I found an interesting quote here a few months back. It has got to be the most staggering example of a complete misunderstanding of, well, pretty much everything. It discusses the fact that Physics is much more successful in modelling the behaviour of solids than of fluids. This should be obvious to anyone with basic understanding of elementary school Physics.
The page explains: "According to the psychoanalyst and feminist thinker Luce Irigaray the difficulty with turbulence is not mathematical nonlinearity but the fact that research in physics is mainly performed by men."
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, [Luce Irigaray] attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. … These idealizations are reinscribed in mathematics, which conceives of fluids as laminated planes and other modified solid forms. In the same way that women are erased within masculinist theories and language, existing only as not-men, so fluids have been erased from science, existing only as not-solids.
Source: Hayles, N. K. (1992) Gender encoding in fluid mechanics: masculine channels and feminine flows. Differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies. 4 (2), 16 – 44.
I tried to track down Hayles’s original paper, without success. I guess I should be relieved that no college within the University of London subscribes to publications of this academic quality. Nonetheless, if someone can get a hold of this, I would love a copy!
Men are pigs. Physicists doubly so.
I found an interesting quote here a few months back. It has got to be the most staggering example of a complete misunderstanding of, well, pretty much everything. It discusses the fact that Physics is much more successful in modelling the behaviour of solids than of fluids. This should be obvious to anyone with basic understanding of elementary school Physics.
The page explains: "According to the psychoanalyst and feminist thinker Luce Irigaray the difficulty with turbulence is not mathematical nonlinearity but the fact that research in physics is mainly performed by men."
Source: Hayles, N. K. (1992) Gender encoding in fluid mechanics: masculine channels and feminine flows. Differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies. 4 (2), 16 – 44.
I tried to track down Hayles’s original paper, without success. I guess I should be relieved that no college within the University of London subscribes to publications of this academic quality. Nonetheless, if someone can get a hold of this, I would love a copy!