I have been reading two remarkable books lately:
- Pythagoras Trousers – God, Physics and the Gender War – a woman’s answer to WHY there are only 12% women are in Science, Engineering, Technology and Mathematics (STEM)
- Siddharta – Hermann Hesse’s novel about the search for wisdom – another typically male example for teaching philosophy as if men were like women – and the only woman is a courtesane.
My software-aided thinking that led to creating three innovative software methods made me ask: why me? Why nobody before me? I came up with these explanations:
- If Einstein had had access to a computer, he would have found what I discovered thanks to my ‘software-aided thinking’: metrology is the missing link between mathematics and physics. He wrote: As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
- At CERN where I used to diagnose software, science starts with theories and experiments are carried out to prove them.
- Even in other sciences, men want to match their own models with their own data as proof.
- All our teaching is book-based. In Western languages that means reading from top left to bottom right as a ‘visual bias’ and linear expression of thought.
- We are living in a world where ‘power’ is defined by men who are in positions of power in organisations that run along male ideas.
- Academic and commercial culture foster competition rather than creativity.
- Money and funding are determined by men.
- Individuals don’t count. Continue reading
