Female Erasure – Vera Rubin – Astrophysicist Who Discovered Dark Matter.

I don’t think this is sexism. I think this is elitism. (Which certainly includes sexism.) Upper echelon clique groupthink.

What do I base this on? The person who first discovered dark matter in the 1930s: Fritz Zwicky. He also hypothesized that supernovas were caused by giant stars collapsing into neutron stars – just one year after the discovery of the neutron. Neutron stars weren’t discovered until 30 years later. Zwicky died in 1974. He wasn’t given credit. He was an outsider.

Alfred Wegener discovered continental drift. Had compelling evidence. It was some strange kind of discrimination. Perhaps because he was originally a meteorologist. It was anathema for geologists to even think about continental drift right up to the discovery of mid-ocean rifts.

Then there was Van Gogh. An outsider not accepted into the club until sometime after his death. Now his paintings are trinkets for alpha male barbarians – likely most appreciated for leveraging top-shelf pussy.

My take on Vera Rubin: she did what many astrophysicists would’ve thought a waste of time: measure the rotational speeds of the stars in a galaxy as a function of their distance from the center. Astrophysicists already ‘knew’ the answer: the curve would follow Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. The further out the stars, the lower their angular velocities. (Like Neptune travels slower than Mercury. A comet gains speed falling in towards the Sun. Slows on its way back out in its narrowly elliptical orbit.)

Rubin was a good scientist in that she knew you never take anything for granted. Again I think there is, what I would call, political corruption involved. People are in a highly competitive field. All reaching for the brass ring. They don’t want to waste their time – and career – going down an obviously stupid path.

Of course, Rubin proved them wrong. Her measurements showed that the angular velocities of stars remain constant despite their distance from the center. What this really means is that galaxies exist in the center of massive dark matter stars: matter that doesn’t interact electromagnetically – or with the strong and weak nuclear forces. (At their cores: massive black holes!)

So Rubin was not a member of the clique. Like Zwicky. And like Van Gogh, their genius over the heads of establishment incompetents.

It’s a strange clique for sure. Not a lot of sense to it. For example, the development of the Big Bang model of the universe predicted that the universe was once very tiny – and therefore very hot. Astrophysicists figured out that when the universe cooled down to around 3,000 K there was a process called photon decoupling – or, ‘let there be light.’ So this light should be shining at us from all directions but red shifted down to the microwave frequency because the OU is expanding: what is called the Cosmic Background Radiation. (A 3,000 K to 2.7 K redshift: 2.7 C above absolute zero.)

So as astrophysicists began to think about ways they could track down this the radiation, a couple of electronic engineers, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, stumbled upon it while testing an antenna in 1964. They received their Nobel prize 14 years later.

Ruben’s discovery was the result of good scientific thinking and research and produced even more profound and disturbing outcome. Because scientists have no idea what dark matter is. They only know what it isn’t: everything (all the fundamental particles) they know about.

Looks like Nobel laureate Richard Feynman – who was an antiauthoritarian egalitarian of some varietal – was right when he said there doesn’t appear to be much sense in the way that they hand out Nobel prizes.

Rosalind Franklin also got hosed. It was her research in x-ray crystallography that unveiled the double helix structure of DNA. Without this research, Watson, Crick and Wilkins would not of gotten anywhere with their models. (Watson was a pig who bullied and harassed Franklin – in the lab and posthumously in his thin 1968 popular book, ‘The Double Helix.’)

An egalitarian take all this: it’s all a bunch of bullshit. The truth has a much more interesting tale to tell. It will long outlast petty corrupt barbarian politics and status symbols.

Barbarians can fool themselves – but they can’t fool the universe. (This a creative paraphrasing of Feynman’s take on why the Challenger space shuttle exploded – the O ring failure he demonstrated before a committee using a sample and a cup of ice water..) Will they ever learn?

LikeLike