Posted on 02/11/2004 1:55:19 PM PST by Helms
The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont.
In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation".
Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics.
Fluids you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things.
Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all,
she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence.
The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem: the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve.
(Excerpt) Read more at physics.nyu.edu ...
OK, well maybe from the HR dept. during the "diversity" craze.
Hey I busted my tail for that degree in ecofeminism!
I hit refresh several times and I now have six vitally important studies on culturally and socially relevant issues.
Nonsense. From a very early age, and for the rest of their lives, men exclusively have daily opportunities to observe parabolic arcs, drainage, fluid flow, fluid turbulence, bubble formation, and fluid mixing.
Here's a young engineer studying his subject:
Note: this topic is from . Thanks Helms. Vote tomorrow!
GACR
Great American Cultural Revolution
To borrow naming convention from Chinese.
At least when men aren’t smart enough (or, more likely, willing to work hard enough) to understand math and physics, they admit it and move on. They don’t try to blame it on their sex or overly large muscles, or something silly like that. They move on. But this woman? She couldn’t get any sillier.
I’ll bet the author makes a terrible sammich.
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