Before diving in to talking about physics, let’s address the elephant in the room: physics is not known for being a diverse field or for having a diverse history. Things have been (very) slowly changing over the last century or so, but by and large, introductory physics was developed by fairly well-off and/or well-positioned white men.
It’s important to point out a few things here:
There is nothing particularly special about white men compared to everyone else in the world in terms of intellectual ability, but there is something special about the opportunities they as a group have historically been afforded.
I really love the line from the Disney-Pixar film Ratatouille that says, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” The latter part of this quote is the important part. Given an equitable society, it would be true. But historically, and sadly still today, not everyone has the same access to the opportunities and resources that allow one to become a great artist – or a great physicist, in this case. It’s not that people other than well-positioned white men are somehow intellectually inferior, but rather that the statistics of access don’t work in their favor, which is problematic.
Even though we may not be satisfied with the story of representation in the history of physics, we can still acknowledge the importance of the work these men did.
The conditions of the history of the world were such that mainly white men were well-positioned to make scientific breakthroughs. We are stuck with this history, particularly in physics. But it is possible to both appreciate the impact of their work on our modern society while simultaneously questioning the underlying power structures that meant they were the ones with the opportunity to advance science. Sometimes I like to wonder about where science would be now if we could have taken advantage of all the brains that passed through history, rather than being restricted (by race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.) to just a subset of them.
“Pure” physics is unbiased: it is a mathematical description of the various phenomena in our universe. (However, due to the fact that humans are, well, human, physics as a discipline is biased.)
While there are sociocultural problems to work on within the field of physics, in this blog, I want to focus on the universality of physics. I believe that physics as a subject can be accessible by everyone, and in some sense that is my goal in writing this blog. I am not planning to talk about the history of physics but rather to focus on the subject itself. (This is for the very simple reason that I am not an expert physics historian, but I am an expert physicist.)
So, with all of that out of the way, are we ready to start learning physics? Well, as you’ll see in my next post, not quite yet…
Scarcely Odd 