Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is often referred as the inventor of the inductive method. In Francis Bacon's imagery, science is disconnected from the female realm and from politics. Science is a mean of power and the sub-culture of scientists is inspired by priesthood. Bacon lived in a time when male scientists were studying alchemy while witches were burnt by the inquisition. Merchant (2001) studied Bacon's language and imagery: “Bacon developed the power of language as a political instrument in reducing female nature to a resource for economic production.” Merchant claims that language from witches trials and torture methods permeated Bacon's literary style: “nature was a female to be tortured through mechanical inventions.” “Bacon transformed the magus from nature's servant to it exploiter, and nature from a teacher to a slave.” He “frequently described matter in female imagery” and used some “bold sexual imagery” for the experimental method. In the New Atlantis, Bacon proposed an utopian society lead by male scientists, “for they alone possessed the secrets of nature” and “had the power to absolve all human misery through science”.
René Descartes
By claiming “cogito ergo sum,” Descartes negated the embodied component of the mind and expelled the feminine from thoughts. According to Bordo (2001), Descartes underwent “a masculinization of thoughts.” She argues that Descartes exhibited a need to escape the anxiety
over the separation from the organic female universe of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.... The more intuitive, emphatic, and associational elements were exorcised from science and philosophy. The result is a supermasculinized model of knowledge in which detachment, clarity, and transcendence of the body are all key elements. ...The scientific mind must be cleansed of all sympathies toward the objects it tries to understand. (Bordo, 2001, p. 93)
Whitehead (1933) claims that seventeenth century scientists saw “Nature as a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.” Bordo (2001) cites Merchant : “In the seventeenth century, the female world-soul was murdered by the mechanist re-visioning of nature.” The scientific community has a well known history of discriminatory practices against women but authors like Hardin (2001a), Stern (1965) and Hillman (1972) claim that modern science also crystallizes masculinist modes of thinking. Cartesian objectivity is also blind to the connections between scientific knowledge and society. However, Harding (2001) challenges that view:
Modern science has again and again been reconstructed by a set of interests and values – distinctively Western, bourgeois, and patriarchal …. Nature-as-the-object- of- human knowledge never comes to us “naked.” … The ideal of the disinterested rational scientist advances the self-interest of both social elites and, ironically, scientists who seek status and power. (Harding, 2001)
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton's mechanics is extensively studied in grade 11, grade 12 and first year physics courses. Newton was as much a physicists as a mathematician, an alchemist and an exegete. Some argue Newton was a virgin homosexual. The popular narratives about this scientific genius are silent about those traits: they rather reinforce the stereotypes of the white-middle-class-straight-solitary-laboratory-oriented man. As early as the time of Voltaire, Newton was pictured as a rationalist. However, his universal law of gravitation was based on the belief in action at a distance, which was more rooted in magic than in rationality and was therefore challenged in continental Europe by Newton's contemporaries (and later by Albert Einstein). Some assimilate Newton with the beginning of mechanism, but he was a devout Arianist who thought God's intervention necessary to “wind up” the solar system. His chastity evokes priesthood, a recurrent theme in the imagery of the physics community. Leiss (2008) quotes: “the Large Hardron Collider is a secular cathedral where physicists wait in meditation and prayer to detect the God particle (the Higgs boson).” Wertheim (1997) asserts that physics is particular among the sciences has being a religiously inspired activity, which could explain the exclusion of women in the physics world: “Women were cast on the side of the material, the bodily, the 'earthly', while men were cast on the side of the spiritual, the intellectual, and the ‘heavenly.'”
Pierre Simon de Laplace
Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749 -1827), the “French Newton,” is the one who developed a complete mechanistic and deterministic view of the universe: An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it ... could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. (Laplace, 1814). This omniscient intellectual is sometimes referred to as “Laplace's Daemon.” Even if this daemon was killed by Boltzmann's statistical mechanics in the 1880s, it can be seen in the background of all introductory physics textbooks.
The twentieth century
In the 1900s, modern physics marked a rupture with classical ways of thinking, in particular with Newton and Laplace's mechanistic views. Some milestones worth mentioning are: statistical mechanics (1880s), chaos theory (Henri Poincaré in 1880s, Edward Norton Lorenz in 1961) and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (1926). Surprisingly, modern physics is never taught to the vast majority of students: grade 11, 12 and first year physics focuses primarily on Newtonian mechanics. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin notices that:
despite the fact that quantum mechanics superseded Newtonian mechanics eighty years ago, most colleges and universities in North America still postpone quantum mechanics until the third year level of study, and even then it is offered only to physical science majors. (Smolin, 2006, p. 265).
Before criticizing physics textbooks, we must acknowledge the recent efforts made by publishers to move toward illustrations and word problems that are less gender and minorities biased. We must also recognize that the scientific community is aware of the limitations of objectivity, as shown in the following extract from a statement by the National Academy of Science:
Many of the intangible influences on scientific discovery – curiosity, intuition, creativity – largely defy rational analysis, yet they are among the tools that scientists bring to work... Historians, sociologists , and other students of science have shown that social and personal beliefs – including philosophical, thematic, religious, cultural, political, and economic beliefs – can shape scientific judgment in fundamental ways. (National Academy of Science, 2001)
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