We have been exploring the ideological takeover of the sciences, especially its impact on innovation and the advancement of knowledge.
A fascinating example of ideological bondage to wokeness recently appeared at Colorado College. A professor of Astrophysics recently complained that the field is paralyzed by “systemic racism and white supremacy” and “very violent and hyper-masculine” terminology.
“As an astrophysicist, I’m a product of institutions that are steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy,” Natalie Gosnell, PhD, an assistant professor of physics at Colorado College, said in an interview published in the school’s newspaper this month.Gosnell, who holds a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is a recipient of the prestigious Cottrell Scholar Award, argued that “tenets of white supremacy” like “individualism and exceptionalism and perfectionism” shape everything from the direction of physics research to the language used by scientists.
Gosnell made these distasteful and irrational remarks in an interview supporting her recent immersive art piece entitled “The Gift.”
Gosnell’s new immersive art piece entitled “The Gift” walks the line in between creativity and science, and exemplifies that which was missing for Gosnell in the sharing of science: creativity. The piece is experienced in a room with audial and visual stimuli, and through a book about an astrophysical phenomenon of a dying star as seen through the eyes of Gosnell and her co-creators, Janani Balasubramanian and Andrew Kircher.The story goes as follows: Two stars are orbiting one another, and just before one is about to die it swells up to hundreds of times its previous size — in doing this, it transfers its mass to its orbiting star. Then the swollen star dies, while the other one shines brighter and bluer than it did before thanks to its companion.Contemporary journalism views this mass-transfer process through a violent, hyper-masculine lens, seeing as the mass-receiving star has been dubbed “Vampire star” or “Cannibal star.” Gosnell adds they are viewed as the “bad boys” of the universe.“I think because science and art have been so separated, and there’s […] systemic issues within science, the metaphors that are often chosen [to discuss science] are very violent and hyper-masculine,” she says.
There is so much to unwrap here. Let’s start with the term “Vampire Star.” It’s pretty sexist to assume all vampires are male. For example, The Hunger has plenty of female vampires.
Next, there has been plenty of creativity in astrophysics, especially from the James Webb Space Telescope. It discovered an Earth-sized exo-planet as a counter to Gosnell’s inane assertion.
Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth’s diameter. The research team is led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, both of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland….“These first observational results from an Earth-size, rocky planet open the door to many future possibilities for studying rocky planet atmospheres with Webb,” agreed Mark Clampin, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Webb is bringing us closer and closer to a new understanding of Earth-like worlds outside our solar system, and the mission is only just getting started.”
Finally, the “anti-masculine” lens is toxic. And woke feminism is equally poisonous.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall covered the feminist attack on Dr. Matt Taylor, the brilliant British scientist who helped achieve the seemingly unachievable by landing a scientific probe on a comet hundreds of millions of miles away.
He was brought to tears in the wake of a successful launch because of the shirt he wore.
You can see it easily in this photo, but on the video you have to really be looking for trouble to find it. The camera is pretty far away, and Taylor is only a relatively small part of the overall report.The woman who complained obviously was looking for something to complain about, and she made it all about her own personal insecurities as a female scientist.For that sin, Taylor was attacked at his moment of glory. Taylor was reduced to tears while offering an apology on live stream TV.
However, Gosnell’s attack on individualism and exceptionalism is the biggest issue with her hot take and a clear indication of her being a warning example of the ideological takeover of science.
“As an astrophysicist, I’m a product of institutions that are steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy,” Gosnell says. “The tenets of white supremacy that show up [in physics] of individualism and exceptionalism and perfectionism… it’s either-or thinking, and there’s no subtlety, there’s no gray area. All of this manifests in the way that we think about our research, and what counts as good research, what counts as important research?”
In a quest for further information on Gosnell, I discovered that, for some reason, her Tweets are protected.
It appears Gosnell is not open to a robust debate on her take on the state of astrophysics. As her assertions clearly cannot withstand challenges, they must be discarded for the sake of real science.
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