Date: 2011
Nationality: Italy
Description: Margherita Hack, “the woman of the stars”, was a very important astrophysicist and a convinced and effective scientific disseminator. Anti-conformist, outspoken, unpredictable, outside the box and far from stereotypes, a free woman who has made a huge contribution to the dissemination of astronomy, making generations passionate about science and promoting the role of women and girls in STEM disciplines.
Margherita Hack (Florence 1922 – Trieste 2013) was born to liberal and broad-minded parents who left her free to decide what to believe and what to do. Even as a young girl, Hack showed that she had a strongwilled character, both in the non-conformist choice of her studies, in a totally male and misogynistic environment, and in her life choices, never bending to what she did not believe in, even as a girl during the Fascist period.
At the age of thirty, she had already been a lecturer and researcher at Italian, French, Dutch and American universities….
At the age of 40, in the early 1960s, she became the first female director of an observatory in Italy, the one in Trieste, transforming it from a residual centre into one of the most modern, where she animated a team of young researchers through constant collaboration and exchange. She charmed everyone talking about Cepheids (variable stars that cyclically increase and decrease in diameter and brightness), sunspots, the supergiant star epsilon Aurigae….
Hack has always declared herself atheist, defending the secularism of the State and advocating total split between faith and science; vegetarian, constantly fighting for animal rights; a civil rights advocate and a convinced Lunàdiga.
In the clip, fragments of two meetings between Nicoletta Nesler and Margherita Hack over the years.