The Forum on the History of Physics sponsored a staged reading of the play Silent Sky at the March meeting of the APS in Los Angeles. The play is based on the true story of 19th-century astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt as she experiences a woman’s place in society during a time of immense scientific discoveries, when women’s ideas were dismissed until men claimed credit for them. When Henrietta Leavitt began work at the Harvard Observatory in the early 1900s, she was not even allowed to touch a telescope or express an original idea. The overqualified Henrietta ends up identifying more than 2,400 variable stars. She is credited with the discovery of the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variable stars. After Leavitt's death, Edwin Hubble used the luminosity–period relation for Cepheids, together with spectral shifts to determine that the universe is expanding.

The staged reading was performed by actors associated with the International City Theatre (ICT), Long Beach CA, http://ictlongbeach.org/. The March meeting audience was fortunate in that ICT had done a full production of the play Silent Sky in the summer of 2017. Thus the staged reading was even more theatrical in that many of the lines and emotions of the play had been committed to memory. The playwright of Silent Sky is Lauren Gunderson and originally from Atlanta. She received her BA in English/Creative Writing at Emory University, and her MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch. At Emory she started her playwriting career as part of a science project in a class taught by physicist Sidney Perkowitz. Lauren is credited by American Theatre Magazine with being the most produced playwright in America in 2017.

The articles in this issue represent the views of their authors and are not necessarily those of the Forum or APS.