Ladies’ STEM Research: How Physics WILL Be Redefined

Back in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, universities were desirous of increasing the number of non-males on their faculties. They didn’t have to do this, but the leadership was frightened of mean looks, they were in thrall to Equality, and they wanted to signal their virtue to other university leaders.

This was before the days where men could identify as women, so they had to find actual women to fill the new quotas—which every swore were not quotas.

Now they couldn’t just grab non-males off the street and dumb them in, say, physics departments. Physicists, while largely willing to cuck, were still somewhat proud of actually knowing physics.

Thus were born the Studies departments. Women were non-males, and presumably knew a thing or two about being non-male. So why not have them study what it was like to not be male? Physicists couldn’t complain, because what did Women’s Studies have to do with them? The quotas were filled. The ladies were happy having power. Everybody was happy.

It should have been easy to foresee what was going to happen. It probably was foreseen. But the cucks in administration most likely figured that they would be long gone, or well ensconced in their positions, by the time the inevitable happened.

The inevitable did happen. The ladies buried in Studies departments noticed that physicists were still being accorded more honors, more money, more prestige, more students than they were. Society valued the fruits of physics more than the bug-ridden vegetable matter churned out in Studies departments.

This could not be allowed. It was against Equality.

The aggrieved ladies did two things: (1) declared themselves to be as important, or even more important, than other researchers, and (2) redefined physics (and other disciplines) so that it became something they could do.

We are now at the point where the paper “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics” raises no eyebrows. It is by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, whose dual surname resides in both the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire, Durham.

Speaking of herself (pic credit to this site), Prescod-Weinstein says “I’m a pansexual agender cissex woman and I’m an assistant professor in theoretical physics…I’m a queer Black femme whose research focuses on the intersection between…and I think scientists need to talk about colorism more.” Her favorite particle is the quark.

There isn’t anything particularly special about this peer-reviewed creation in a University of Chicago Press journal, except that it was bound to have been written. Let’s see what it says.

Now this paper is eminently quotable. Which is all I will do: quote. It’s free on line, so I beg you will read the entire thing, so that you don’t develop the idea I’m quoting out of context.

Who is allowed to be an observer in physics, and who is fundamentally denied the possibility? In this article, I propose that race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics, despite the universality of the laws that undergird physics, and I introduce the concept of white empiricism to provide one explanation for why…Because white empiricism contravenes core tenets of modern physics (e.g., covariance and relativity), it negatively impacts scientific outcomes and harms the people who are othered…

To provide an example of the role that white empiricism plays in physics, I discuss the current debate in string theory about postempiricism, motivated in part by a question: why are string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to racial hegemony?…

Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principle of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other (Sachs 1993). All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent…

Given that Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression, we can dispense with any suggestion that the low number of Black women in science indicates any lack of validity on their part as observers…

Ultimately, the discourse about the quantum gravity model of string theory provides an example of how white supremacist racial prestige asymmetry produces an antiempiricist epistemic practice among physicists, white empiricism. In string theory, we find an example wherein extremely speculative ideas that require abandoning the empiricist core of the scientific method and which are endorsed by white scientists are taken more seriously than the idea that Black women are competent observers of their own experiences…

The idea of “scientist” was formally conceived after the late eighteenth century when the “fixity” of gender, race, nationality, and class origins became concretized (Golinski 2016, 11). Gender also began to undergo a reinvention: “They [gender categories] were increasingly thought of, not just as anatomical features but as pervasive determinants of personality and intellect…”…This masculinist logic conflated intellectual prowess with physical prowess, in the process ignoring the physical prowess associated with childbirth under the conditions of slavery…

Per Golinski, “For the account to be as purely factual and objective as possible, the observer had to be autonomous, independent of any inference by preconceptions or passions. The ideal was a ‘modest witness,’ one who kept him- or herself out of the picture as much as possible. The observer was called on to practice a kind of self-suppression or self-abnegation” (2016, 29). This definition is almost by construction exactly what Black is not…

It goes on like that at some length. It is complete gibberish. It can be summed up: “I am a black woman who wants more power, and will have it.”

Scoff and laugh at her idiocies, but she’s in the right of it. She knows it’s a power game, and she plays it well. Her kind will win. You and I, dear reader, are not in the academy and can do nothing. She has the power, and will gain more of it from the cucked and shivering men who remain. Men who in the end will care far less about physics and far more about being called a “racist.”

Physics will inexorably be redefined as whatever black women say it is. It’s not that a few white male hangers on won’t continue to do real physics, but they’ll have to do it quietly, and on the cheap.

It is an interesting exercise to guess which year will see the coveted (and overblown) Nobel Prize in physics is awarded to “discoveries” like Prescod-Weinstein’s. Or maybe not her noticing, but to a non-male non-white, a person who did what might be called real physics, but a sub-standard version of it. The pressure is on. I say ten years or fewer.

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