Skirting the main issues
Teresa Waugh
PYTHAGORAS' TROUSERS: GOD, PHYSICS AND THE GENDER WARS by Margaret Wertheim Fourth Estate, £9.99, pp. 297 .t would be hard to imagine a more enjoyable book than Margaret Wertheim's Pythagoras' Trousers, or, for that matter, a cleverer one, since one of the most difficult assignments for a writer must be to render a subject like physics even remotely accessi- ble to the lay reader, let alone to one whose mind has for over half a century been determinedly closed to the subject. But women, Wertheim argues, are differ- ently 'acculturated' — horrible word — to men and, as it were, brainwashed from the start to turn away from physics. This brainwashing is something which has been alive and well for over 2,000 years since the days of Pythagoras, when the study of mathematics was seen to be an exclusively male activity. From that time, When God was thought to be the divine mathematical Creator, until the present day, when Stephen Hawking (inheritor, Wertheim says, of Einstein's mantle) hopes to reveal the mind of God, the study of Physics has been somehow confused with religion. The priestly culture of physics by which men have striven to read the book of Nature, as the Christian churches seek to interpret the book of the Word, has in its priestliness been especially male- dominated and therefore more closed to women than any other of the sciences. . Wertheim gives us a terrifying list of the Injustices women have suffered in the name Of physics: how Marie Curie — winner of two Nobel prizes — was never admitted to tIteFrench Academy of Sciences; how Emilie du Chatelet, translator of Newton's Pnncipia into French during the first half of the 18th century, began to write a book of her own which her tutor then successful- ly claimed as his; how Ernest Rutherford On. meeting Lise Meitner who, with Otto Frisch, first elucidated the process of nuclear fission, expected her to take his Wife shopping while he presumably talked about nuclear fission with the men. So it goes on.
Today the world of physics is still domi- nated by men and it is men primarily who seek to prove the Theory of Everything (TOE) which should ultimately reveal the one unifying force that will explain the uni- verse and lead us to the mind of God. The cost of pursuing research into TOE, which may well be an unfounded theory anyway, is astronomical and even the keenest TOE enthusiasts admit that if it could be proved it would be unlikely to have any application whatsoever to the way we live.
Wertheim believes that were more women involved in the higher reaches of physics, a more balanced approach might result; physics might be used for the greater advancement of mankind. Being differently 'acculturated', woman might take the religion out of physics and see to it that taxes were spent on something of greater humanitarian use than machines called super-accelerators whose sole purpose is to prove TOE and which cost billions of dollars. Whilst her rhetoric may at times make the reader want to back off and look for a flaw in her argument, Wertheim presents an excellent, if not watertight, case for the need for women physicists. But it is not the rhetoric, which is only a small part of the text, that makes Wertheim so readable — and, to be fair, 'acculturate', which doesn't crop up until the end, is the only nasty word in the book. The magic of this book lies in the way in which the histo- ry of physics from its inception in ancient times to the present day is described in gal- loping, crystal-clear prose so that your attention never lapses for a moment. You turn the pages as eagerly as you would those of any novel, carried along by an unusual lightness of touch and breadth of knowledge until, with the advent of New- ton, you hold your breath as Wertheim's own sense of excitement cannot fail to be communicated — even to one who may never have given a thought to gravity until that moment. You weep for Marie Curie, gasp at Einstein and wonder at Hawkings.
Where Wertheim explains the theory of relativity of electromagnetism for instance, she is extraordinarily easy to understand. Only when she came to quantum mechan- ics did this reader begin to lag and think that she had made the right decision in eschewing physics all those years ago.
`Of course this movie was never meant for the small screen.'
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