Physics Envy
Earlier this month, news broke that the journal Quantitative Science Studies had agreed to publish a paper by Alessandro Strumia on gender imbalance in physics. Strumia had previously drawn fire for presenting similar findings at a CERN workshop in 2018 on gender and high energy theoretical physics. Strumia claimed that there was no empirical evidence that women faced any more challenges getting hired in physics jobs. The upcoming paper argues that an analysis of more than a million papers in fundamental physics demonstrates little difference between the hiring rate of new male and female Ph.D.s. Even though fewer papers are published by new female Ph.D.s compared to men, Strumia concludes women face no additional discrimination in hiring practices. In his talk at CERN, in fact, Strumia complained that he was passed over for a position in favor of a woman who had far fewer citations than he. Part of the reason his talk generated so much controversy was that the woman physicist who he accused of unfair success at his expense was in the audience at the talk.
Following his talk, Strumia was suspended from CERN. His claims were refuted in point-by-point analyses by other physicists, and thousands in the physics community signed a letter protesting Strumia’s actions and his findings. That QSS has decided to go forward with the publication of the paper shouldn’t overshadow the strong action taken by physicists to condemn Strumia’s conclusions, but neither should it be surprising. Strumia declaiming from the podium the irrefutable objectivity of his method while the woman he believed had stolen what was rightfully his and whose experiences he had never bothered to understand sat in the audience is perhaps the defining image of modern science. It is an image of power and truth, the impossible embodying of the view from nowhere, a claim on the ultimate authority over reality, and the ultimate freedom of not having to take seriously the lived experiences of another person. “Hell yeah,” is what I suspect my 22 -year-old self would have thought of such an image.
In December 2011, I was only a year away from completing my art studio degree. According to my ebook orders from the end of that month, I was reading Why Does E=Mc2? by physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Foreshaw. In January, I read and enjoyed Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, and by February, I had moved on to Six Easy Pieces, The Quantum Universe, and The Greatest Show on Earth. A month later I bought The Portable Atheist and The God Delusion. That spring I signed up for a history of science class not because I was interested in the history of science but because it was the closest I could get to a real science class after spending four years doing as little math as possible. I had become completely enchanted with the idea of leaving art school to start over as a physics major. In reading books and watching documentaries about particle physics in particular, I was swept up in a vision of my future self as a researcher at CERN, probing the most fundamental questions of the nature of reality. When I imagine Strumia now, at that podium, staring determinedly above the head of the woman physicist and doggedly advancing his slides, sure in the knowledge that he had bested her with his data, I can see my younger self, averting my eyes from the messiness of my life, the art I felt I couldn’t make, the people I struggled to connect with.
One of the things I learned from Richard Dawkins and Brian Cox is that the substance and weight of the world we experience in day to day life is a kind of lie. The laws that govern our reality are not the intuitive, instinctual ones we use to navigate it. From Feynman, I learned that there is a whole bubbling, shifting, transforming field of forces and materials constantly making and unmaking the world around us, but many of us are too dim or uninterested or just too stupid to make sense of it. What pleasures of experience awaited those who spent less time watching the news or reading fiction and more time disciplining their minds to see the wild and wondrous workings of our world? What need would we have of religious faith, and by extension the bonds of friendship and kinship and community that seemed to ape it, if we could know the true nature of what holds the universe together?
We know, of course, that Feynman denied himself none of the base pleasures available to the great novel-reading unwashed, even many that he should have. But I was entranced by these men and the clarity and purposefulness with which they seemed able to approach the too-big, confusing, shuddering, rippling world I felt I was slogging through. People and their strange ways were incidental in the hierarchy of knowledge that these writers touted. If you commit yourself to the project of knowing and naming fundamental nature, you could be exempted from the much more arduous project of knowing and naming the people around you. I saw a way out of what was at the time my fast-increasing social and general anxiety. A noble pursuit, for which I would be granted in return a reprieve from the agonizing experience of knowing the world with my raw feelings and flawed human perceptions.
I started telling my friends, my artist friends, that art was bullshit. That there were better ways to know the world. Privately, I relished the thought that if I just became a physicist, I could stop agonizing over whether my art had a sufficiently social message. I wouldn’t need to pay much attention to politics if I started over as a physics major—my cause could be instead the New Atheism of the skeptics and scientists populating my bookshelf. And if I was going to torture myself over something, why not have it be learning more math, instead of the helplessness I felt around friends who were struggling with mental illness and the dawning knowledge that I was as well. It would be so much easier.
In September of 2012, I ordered The Structure of Scientific Revolutions because I had actually decided to start over, not as a physicist, but as a historian of science. This last book was added to a stack of things I had read for my history of science course that spring, including a small battered copy of James Watson’s The Double Helix that I discussed with the small group of graduate students in the course. It was the first time I really understood that Watson was no hero and that he had actually told us as much in his own brash words. I remember sitting in my professor’s office with a heavy reader in my lap, trying to parse Donna Haraway’s theory of “the eye that fucks the world,” and the “god trick” that scientific objectivity tries to achieve, to which I had also aspired. I started to see the absurdity–– the cruelty––of that disembodied “objective” gaze from nowhere. It is the refusal of the scientist to lower his eyes to the people in the room, the world around him. By the end of the year, my applications for graduate programs in the history of science had been mailed away, and I was emerging from a hazy 12 months of direct confrontation with all that modern science seemed to offer, and much that it seemed to lack.
This isn’t a story about how I took a course in college and learned that history is nuanced, or about how I read some postmodernism and learned that the Truth is bullshit. It’s certainly not about how my mental health improved and I suddenly saw what a shitty person I had started to become because the former is not true, even if I genuinely hope I have improved on the latter. It’s a story about the same things all of my stories are about, what Lady Science is about. How are we to live in in the world, with all the simmering complexity and beauty that physicists tell us about, but also full to bursting with people and kinship, suffering and joy—all the hot, live wires of emotion and perception and understanding and conflict that make it up? We may choose, as I did for a moment, to try to hoist ourselves above the churn, to fix our eyes on the back of the lecture hall and move to the next slide, safe in the knowledge that science will provide all the answers we need to do it. Strumia at least has proven that he is beyond help, and it is encouraging that the physics community has on the whole come together to make its values clear and shout down his hateful ideas. The next step is to confront the seductions of science honestly, to think deeply about the true cost of the bargain that it offers us. The real calculus here is what we give up in connection and compassion and comprehension of the people around us to pursue the false dream of objective truth.
Image Credit: Claudia Marcelloni, Atlas Experiment, CERN, 2007
