by Adrian Berry
Why are there so few women scientists? The reason, says an expert on feminism, is not so much male prejudice as the influence of militant feminists who proclaim that science is a ‘tool of domination’.
‘These people, to whom ideology is all that matters, are driving women out of science by imposing their beliefs on them,’ Noretta Koertge, a historian and philosopher of science at Indiana University in Bloomington, told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Atlanta.
‘They claim that research is valueless unless it conforms to current ideology. If a woman scientist reveals her profession at a feminist gathering, she is likely to be told, You’re wicked. You’re consorting with the enemy. You’re raping the environment .’
At the centre of this ideology was a paranoid obsession with rape. The feminists, say Koertge and others, believe that pursuing knowledge is a violation of nature and hence that ‘to seek to know is to want to f**k.’
One of them had asserted that ’s Principia, which deals with the laws of gravitation, is a ‘rape manual’. By this she had meant that this great work of mathematical exploration ‘penetrated the innards’ of physics.
Many female students had taken this literally. They were now convinced that the laws of gravity were about sex, and therefore shunned them. Other feminists had a special dislike of biology. They had convinced themselves that the pain of childbirth was a ‘social construction’, meaning that it could be prevented by political reform.
‘They claim that the biological classification of human beings into two sexes is inspired by the political desire to demarcate clearly those who are to dominate and those who are to be dominated. If this demarcation was changed - so they say - then it would no longer be painful to give birth.’
Koertge had heard a female would-be astronomer - who decided after all not be an astronomer - say she had changed her mind because she was put off by the expression ‘Big Bang’, which describes the violent origin of the universe. Such ‘male sexist terminology’, said the sensitive creature, ‘is off-putting to women who might otherwise be interested in pursuing careers in the field.’
Recently the journal Sky and Telescope, recognizing that ‘Big Bang’ has a sexual connotation, ran a competition to find a ‘less offensive’ but equally graphic term for this event. But in vain. After looking at countless entries, the judges decided that the original had to stay.
Feminism was not always like this. ‘Twenty years ago,’ says Koertge, ‘its dominant mood could have been represented by the Second World War posters of the Riveter. Activists were rolling up their sleeves and demanding access to traditionally male jobs.
‘Women were no longer willing to be nurses or legal secretaries or lab technicians. They wanted to be electricians, engineers, forest rangers and astronauts - and gender stereotypes which implied that women couldn’t deal with machines or think analytically were anathema to them.’
But a Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep during the Seventies would be amazed by the changed nature of feminism today. ‘The tough and strong-armed Rosie Riveters have been displaced by moralizing Sensitive Susans, each desperately trying to find a new ideological flaw in the so-called hegemonic discourse of patriarchal, racist, colonial, Eurocentric culture .’
This kind of dogmatic phraseology was typical of the feminists who all too often talked like Communists and Nazis. One example was their argument that belief in logic was a form of insanity. It went like this: was both logical and insane. Therefore logic is insane.
The history of women’s achievements in science often attracted feminist teachers. But students learned little or nothing about , or . Instead, they would be told of the ‘contributions’ of the allegedly forgotten healing arts of herbalists and witches. Some observers have likened this to a clash between the male, Apollonian culture of the ancient Greeks and female, Earth Mother cults akin to that of the Maenads.
‘The tragedy is that women, already a tiny minority among scientists, could use some support from moderate feminists as they seek to gain acceptance and equal treatment. But instead they find the opposite, because the moderate feminists are not there any more.’
The Paranormal is a Peter Pan
Few subjects more infuriate scientists, physical scientists in particular, than claims of ‘paranormal’ events, such as spoon-bending, levitation and communication with the dead.
They are resented because, if confirmed, the whole fabric of science would be threatened. On both sides of the Atlantic, sceptical committees have been set up to investigate such events, and they almost invariably conclude that the claim in question is a fake.
One scientist, , spoke for many when he declared that, after a century of failure to perform paranormal experiments with repeatable results, the subject has become ‘a bloody bore’.
is an energetic collector of strange folklore with no such inhibitions. She has just published a finely illustrated book on the subject, filled with fascinating and unintentionally hilarious tales. The book’s dust-jacket tells us she ‘is a leading authority on the paranormal. She writes and broadcasts regularly on the subject . . . She works as a healer.’
If naive, she is at least honest. She does not hesitate to reveal photographs of mediums caught cheating, or the bogus photographs of fairies that deceived . The great difficulty in verifying paranormal claims is that the evidence always proves elusive - such as the photographs of ghosts which are visible only to the ghost-hunter.
Picknett has an excuse for this. She blames it on a personage called the Cosmic Joker, or the god Pan, whose sinister antics gave the word ‘panic’ to our language. He is a ‘cruel, bored god’ who amuses himself by revealing proofs of supernatural happenings and then destroying the proofs before they can be examined.
and , the two Yorkshire teenagers who faked the pictures which deceived , were typical victims of the Joker. They could see the fairies, but with terrible unfairness he made them vanish whenever they produced a camera.
Another of his victims was , founder of the Mormons. The angel Moroni gave him gold and brass plates bearing hieroglyphics, which he translated with the angel’s help into the Book of Mormon. But Smith’s reputation for honesty has suffered ever since, because the angel removed the plates before anyone else could examine them.
This fellow Pan is even wicked enough to swindle hundreds of people out of their worldly possessions. Typically, Picknett says, he informs a trusting cult-leader that the world is about to end in fire, but that if they will sell everything they own and stand on a hilltop, alien spaceships will rescue them before the conflagration. Then, of course, the spaceships fail to turn up.
‘History attests the Joker’s power,’ the author says shudderingly. The Joker loves to arrange tantalizing ‘coincidences’, a good example being the apparent similarities between the assassinations of American presidents and . ‘It is difficult [in these two assassinations] to escape the notion of the malign influence of the Joker,’ Picknett writes.
On the contrary, it is quite easy. She gives the following facts: was elected president in 1860 and in 1960. A hundred is a remarkable number only because we count in tens. Both men were involved in civil rights. So was nearly every president since . Both were assassinated on a Friday and in the presence of their wives. There was a one in forty-nine chance - not remarkably long odds - that both murders should occur on a Friday, and both were on an occasion that wives were likely to attend. Both men were shot in the head. The most logical place for a murderer to aim. Both their successors were called , were Southern Democrats and were in the Senate. This is less surprising than it sounds. Of the 41 US presidents, 13 have been Democrats, 15 were Southerners and 12 had been Senators. And is one of the commonest names in America. Of the 8,602 people listed in the current Who’s Who in America, nearly 4 per cent are .
was born in 1808, Lyndon in 1908. One assassin was born in 1839, the other in 1939. That 100 again. The names of the assassins each had 15 letters. So did the ass
assin of President . So do many people’s.
The paranormal is filled with these dubious ‘coincidences’. Many people associated with the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 were mysteriously ‘struck down’, Picknett suggests, by an ancient curse; but this is Hollywood, not history. Today it is commonly accepted that the tomb’s discoverers, Lord and , invented the ‘curse’ to discourage robbers.
Like the writers of many books on the paranormal, Picknett dislikes scepticism. She calls it an ‘extreme form of gullibility’. Another paranormalist, in Stalinist style, calls it a ‘mental illness’.
But the science writer takes a more robust view: ‘You cannot build an informed democracy out of people who will believe in little green men from . Willingness to accept unsupported statements is the greatest ally of the demagogue and the dictator.’
Get Resurrected with
I claim that either theology is pure nonsense,
a subject with no content, or else that it must ultimately
become a branch of physics.
Tipler has made the most startling prediction since science and religion diverged late in the last century. He believes that everyone who has ever lived will be resurrected and allowed to live out their lives again.
But there is nothing religious about his prediction. Even if somewhat speculative, it is based strictly on science. Its feasibility depends on the findings of future and super-powerful astronomical telescopes. It assumes that the beings who live at a time in the extremely remote future, which he calls ‘Omega Point’, will be able to resurrect us because they will have almost infinitely powerful computers.
Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, New Orleans, and a former senior research fellow at Oxford, takes the commonly accepted view among physicists that everything that can happen must happen.
‘I cannot prove my theory,’ he admits, ‘and there is at present no way to test it. But it seems absolutely logical, and it is based entirely on our present knowledge. Just as we, out of scientific curiosity, make clumsy and partly successful efforts to recreate the bodies and ways of thought of our prehuman ancestors, so our far future descendants will be immeasurably more successful in recreating us.’
The vastly powerful computers of these beings at Omega Point would be so sensitive that they would be able to look back into their past and extract almost all the information that was there. Yet they will be able to do this only if they can acquire the necessary information. And this, in turn, depends on whether the universe is going to continue to expand for ever - whether it is ‘open’ - or whether, by contrast, it is ‘closed’, so that it collapses under its own weight in a ‘Big Crunch’ some 20,000 million years hence.
Astronomy will eventually give an answer to this long-debated question. The required information will consist of light-rays that we radiate continually into space, and which an infinitely sensitive telescope could capture with 100 per cent accuracy.
‘We cannot ‘see’ a person who lived centuries ago,’ Tipler explains, ‘because the light rays from that person have long ago left the solar system.’ Similarly, if the universe is open, all information about us will ultimately be dissipated and lost for ever. But a very different situation prevails if the universe is closed. All the radiation that has ever been emitted will converge on the Omega Point. ‘All the light-rays from the people who died a thousand years ago, from all the people now living, and from all the people who will be living a thousand years hence, will intersect there.’
His colleagues are intrigued, but not entirely convinced. ‘It is certainly logical in principle to suggest that an infinite amount of information can be stored in a closed universe,’ says (later to become Astronomer Royal). ‘But whether it would ever happen in practice is another matter. I would put the theory on the borderline between science and good science fiction.’
Tipler, however, has published a complete description of it in the leading physics journal Zygon. Our descendants at Omega Point, he explains, would have almost infinite energy at their disposal. This would be provided by a phenomenon called ‘gravitational shear’, which would result from the fact that if the universe collapses it will collapse very unevenly. Mathematical models show it expanding in one direction while contracting in others, a conflict which, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, would produce a gravitational ‘warping’ exploitable as a gigantic source of heat and power.
Tipler claims that we will be conscious of being resurrected. ‘We will not merely be simulations of people who once existed, like the characters in ’s historical plays. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a perfect simulation. Real people when dramatized make very poor simulations because they do not have free will. If my theory is correct, it implies that when people die, the next thing that they will be conscious of is living again in a future almost unimaginably different from the world in which they died.’
The Saga of
The academic world has been once more in a turmoil of anger against a maverick whom many of them see as being to science what the over-talkative former Bishop of Durham was to religion - Professor Sir .
, and his mathematical colleague , produced a new bombshell in Nature claiming that flu epidemics are caused by sunspots. Their conclusion, which has infuriated medical scientists, is based on their rigidly held belief that space is full of viruses. Storms on the sun’s surface (indicated by sunspots) are supposed to drive these viruses into the earth’s atmosphere, whereupon we all catch flu.
This claim, that denies all conventional explanations of flu outbreaks, was not exactly new. Some angry scientists have even written a special sub-program in their word processors which, by pressure of a single key, will bring the phrase ‘Contrary to the views of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe . . .’ to the screen.
For H W take the provocative view that all life comes from space. Aids, Legionnaires’ Disease, the germs that have caused outbreaks of disease throughout history, all come wafting down through the clouds like microscopic little green men. But the real fury arises with their claim that ’s theory of evolution by natural selection is wrong, and that evolution occurs because mutating life-forms continually fall from space. Nor, in their view, is this an accident. It was deliberately arranged long ago by a super-intelligent civilization who wished to ‘seed’ the earth. In pursuit of this case they make claims that their critics consider downright outrageous.
The accusation that has caused the most outrage is that Archaeopteryx, one of the most significant pieces of evidence for natural selection, is a fake. Archaeopteryx was a creature, half reptile, half bird, that lived about 60 million years ago. The fossil of this feathered reptile, one of the prides of the British Museum, shows that the creature was evolving from one species to another without any help from space invasions.
However, this was no problem for H W. They claimed that the feathers were actually made of concrete and were put there in 1861 by its discoverer, . Their book on the subject provoked a review in the New Scientist by the Reading University zoologist of unprecedented savagery:
‘This book is couched in such intemperate language and contains such demonstrable falsehoods, as well as hardly imaginable calumnies of persons unable to defend themselves, that it is exceedingly difficult not to fall into the trap of exploding into an emotional tirade . . .
‘Its main thesis is patently ludicrous and can be proved to be false. We must ask the question: what is this all about? This is the unsavoury aspect, which makes this one of the most despicable pieces of writing it has been my misfortune ever to read. It displays utter contempt for minimal standards of scholarship - the book seems to portray a hatred of and a most involved and twisted mentality towards zoologists. This libellous nonsense will remain for a long time a stain on the reputations of both authors.’
The museum fraternity were just as angrily pressing the H W keys on their computers. ‘There is not a grain of truth in any of these outrageous allegations,’ said , former chief curat
or at the British Museum.
‘Certainly,’ said , curator of the University Museum at Oxford, ‘the claim that Archaeopteryx is a fake should be investigated. But the investigation should be done by those who actually understand fossils, not a couple of people who exhibit nothing more than a Gargantuan conceit that they are clever enough to solve other people’s problems for them, when they do not even begin to recognize the nature and complexity of those problems.’
Hoyle himself denies writing anything objectionable. ‘But we may have included a few mild sarcasms,’ he concedes.
The most puzzling part of all this is that, in other branches of science, he is a giant. ‘He has made great and fundamental contributions to astronomy,’ said . The most important of these is his discovery, with the American physicist , of the way that the heavy chemical elements that fill our bodies, such as oxygen, carbon and iron, are made in the nuclear furnaces of giant stars. Fowler won a Nobel prize for this work, but Hoyle, to his justifiable annoyance, did not.
But even astronomy, at which Hoyle - co-founder of the now discredited Steady State model of the universe - is a top theorist, gave H W another opportunity for starting a furious quarrel. They accused an American astronomer, J. Mayo Greenberg, of plagiarism. Greenberg developed a theory that space contains ‘pre-organic’ material, which H W claim is an unacknowledged copy of their own theory. ‘We must congratulate him on his startling accuracy,’ they said slyly.
Greenberg reacted like other victims of H W’s ‘mild sarcasms’. ‘These two men are constantly making these stupid accusations against me,’ he retorted. ‘I think they have never forgiven me for pointing out some years ago at a public meeting that they had made an elementary scientific error.’
H W seem to have a genius for annoying people. Whatever the merits of their theories, their rows cause far more enjoyment than the whingeings of bishops.