RH: You talk in the opening section of the book about how you
were drawn to math and physics as a young woman. What led you to
writing about science rather than pursuing a career as a
scientist?
MW: For me, I was one of those children who loved math from
the very beginning. I remember a lesson where we were taught
about the existence of pi; it was like a religious experience for
me in many ways, and I knew from then on that I wanted to do
math and science when I grew up. I read about Einstein in a
children's encyclopedia and he became my hero. I didn't know what
relativity was, but I knew it was something great, and I knew that
when I grew up, that's what I wanted to know about. And I did --
when I went to university, I did physics, and relativity was
everything I wanted it to be and more.
I had every intention of becoming a research physicist, but I
ultimately left the field because I found the whole culture -- of
science in general, and of physics in particular -- alienating. Partly
because I was the only woman: I had no women teachers or mentors,
and found it very difficult to be the only woman in an all-male
environment. I left and basically have written about science and
technology ever since.
For a long time, I've wanted to write a book about physics as I saw it,
which is as a beautiful way of understanding the world around us. I
was particularly inspired because a number of my friends had tried
to read other physics books and couldn't get past the first two or
three chapters before they would come to me and ask me to help
them understand... so it seemed to me that there was a tremendous
gap, that nobody was writing about physics in a way that was really
accessible to non-science people. I wanted to write a book that would
explain physics to intelligent people that didn't know much about
science. And the way to do that, I thought, was by putting it in a
cultural context -- much science writing gives us the answers, but it
doesn't help us understand why the questions matter. Why does it
matter whether the earth goes around the sun, or the sun around the
earth? It's not just a matter of celestial geometry; it actually has real
cultural meaning...
That was my primary aim: to write a book about physics that would
put it into a cultural context. And I had in the back of my head an
idea, that I would like to try to shed some light on a question that
had confronted me as a woman in physics: why was it so difficult for
women to get ahead in physics? why was it the one field of science
where they still hadn't significantly broken into? When I started, I
didn't start out with any particular thesis, but it gradually became
clear to me, as I read more and more of the history of physics, was
that physics was the one branch of science that has historically been
most closely linked to religion, and remains a quasireligious pursuit
even today. And that the historical struggle of women to get into
science reflects their historical struggle to get into the clergy -- to
interpret the book of God and the book of Nature.
RH: One of the interesting points developing out of that thesis is
that modern physics has become -- I don't want to say abstract, but
it's become somewhat of a pursuit unto itself, and that it should take
material reality more into account.
MW: Physics is still the great love of my life, and I really have
hoped to see in my lifetime relativity and quantum physics unified
into a Theory of Everything, and in my heart I still wish to see that.
In some ways, that's a very abstract goal. I don't think there's
anything necessarily wrong with abstract goals; if we could do this
within a reasonable cost limit, I would be the first to say, "Give them
the money." But I think there's a problem in saying that in order to
realize this goal, our society is going to have to spend literally tens of
billions of dollars -- it isn't that the goal is unworthy. But even its
greatest admirers admit that as beautiful as the TOE would be, it
doesn't have much practical use, and when it comes to the social cost,
you have to ask why taxpayers should pay billions of dollars for this
work of beauty, anymore than they should spend billions of dollars
to stage an opera, or to have an artist paint a beautiful picture. When
physics is competing with art for our tax dollars, I don't think we can
justify spending billions of dollars on an aesthetic whim.
One of the things that has been missing from the dialogue about
science in our society, especially physics, is the need to justify
spending large sums of money in terms of the overall social good.
The money that we spend on a supercollider to find one subatomic
particle is money that doesn't get put to other, more practical uses.
And I think that physics has gotten a bit too focused, a bit too
obsessed, on these theoretical pursuits.
RH: Looking at it from the religious parallels you set up in the
book, it's like paying billions for Trappist monks to spend their lives
in contemplation.
MW: That's absolutely right. The analogy is a good one; when I
was doing physics, I felt we were being treated like monks, that
when we walked into the door each day, we were abandoning the
worldly reality for a realm of pure, transcendent truth. And that can
be a tremendously appealing thing, but as you say, should we spend
billions of dollars on meditating?
RH: You steer away from claiming that bringing women into
physics would inherently cause a breakaway from this theoretical
tendency, but you do make the point that a significant influx of
women into the field would by necessity change the overall ethos
and mindset of the scientific community.
MW: I certainly don't believe that women are innately
different than men; I think it's a question of different forms of
acculturation. It's my view that physics needs to get back into it
some of the qualities that have traditionally been acculturated into
women. In order to justify that claim, we can look at a scientific
discipline where that kind of reacculturation has occurred, like
biology. In the last twenty or thirty years, with a significant number
of women joining the field of biology, there has been
significant change. One concrete example is the shift from theoretical
models of competition to models of cooperation. And male biologists
are studying cooperation as well -- it's not that only women will take
new approaches, it's that they will ask the new questions that will
lead to new approachesthat everyone can use. It seems to me that it
is a very sane conclusion to say that that can happen in other
branches of science like physics.
RH: You also propose that women in physics, by the very nature of
their rarity in the field, are more inclined to look at physics from a
critical perspective, because they already are constantly questioning
and evaluating their presence in the field, leading to broader
contemplation about what the field means to them, and ultimately
what it means period.
MW: Women who are outsiders are already forced to address
issues that the insiders don't have to face. In the last thirty or forty
years, the one field of physics in which women have made significant
inroads has been astrophysics, and a number of women have made
significant contributions to astrophysics in that period, because they
asked questions that most astrophysicists thought they already knew
the answers or that the answers weren't important.
RH: One point that needs to be reiterated is that most non-
scientists tend to look at science as a sort of perspectively neutral
discipline: there's an answer out there, and the scientists go out and
find it. What this book and your examples here say is that science is
not a quest for abstract, neutral truth, but is very much rooted in our
attitudes and beliefs as men and women. It has a common quality
with religion, then, in that it is concerned with questions about our
own identity.
MW: In the seventeenth century, scientists, especially
physicists, tried to create what they thought would be an entirely
objective, neutral version of the truth. And they honestly believed
that they had discovered, in mathematically based science, a form of
truth totally independent of human culture. I think their belief was
sincere, but what contemporary histories and philosophies of science
has shown us is that even when you use the tools of mathematics,
there is no such thing as neutal science.
You always have to a metaphor of what you do. In the seventeenth
century, they used the metaphor of the machine; today, we use the
metaphor of information processes. Science always proceeds by being
informed by cultural metaphors. It can no more remove itself from
culture than any of us can.
