What Physics Is Fundamental Physics? Feminist Implications of Physicists' Debate over the Superconducting Supercollider

Abstract

The feminist critique of science is one of the most active areas of current feminist scholarship. Most of this work has concentrated on the life and social sciences, but some feminists, most notably Evelyn Fox Keller, Sharon Traweek, and Karen Barad, consider the physical sciences as well. Feminist critics have pointed out, among other aspects, the prevalence of hierarchical models in our thinking about science and scientific ideas. Sandra Harding observes that we think of the sciences themselves as a hierarchy, with the pure, hard, analytic, or mature (depending on one's choice of complimentary adjective) physical sciences at the top, the life sciences in the middle, and the irredeemably soft social sciences at the bottom. (The Science Question). This hierarchical structure is apparent in most traditional works on the philosophy of science, which treat as the paradigm for all sciences. Even heretical philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend draw most of their examples from physics. Stephen J. Gould speaks of physics envy on the part of scientists in other fields, an often inappropriate desire to reduce complex phenomena to simple and quantifiable causes. Physicists have for the most part accepted our position at the top of the scientific hierarchy, regarding other sciences and feminist critiques of science with complacency and a touch of arrogance. We have been reluctant to challenge traditional paradigms of science. We also accept a similar hierarchy in itself, ranking the subfields. Physicists ask questions about many things: the universe; galaxies and stars; bridges, spaceships and other machines; the structure of crystals, atoms, nuclei, and quarks. But some of these questions are regarded as more important-physicists say more fundamental-than others, and the branches of that pursue these questions are more elite and competitive than others. Until recently this hierarchy of subfields has been taken for granted by the community. However, the proposal to build the superconducting supercollider (SSC)l stimulated a debate within the community, one that turns on our use of the word fundamental and calls into question the hierarchical structure of and its relation to other sciences.