nucleus. Nobody actually qualifies the men's discoveries the same way that people tend to qualify the women's discoveries. When we come back from our break, Chohaney Gose talks about what inspired her to go into one of the most challenging fields of science, quantum theory. Just a reminder that clear and vivid is nonprofit, with everything after expenses going to the center for communicating science at Stony Brook University. Both the show and the center are dedicated to improving the way we connect with each other, in all the ways it influenced our lives. You can help by becoming a patron of clear and vivid at patreon.com. At the highest tier you can join a monthly chat with me and other patrons, and I'll even record a voicemail message for you. Either a polite, dignified message from me explaining your inability to come to the phone, or a slightly snarky one where I explain you have no interest in talking with anyone at the moment. I'm happy to report that the snarky one is by far more popular. If you'd like to help keep the conversation going about connecting and communicating, join us at patreon.com/clearinvivid. P-A-T-R-E-O-N-D. Welcome to www.TilorEdit.com/ClearAndVivid. And thank you. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. And Bubble Wallace. You know what's the worst part of a race? A Raindole. Sitting around and waiting for the track to dry is dull. But instead of waiting, we hang out with Chamba Casino. Social Casino slots, bingo, solitaire, plenty of fun to keep us entertained. So why let a Raindole slow you down? Play now at chambacasino.com. Let's chamba. No purchase necessary VGW group void we're prohibited by law. CTNC is 21 plus sponsored by Chamba Casino. It's 2 a.m. You've kicked off the blanket, flipped the pillow to the cold side twice. And your shoulder is filing a complaint about last night. Nobody warned you, Menopause comes with a side quest. Sleep is like a competitive sport. Hot flashes and frozen shoulders walked in together, uninvited. So Coop built solutions for both. Cooling pillow sheets and toppers that actually hold up through the night sweats. Plus adjustable fill pillows that ease shoulder pressure, instead of leaving you to rotate through four positions, hoping one works. You've googled it as your group chat tried three different solutions that solve nothing. This is Menopause Awareness Month. Turns out the fix was just better sleep essentials all along. Wake up once instead of four times. Head to CoopSleepGoods.com/Menopause. We've been talking about the women physicists that she profiled in her book Her Space, Her Time. How trailblazing women scientists decoded the hidden universe. The prejudices they overcame, while less explicit today, are still formidable for a woman drawn to physics. It's amazing with all the barriers facing you as a woman. How you got so deeply involved in the field itself, what drew you to quantum physics? It doesn't sound like a field that's populated by a lot of women. Well, it's not populated in general, I would say. It's not the first thing I guess students are drawn to. For me, I think I've always been fascinated by things like mysteries and puzzles. I really was that nerd dreaming about exploring and having adventures. Eventually that led me to realize the biggest mystery out there, the biggest puzzle that one could actually start unraveling is the mystery of how the universe works. Quantum theory happens to be the fundamental theory that we know of that best describes the universe. I guess it was inevitable that I would find my way to quantum physics and once I started exploring that and I got a chance to do a research project as an undergraduate. I was hooked because there seems to be so many parts of it that we still need to explore. It's like being that explorer, except not in outer space, but right here on Earth, but exploring areas that nobody has ever really understood. I love the way you take principles from quantum physics and apply them to your own life, like the uncertainty principle. I think that the universe is constantly trying to teach us these lessons. We just have to pay attention. Embrace uncertainty. That's one of them. Yes, absolutely. What is there about the uncertainty principle that you can apply personally, at least in a metaphorical way? You know, the law of quantum uncertainty tells us that we cannot actually know everything about a single quantum particle, for example, an electron or a photon. It's not even allowed by the laws of nature, meaning if you try to go in the lab and make the best experiment you possibly could, using all of the resources in the world, all of the resources in the universe and try to measure that particle, everything about it, you still wouldn't succeed because it's not actually knowable. That's how amazing this quantum uncertainty principle is. It's giving us a limit to knowledge itself and reality itself. How precisely we can know it. To me, that's quite a lesson there that uncertainty means we can't be know at all. We can't know everything, but that's not a bad thing. When it goes out, quantum uncertainty can lead to better types of information processing. We can build quantum computers by harnessing it as an extra knob. So there's power in not knowing. To me, that's a great lesson that we don't have to know it all and be right all the time. You know, I've always wondered when I've heard this discussed, how do we know it's not knowable? I can't get close to understanding that. There's actually an equation that describes the limit to our precision measurements. There's literally an equation which says if you know exactly where let's say a particle is located, that's a property, right, like a position, then there is an actual exact number beyond which we cannot know where, for example, how fast that particle is going. You can actually calculate it. So does that mean if we know this much about where it is, we know that much less about how fast it's going? That's exactly it. That's a formula. So he have your choice. Either get married or be a professor. There you go. That's it exactly. You've not just written this book, but you had an organization that promotes women in science. Tell me about that. How did it begin? What do you do to help the process move along? How does it work? You know, well, thanks for asking about that. So when I eventually got to, you know, my faculty position and started talking to others about what it's like to be a physics student in the classroom, if you're a woman or you're from one of the underrepresented groups, why is that happening? I decided to think of it as a scientific problem. So for example, if I wanted to solve some kind of a quantum problem, there's a process, right? You go and you try to figure out what other people know, what's been measured, what are the experiments, what's not known, and how do you set up ways to do experiments to know and fix perhaps a problem. And then if you do the experiment, it doesn't work. You go back and you change it and you improve. So to me, there's a whole process of addressing scientific problems. So I wanted to use that method to try to address this problem of not having more women and let's say in physics. So that meant I needed to go and find out what are what's known, what do people know about experiences of women versus men in classrooms, what's the culture like, what's the environment, that's all kind of like a research approach. And there are actually experts who study these things, of course, they are experts in scholars in gender studies, psychology, education, policy, many, many different areas. So for me, that was really a light bulb moment to realize that, wait, if we could bring all these scholars and researchers together, we could build a more evidence-based sort of scholarly approach to trying to address this problem. And that's how we came up with this idea of having a center which does bring together all these different types of scholars. That's the Center for Women in Science. And that's what we founded about a little over 10 years ago. And so one thing we did was to try to focus on understanding what are the things that do work and what don't work when we talk about these kinds of questions. For example, I know a lot of people do a lot of work mentoring and, you know, camps for girls and, you know, outreach should make science somehow more exciting to girls. And one thing we found out that, of course, those things aren't actually moving the needle much. We still have very low numbers of girls choosing to go into physics and computer science. So we must be doing something wrong. It turns out we're addressing the wrong problem. It's not that women or girls are not interested or curious. We actually all have that natural sense of curiosity and wonder. It's about whether or not that's being nurtured, whether people are getting there, an equal opportunity to indulge those kinds of, you know, natural interests and being able to succeed and flourish in career choices, as you were mentioning in terms of not having to choose either marriage or career, those kinds of situations don't help. So those are the things that we should really be addressing. So what do you find works, what works? So it's obviously a complex problem because it has to do with, you know, these boxes that we've kind of created as in what's the, what are the roles and abilities and skills of women versus men? So those are biases. We'd have to address biases, address culture. Some things are actually perhaps more direct that we can address things like having policies around, you know, family and support for for women, parental leave. These are things that are already happening and changing, making sure that we offer equal wages so that there's no longer gender wage gap, which still exists, of course, unfortunately. Things like equal access to funding and research resources, which is a very, very important part of doing any kind of physics or scientific work, equal access to networking and the platform such as conferences where we actually get to talk about our work, so that it's known. Things like these Nobel Prizes, which, by the way, still are not necessarily the fairest process for celebrating the best work. So there are those kinds of very specific things that we can change in the process and the systems that we use for doing research. But beyond that, of course, we also have to get over all of our implicit biases, the culture of who we think of. There's a very famous test about who we think about as scientists. It's called just the draw scientist test. And so when kids are asked to draw a scientist, you can guess that who they draw, it's always some guy with crazy hair, like Einstein. That's really just about all these stereotypes that we hold. So we have to work on that piece as well, change the culture. - It's hard to be on the front lines, I imagine. In fact, I know it is. To do what you think is right is the appropriate response. And to make sure you're nevertheless still effective, for instance, Margaret Burbridge didn't accept an award because it was for women scientists. And she didn't want to keep women pigeonholed in the women category. Am I right, Mother? - Yeah. Yes, definitely. - And you had a paper, you had a paper that you withdrew from what was it a journal because they wanted to, what was the reason for including you? - Well, I was told that it was to have more diversity in the way that we could actually-- - So you were there for diversity. - Exactly. - For diversity, not for what you could contribute as a scientist. So what did you do, did you withdraw your paper? - I did, and I sort of did it in more of a public form because I was inspired, I guess, partly by Margaret Burbridge, who was, you know, she was a nationally recognized leading astronomer. So of course, when she made that kind of statement, it really had an impact. And so reading about the fact that these things can make a difference, I thought I would try that in my own small little sort of circle and see if it made an impact. And of course, it didn't cause huge amounts of change, but I think it did raise that awareness and because I did sort of mention it publicly in the group of researchers who were contributing to that particular collection. There was, I did get actually personal notes from some of the other authors. And particularly some, one of the younger authors of one of the other papers wrote to me and was, you know, really genuinely seemed to feel that this is something that needed to be talked about more and was happy that this was being discussed. - You did what you felt was the right thing to do, but at the cost of not getting the paper published in that journal. - Yeah, so I think that that's, you know, part of making change requires some level of being willing to, you know, put it on the line, I guess. And for me, this is a small price to pay if we can actually change things in the longer term. And, you know, the real, to me, I don't see it as a loss at all, in fact. It was a gain. And I'm so glad that I made that choice and didn't choose to just go with the publication. (laughs) - Ah, great. Well, that's encouraging. You're inspiring not just in your book, but in your life. Thank you for that. We're running out of time, but we always end every episode with seven quick questions. - Oh, okay. - Okay, good, let me play your game. First question, of all the things there are to understand, what do you wish you really understood? - Oh my gosh, of course I would go with what I spend every day wondering, which is what's quantum about our universe? What is quantum about quantum? Is really what I want to know. (laughs) So I know that that's very specific to physics, but it really is something I would love to understand. - Well, that's your life. - Yes. - Second question, how do you tell someone they have their facts wrong? - Oh, wow. So the easy question, you mean? (laughs) - These are all hard in that way. (laughs) - Harder than I think quantum physics sometimes. I think it's actually more about perhaps the first finding something that people do agree on. And then maybe that laying that groundwork of what we can agree on could lead us to have more of a discussion on what we disagree on and then call out facts that may be wrong. That might be. - Great, great. What's the strangest question anyone has ever asked you? - Oh my gosh, what's the strangest question? Certainly I've been asked many strange questions about quantum theory and whether people can be brought back from the dead, for example, that was pretty strange. - That's pretty, that's one of the strangest questions I've heard. - Really, okay, so yeah, that was up there. - Okay, how do you deal with a compulsive talker? - I guess mostly I'm the kind of person who would just listen because I'm not actually a compulsive talker, so I don't mind if somebody else was willing to talk. At some point, I guess I would find an excuse and back away slowly. - Now let's say you're sitting next to someone at a dinner party who you've never met before. How do you begin a really genuine conversation? - Wow, I guess I would probably ask them, what was the most interesting experience they've ever had is really what I would like to know because that tells me a lot about what is it that they really value and what comes to their mind first. - That's great, and then slowly you build up to what's the strangest question anyone ever has. - Yes, I don't think I'd lead with that one. - Now we talked about this a little bit and there are a conversation, but the next last question is what gives you confidence? - I think confidence is about, at least for me, confidence is about knowing where I stand about whether it's different issues or different topics and also not looking to others to validate me all the time. So for example, we talked about imposter syndrome before and these days, my approach to that were having confidence in situations where I think I don't belong. I really do treat it like I'm a gay crusher at a party. And if I did, for example, when you crash a party and you know you're not supposed to do that, you don't go stand in a corner, right? You go and you eat all the food and you dance and you meet people and you do everything. So this is how I feel that confidence is about, doing it all until somebody decides that you're not allowed to, but that's not under your control. - That's great. Okay, last question, what book changed your life? - One of the books, I think many books changed my life. One of them was Cosmos, actually, by Carl Sagan. And the reason is not just, of course, because it is a science book and he takes us on this incredible journey across the cosmos, but also it's done in this very poetic way. And it was really of that that drew me in. It's like, you know, the poetry of the universe, not just the facts and the science, but the wonder of it all. And to me, that really is something that I try always to, you know, engage with and bring to audiences myself. So that's why. - You know, one of the things that I think is so valuable in the way you communicate is the relish that you show for what you do. That's contagious. And I congratulate you on your relish. - Oh, thank you. That's exactly, to me, that's exactly what I connected to with somebody like Sagan and those, you know, those communicators who just are so passionate about everything. And for me, that's the same way. - Well, thanks so much, Haney. It was great talking with you. Thanks for being on the show. - Thank you so much. (upbeat music) - This has been clear and vivid, at least I hope so. - My thanks to the sponsor of this podcast and to all of you who support our show on Patreon. You keep clear and vivid up and running. And after we pay expenses, whatever is left over goes to the oldest center for communicating science at Stony Brook University. So your support is contributing to the better communication of science. We're very grateful. - Shohaney Gouge is a quantum physicist and professor of physics and computer science at Wilford, L.A. University in Waterloo, Canada. She served as a lawyer. President of the Canadian Association of Physicists, co-editor and chief of the Canadian Journal of Physics, and the director of the Laurier Centre for Women in Science. Her new book is "Her Space, Her Time," how trailblazing women scientists decoded the hidden universe. This episode was edited and produced by our executive producer Graham Shed with help from our associate producer Gene Schumay. Our publicist is Sarah Hill. Our researcher is Elizabeth O'Haney and the sound engineer is Eric O'Hwan. The music is courtesy of the Stefan Kernig Trio. Next in our series of conversations, I talk with retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. His new book is "Reading the Constitution," why I chose pragmatism not textualism. We know just looking at history and what those framers, what they thought these words meant, but look at it, no problem. But let's look at a little more. Let's look at what the purpose of this thing was. Let's look at how it fitted in within the values that that part of the Constitution wished to keep. Let's look at what the consequences are. Let's look at how our value systems have changed so that to keep the same values, well you may have to do a little bit of work with those words. I'm not saying don't look at them. I'm not saying don't use them. I'm just saying there's a lot more than that involved in a serious constitutional case. Justice Stephen Breyer, next time on "Clear and Vivid." For more details about "Clear and Vivid" and to sign up for my newsletter, please visit allenolda.com. And you can also find us on Facebook and Instagram at "Clear and Vivid." Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. Tired of the same old game night? Switch things up with Chamba Casino. Play over 200 free online social casino games, from classic slots in Blackjack to exclusive in-house favorites you won't find anywhere else. However long you got, you can play your way anytime, anywhere. Make your next chill night a little more fun with Chamba Casino.