Weird words of science: scientist

Woman teaching geometry to men
illus. 14th century copy of Euclid's Elements

Scientist may not sound like a weird word, but when it was first coined, it was thought "unpalatable," along with (understandably) "nature-poker." Recently my sister tagged me in a Facebook post linking to a series of articles on women in science. She thought it interesting that the word had been coined to honor the work of a woman in science.

"Not only did Scottish mathematician, science writer, and polymath Mary Fairfax Somerville (December 26, 1780–November 28, 1872) defy the era’s deep-seated bias against women in science, she was the very reason the word “scientist” was coined: When reviewing her seminal second book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, which Somerville wrote at the age of 54, English polymath and Trinity College master William Whewell was so impressed that he thought it rendered the term “men of science” obsolete and warranted a new, more inclusive descriptor to honor Somerville’s contribution to the field." — from Maria Popova and Lisa Congdon's 2013 project The Resurrectionists

Oddly enough, I'd read William Whewell's review of Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences while writing an essay about the public conception of scientists, and my recollection was that the coining of scientist, while reported in this review, was not in fact spurred by Somerville's work.  So I went back and read it again.

Whewell was certainly impressed with Somerville and her book, but his tale of the creation of the word 'scientist' makes no mention of honoring Somerville or her contribution.  About the only person Whewell seems impressed with in this context is the "ingenious gentlemen," thought to be himself!

A curious illustration of this result maybe observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings at York, Oxford, and Cambridge, in the last three summers. There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits. Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician ; savans was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist—but this was not generally palatable; others attempted to translate the term by which the members of similar associations in Germany have described themselves, but it was not found easy to discover an English equivalent for natur-forscher. The process of examination which it implies might suggest such undignified compounds as nature-poker, ornature-peeper, for these naturae curiosi; but these were indignantly rejected." [from the Quarterly Review, 1834, emphasis mine]

Interestingly, Wherwell does tackle the issue of women in philosophy/science:  "Our readers cannot have accompanied us so far without repeatedly feeling some admiration rising in their minds, that the work of which we have thus to speak is that of a woman."  It's a fascinating read, in which you can see the threads of imagery that is still current (and still unsupported by data) about the innate differences between the minds of men and women.

And in the end, scientist would catch on, by the early 20th century it was far eclipsed "natural philosopher" as the preferred general term.

First woman in 'space'

I keep checking to see how far away New Horizons is from Pluto (459,770 km at 0235 GMT) even though I know there's nothing to see at the moment, but I am a space junkie.

The first space launch I can remember seeing is the last of the Mercury missions, launched in May of 1963.  I was 5 and I was hooked on space.  In retrospect, I suspect my hours watching rockets erect on their launch pads, the vapor streaming off the only sign this was live TV,  fed my desire to do science as much as the biography of Marie Curie I chewed through while ill one summer or my parents' careers.

I'd be glued to the TV for every launch I could for the next decade, and I confess I can still be found streaming a launch in the corner of my screen while grading.  I'm still hooked on space.

S o I was delighted to discover the first woman to leave the atmosphere — at least the breathable part of it — was both a chemist and an alum of the college where I teach.  In October of 1934, Jeannette Ridlon Piccard, a licensed balloon pilot, flew a balloon with her husband on board to an altitude of 17.5 km, well into the stratosphere.  Her altitude record (for women) would not be broken until Russian astronaut Valentina Tereshkova's flight in June 1963.  You can watch the Piccards take off in this video and see the wreckage of the gondola after they crash landed.  Her first person account of the trip was published in the New York Times the next day, including her chagrin at such an inelegant landing.

Ridlon's entry in Bryn Mawr's Undergraduate Catalog of 1916, she
would concentrate on chemistry and physics over the next 2 years. 

Piccard was a Bryn Mawr College graduate, class of 1918, taking course work in chemistry and physics, as well as psychology and philosophy.  She went on to get her master's degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago and later a Ph.D. in education from the University of Minnesota.  All wonderful preparation for being an...executive secretary (those were not the days), pilot and stratospheric explorer.  Piccard's papers are the Library of Congress and I'd love to go read the experimental notes from that epic flight.

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Piccard's grand-nephew Bertrand Piccard is one of the pilots on the Solar Impulse, a solar powered plane attempting to circumnavigate the globe.

My thanks to Bryn Mawr College's registrar, Kirsten O'Beirne, for figuring out how "majors" worked in the early 20th century.

Getting at the truth: gender in the lab

Nobel prize winning biochemist Tim Hunt made an unfortunate series of remarks at a luncheon for women science writers and journalists at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry.”

Today he's said he's sorry for having made those remarks to that particular audience, suggesting first that it was a misunderstood attempt at irony, but he stands by his comments: "I just meant to be honest, actually."

He went on to say that, "It's terribly important that you can criticise people's ideas without criticising them and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth....Science is about nothing but getting at the truth and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science."

What I'm thinking about is how the documented tendency of men (or should I say boys?) to be overconfident in their self-assessment of ability in science and math might diminish the effective functioning of a research group? Shelley Correll's work showing that "males assess their mathematical competence higher than females who perform at the same ability level and who receive the same feedback about their mathematical competence."makes me wonder if when Tim Hunt criticizes a boy's ideas, the boy discounts the criticism because he is overconfident.  [Amer. J. Soc. 106 (2001): 1691–1730.] #justbeinghonest

Hunt's remarks should come as no surprise, given what he said in this interview:

Labtimes: In your opinion, why are women still under-represented in senior positions in academia and funding bodies? 

Hunt: I'm not sure there is really a problem, actually. People just look at the statistics. I dare, myself, think there is any discrimination, either for or against men or women. I think people are really good at selecting good scientists but I must admit the inequalities in the outcomes, especially at the higher end, are quite staggering. And I have no idea what the reasons are. One should start asking why women being under-represented in senior positions is such a big problem. Is this actually a bad thing? It is not immediately obvious for me... is this bad for women? Or bad for science? Or bad for society? I don't know, it clearly upsets people a lot.

If he wants a hint, it's bad for science.  Restricting the pool means you get fewer breakthroughs. Last fall I built a simple Monte Carlo simulation of "science" to find:

"I wonder if framing the issue of women in science as one of equity to individuals — it's not fair to deny women the opportunity to play the game — blinds us to the costs to science as a whole of unwittingly perhaps, but systematically regardless, hampering the participation of women in science. We see science as a meritocracy, where the best people and the best ideas bubble up and we fear efforts to play fair could undermine the overall quality of science. But are 'fair' and 'best' necessarily at odds with each other in the arena of scientific discovery? Stated another way, at any given time do discoveries go unmade because the person who might make them is not in the scientific workforce?

In an attempt to roughly quantify the answer to this question, I built a simplistic computational model of scientific discovery. The model used a Monte Carlo approach to create a scientific community from a larger population of one million. Inherent scientific ability was assumed to correspond to a single integer variable, with values ranging from a low of zero to a maximum of 200 and to follow a normal distribution (σ = 30); potential scientists were assumed to have a score above 140 on this measure. The parameters were set such that one discovery was expected per thousand potential scientists. Discoveries were not uniformly distributed throughout, but weighted such that higher ability scores were more likely to have the potential to make a breakthrough.

A model scientific community was selected from the full population using a weighted random selection procedure, which again favoured the 'best' end of the pool, and the number of 'discoveries' made by this select group were added up. The simulation was run for a total of one thousand trials. Models that limited the selection of women to 10% of the pool incurred a 10 to 15% average penalty on the number of discoveries made, compared with pools with roughly equal numbers of men and women.

Having 10% of potential scientific breakthroughs go undiscovered may sound insignificant, not worth the bother of figuring out how to bring more women into a field. That is, until you are asked to take a 10% pay cut, or if I ask which of the top-ten organic reactions you would prefer to do without. Heck? Diels–Alder? Within the limits of my model, choosing fairly with respect to gender does not compromise the quality of the scientific community, in fact, the opposite is true." [Nature Chemistry 6 (2014): 842–844.]

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Correll, Shelley J. “Gender and the Career Choice Process: The Role of Biased Self‐Assessments.” American Journal of Sociology 106 (2001): 1691–1730.  See also the discussion in Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender pp 48-50.

Francl, Michelle. “Seeding Crystallography.” Nature Chemistry 6 (2014): 842–844.  ($)

Can gender gaps impede scientific progress?

My commentary on Marie Curie and the paucity of women chemistry Nobel laureates ends wondering

"...if what underlies the inability to fully acknowledge the social biases that obscure and downplay women’s scientific achievements, and the ways in which our spaces silently speak to us about who belongs and who doesn’t, who appears capable and who does not, is the assumption that if a Marie doesn’t make a critical breakthrough, of course, a Pierre somewhere will. Will chemistry make all the critical leaps it could, without the contribution of half of its finest minds?"

Last week, the president of Bryn Mawr College (where I teach) had an opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed about closing the gap for women in science and engineering. She, too, worries that progress in science and technology is impeded by lack of participation by women (and I would add the lack of recognition for women's work in these fields) President McAuliffe writes "As long as there is a gender gap in these fields, there will be an innovation gap."

Some readers of McAuliffe's essay had a hard time imagining that scientific progress could be impeded when women are underrepresented or sidelined in science and said so in the comments. Sam Kean's delightful Disappearing Spoon includes a clear counterexample: In 1934, Ida Noddak suggested the possibility of atomic fission. Her work was dismissed as "ill conceived and unfounded" by Emilio Segre (who won the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of the anti-proton); Irene Joliet-Curie similarly thought it possible; Lise Meitner definitely discovered fission in 1939 (and Otto Hahn won the Nobel for the discovery).

Another example on the same theme: Lise Meitner also discovered the Auger effect, in 1922, a year before it was discovered by Pierre Auger (for whom it is named).

I realize these are historical examples, but they do prove the point. A blanket disregard (for whatever reason, be it gender, country of origin, venue for publication) for the contributions of a subset of scientists can impede the progress of science. As Matt

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Read about how the cover was made.

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Sex in the citadel of science

"The problem was to give birth to a boy
and not a girl," said the fathers of the atom bomb.
Marie Curie did not give birth to any joy.
Tenderly she leans toward jars of glowing radium,
as she had earlier at the bed
of her sleeping daughter Irene. (And then she bore Eve!)
Four years clothed in bitter smoke, in a shed,
stirring a mass in ebullition, nothing secretive,

an iron cauldron, iron rod nearly as big as herself,
a shed no one wanted, not fit for cadavers.
Science is the primordial interest of my life,
nor do I know whether I could live
without the laboratory. Her problem—to give breath,
to let there be light, out of slag, abandoned earth.

— from "Her Crucible: A Poem of Marie Curie" by Margaret Almon

In the latest issue of Nature Chemistry, I have a commentary speculating on why women, despite their increasing presence in the field, win the Nobel in chemistry less frequently than 100 years ago. The essay is framed around Marie Curie, the first woman to win the Nobel prize in chemistry. This year marks the 100th anniversary of Prof. Curie's Nobel (her second).

It's not about mathematical ability (sorry Larry Summers, there's hard data that punctures your theory) or lack of inherent interest. Instead, I wonder if it has to do with the built environment: the size, color, shape of the laboratory and its equipment:

Built space is not neutral, as Winston Churchill noted, “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” As much as scientists use labs to create science, labs themselves create scientists. (Read the rest here....)

Sex and the scientist

(Cross posted at my other blog.)

I am in the midst of writing an essay for Nature Chemistry - about why people are so curious about stereotypes of scientists, but seem less so about other fields. There is the DAST (draw a scientist test), but not as far as I can discover similar instruments to assess the images of other professions. Where are the DATTs (draw a teacher test) and DACTs (draw a chef test)? On the other end of the cultural spectrum there is the Big Bang Theory.

The earliest anthropological study I can find dates to the late 1950s and is by Margaret Mead (yes, that Margaret Mead) and Rhoda Metraux under the auspices of the AAAS. They analyzed thousands of essays, drawn from a set of 35,000 written by US high school students. The 1 page essays were written in response to one of three prompts. Prompt I read "When I think about a scientist, I think of..."

What took my breath away was Prompt II (italics are not mine, but as given in Mead's original paper - Science 126, 384-390 (1957)):

If you are a boy, complete the following statement in your own words.
If I were going to be a scientist, I should like to be the kind of scientist who...

If you are a girl, you may complete either the sentence above or this one:
If I were going to marry a scientist, I should like to marry the kind of scientist who..."

Math Man points out that I did both.

UPDATE: So there is a draw-a-teacher test (DATt) (H/T to Neil who commented on drawing God - another area that has been explored by educators and psychologists)

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Images are from K.D. Finson, J.B. Beaver, B.L. Cramond, "Development and Field Test of a Checklist for the Draw-A-Scientist Test" School Science and Mathematics 95, p. 195 (1995).

Weird Words of Science: isotope

The periodic table is the map of the chemical world. Columns collect atoms which share properties - all of the elements on the far right - He, Ne, Ar… - are all gases and all nearly chemically inert. The region at the bottom harbors elements more likely to be radioactive. Metals pool in the middle.

Each atom of an element has a characteristic number of protons - positively charged particles - in their nucleus. An atom with five protons is boron. One with 82? Lead.

Most atoms also have a number of uncharged particles - neutrons - in their nuclei as well. The sum of the number of protons and neutrons in a given nucleus is called its mass number. A boron atom with six neutrons has a mass number of 11: five protons and six neutrons. Take away a neutron and it’s still boron, but the mass number is now 10.

Atoms with different mass numbers but the same number of protons are termed isotopes. Most elements have several naturally occuring isotopes. The most abundant form of the element carbon has a mass number of 12. One percent of carbon atoms, however, have an extra neutron and a mass number of 13.

Scottish novelist and physician Margaret Todd coined the term for her distant relative Frederick Soddy at a dinner party in 1913. He had described his research to her and she responded that any good discovery need a Greek term to describe it. She suggested combining the Greek “iso” for same and “topos” for place - to emphasize that the mass number of an element doesn’t affect it’s place in the periodic table: argon-36 and argon-40 are both inert gases. Soddy went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his discovery - perhaps because his distant relation had coined him a such good term?

Allotropes and architects: buckminsterfullerene

Responding to an earlier post on inert gases, a commenter wondered if buckminsterfullerene might act as an inhalation anesthetic - given that, like xenon, it's a large, polarizable ball of electron density. It might, if you could get enough to inhale. At room temperature, the vapor pressure is 5 x 10^-6 torr. Very roughly, that's about a billionth of atmospheric pressure. For comparison's sake, the pressure of xenon necessary to induce anesthesia is about 500 torr, or 65% of normal atmospheric pressure. If you want higher pressures, you need higher temperatures: buckminsterfullerene sublimes (goes directly from the solid to the gas phase, like dry ice) just above 1000F. Not great to breathe...

While likely impractical as an anesthetic, buckminsterfullerene has asthetic properties. It's a highly symmetric molecule - having iscosohedral symmetry. Kroto and Smalley discovered the new allotrope of carbon, C₆₀, in vaporized graphite and named it for the architect (Buckminster Fuller) who made famous the geodesic domes it resembled. Two more familiar allotropes of carbon are graphite and diamond.

Allotropes are differing forms of the same element. The roots of the word are Greek - allos for different and tropos for "turn of mind". A different turn of mind? It's what Smalley needed to propose the now iconic structure, over a beer at his kitchen table.

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Another allotrope of carbon is lonsdaleite - named for Kathleen Lonsdale, an Irish crystallographer who determined the structure of benzene and my brother-in-law's godmother.