The Gendered Atom by Theodore Roszak

The Gendered Atom by Theodore Roszak

Author:Theodore Roszak
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609255091
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser


For Weinberg, only scientific intellect redeems life from total inanity. “The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

Macho like this is just as much at home in the life sciences as in physics. In fact, one is now more apt to find biologists staking out the farther reaches of Stoic resignation. Hence the words of the Nobel laureate Jacques Monod: “Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.” Russell's fatalism was based on accidental atoms; as a biologist, Monod preferred to ground his view of life in the genes, which he believed are randomly shuffled in the process of natural selection. But Monod's theme is the same: a call to show courage in the face of “the world's uncaring emptiness.”

At times, scientific toughness can reach an absurd extreme. It can be read even into cosmology, the science seemingly most remote from our earthly concerns. For example, an essay from a science journal, titled “Cosmic Cannibals,” opens with an ominous pronouncement: “Predatory galaxies are stalking the universe, and our own Milky Way is one of them.” If we were dealing with nothing more than metaphors, this would be a revealing way to characterize the cosmos. But some cosmologists have gone beyond metaphors in making their science as macho as possible. One hypothesis formulated by Lee Smolin at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that there is an infinity of competing universes, each the result of a black hole. Therefore, “universes with the most black holes . . . would produce the most ‘offspring’ and would quickly come to dominate their competitors.” This is dog-eat-dog Social Darwinism raised to a cosmic magnitude, a telling example of how pervasively, yet casually, science has become gendered. One cannot even imagine what evidence there could be for a multiplicity of universes. The theory is a speculative fantasy intended to bring the entire universe within a suitably masculine worldview.

There is a terrible irony to these efforts to portray nature as alien, hostile, or meaningless. At the very time that scientific Stoics began to use size in order to prove that the Earth was an insignificant speck in the cosmos and life a meaningless aberration, both physics and biology were undermining the naive concepts of large and small that we learn in childhood. Science was beginning to understand the astonishing amount of physical structure nature can pack into the cellular and subatomic realms. No society in history has ever been able to appreciate more fully that small things are not minor things. For some people, these remarkable discoveries might have ranked as miracles; but for the most part, science elected to adopt a Stoic stance. It preferred to atomize, isolate, and toughen.

Is macho science of this kind built into the



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