Michio Kaku discusses many complex ideas dealing with science and physics in “The Mystery of Dark Matter.” He focuses on dark matter and the scientists that discovered it, and what research is going on today to further our knowledge about particle physics and dark matter. He explains that dark matter has weight but cannot be seen, and it makes up at least 90 percent of the matter in the universe. Basically, without dark matter, research shows that galaxies in the universe would fly apart because the gravitational pulls would not be great enough to hold them together without it. This was discovered by a few scientists, starting with Zwicky who found that using two different methods of weighing galaxies, the results came out very differently, and this lead him to suspect the existence of dark matter. After Zwicky came Ostriker and Peebles, who showed that the standard idea of a galaxy should fly apart unless there was other matter (dark matter) we could not see. Kaku spends a great deal of time discussing Dr. Vera Rubin and her research and difficulty in the scientific community because she was a woman. Rubin found that the velocity of outer stars in a galaxy really did not vary much from the velocity of inner stars, as previously thought. This lead to the assertion that they should fly apart unless held together by the gravitational pull of dark matter. It took Rubin decades to receive recognition for her research and findings and while this is shocking to me coming from the science community.
I thought this was especially interesting about Rubin’s struggles in science. I have known for a while that women are often underrepresented in science for whatever reasons, but it is interesting that the few women in science can be so largely ignored as Rubin was. She struggled her whole life to succeed in science (as Kaku explains) probably working harder than many men in the field just to get to the same level in her education and knowledge. I find it especially interesting that Rubin faced such discrimination because of the discussions we have been having in class lately about science. Science seems to be a field that tries to remain individual from any cultural, religious, or governmental influences at that time. For example, science tries to do its research regardless of a group’s religious values. In this way, I find it interesting that science would allow the cultural stigma against women to invade its advancements. It also makes me wonder why there are not more women in science today, considering the great strides our country has made in women’s rights. Why don’t more women seem to be interested in a career as a physicist? I am a Middle Childhood Education major concentrating in Reading/Language Arts and Science, and in my own observations I have noticed that it seems like there are many more women in my English courses while my science courses seem to have more men.
Overall, Kaku presents us with some very interesting findings on dark matter and particle physics, but perhaps more interesting is his focus on Dr. Vera Rubin and her struggles as a woman in science.
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I do believe that although science aims to find objective truth through observation despite popularly held beliefs, it still does not exist entirely outside of society. Though for a great period of time science was viewed as a counter-culture, trying to knock down the precepts of society as it stood, certain aspects of science are still controlled by the larger society as a whole. This seems slightly paradoxical, but it makes sense in a larger context.
Science was never really trying to fight against society, only to make known certain facts that had been studied through careful observation. Science became the meeting place of the intellectually elite. The intellectually elite of the time period when science was new were necessarily males, because females were not educated. It was believed at the time that only males were capable of great intellectual feats, and a woman’s place was in the house.
Over the years, this discrimination became institutionalized within science itself, and science began to think of itself as a “Gentleman’s Club,” a place where men gathered and studied things that were of no concern to women. This attitude became so deeply ingrained in the scientific community that even as women began to be acknowledged as the intellectual equals of men, scientists have held on to the belief that this intellectual equality does not exist in science, and women are then discouraged from entering the field.
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