In article "John Knight" <jwknight at polbox.com> writes:
<
<
<
<And what was this list supposed to prove, Cary?
<
That you were either lying or butt-ignorant, quite possibly
both, when you wrote
we haven't a shred of evidence that there has been a woman
"physicist" in the century since Marie got the
Nobel Prize who feminazis can quote with such regularity.
because there have been dozens. That you haven't heard of Noether
all by itself is sufficient; any history of physics in the first
half of the twentieth century will dwell on her contributions.
That you haven't heard of Meitner means you haven't been
reading my posts. That you haven't heard of Bell -- well,
ask Bob who Jocelyn Bell is. And while you're asking Bob
about Bell, you might want to ask him about Leavitt too.
She's the chick who came up with a rule which demonstrates
(yet once again) that if your god created the world ten
thousand years ago, he also went to incredible lengths
to make it look thousands of times that old.
<That women DO understand physics, after all? That TIMSS was wrong?
<
Gee, why don't you go discuss chaos theory with Cartwright or non-Abelian
guage theories with Choquet-Bruhat (or with Kallosh) or -- the field you
once claimed to know something about, X-ray spectroscopy -- with Franklin,
or Fourier Transform (before digital computers!) with Connes or super-
conductivity with Sarachick and then you come back and tell me.
Incidentally, before you start babbling about affirmative action, how
about Pockels, who studied surface tension and the effects of surfactants --
at home, on her kitchen table. When she sent a letter to Lord Rayleigh,
thinking her little domestic experiments might interest him, he wrote
to the folks at _Nature_ (heard of that one, bub?):
I shall be obliged if you can find space for the accompanying translation
of an interesting letter which I have received from a German lady, who with
very homely appliances has arrived at valuable results respecting
the behaviour of contaminated water surfaces. The earlier part of Miss
Pockels' letter covers nearly the same ground as some of my own recent work,
and in the main harmonizes with it. The later sections seem to
me very suggestive, raising, if they do not fully answer, many important
questions. I hope soon to find opportunity for repeating some of Miss
Pockels' experiments.
If getting published in _Nature_ (the most prestigious journal in science)
because Rayleigh thinks you're an undiscovered genius is affirmative action,
then I'm all for affirmative action. Pockels was subsquently published in
_Nature_, and continued to publish for the next forty years.
-- cary
