Chauvinist Physics

Last week, the Internet grew three times in size, as countless bloggers posted their reactions to McCain's Vice Presidential pick. Just as Hillary's departure speech endorsement was sweeping women's suffrage issues under the rug, McCain and Palin pulled it out from under everyone's feet. The physics sphere seems to be especially in a twist. McCain's almost admirable traits (like his vow to fight global warming, and to keep creationism out of science classes) are negated by Palin's more conservative views. Even as governor of Alaska, Palin is far from convinced global warming is caused by humans, making it easy to justify turning a blind eye to environmentally friendly efforts. Its the same story with creationism - indeed, she is now the only candidate who is still open to adding creationism to the curriculum.

What does this mean for science? If she can brush off the opinions and efforts of thousands of professional scientists, what will she do with power?

Of course, there have always been hot points of contention between women and Science. The skewed distribution of the sexes in physics clearly illustrates that. Only five percent of physics professors in the US are women. Even in my own class, out of forty students, the two females serve as a daily reminder that there is heavy social stigma for women in physics.

Yet this distribution seems to be only with physics - math and chemistry seem to have equal proportions of the sexes. I cannot think of a singular event that gave physics this disrepute. If anything, the opposite is true - Marie Curie is the only human, let alone woman, that has won a nobel prize in two fields - physics and chemistry. Rosalind Franklin used X-ray diffraction to find the structur of DNA (even if the recognition is often directed to Watson and Crick.

More recently, "Einstein's big Idea: Ancestors of E=MC^2", a KPBS documentary, portrayed Émilie du Châtelet as a founder of Einstein's famous equation. Before this, I had never heard of her, as is the case with, unfortunately, many scientists (hopefully due to my cultural ignorance, not to being cultural derelicts). Emilie was, having been born in the beginning of the 17th century, extremely lucky in having recieved extensive education. An affair (a practice acceptable at the time) with no other than Voltaire introduced her to Newton's ideas. Her French translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica is still the most widely distributed today. Her connection to Einstein's equaion, while loose, was still groundbreaking for her time. She was able to prove by experiment that free-fall speed increased quadratically, not linearly, as was thought at the time. She actively published papers, and was well regarded in society. A biography is available on her iconoclast life and work.

When she died after giving birth to a fourth child, at the age of 42, Voltaire wrote that Emilie was "a great man whose only fault was being a woman".