Ada Lovelace Day: Women in Science
“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised.”
“Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.” - findingada.com
I’ve always been interested in biographies of scientists and also historical fiction about scientists, and for some reason the ones I’ve gravitated toward are usually (but not always) about physicists. [I highly recommend all of these.] Maybe physicists are fascinating because they spend their lives trying to figure out how the universe works, smashing atoms into each other, thinking about particles that are also waves, parallel universes, and what happens if you travel through space at the speed of light. A person has to be both brilliant and strange to be a great physicist. Physicists invented the atom bomb (and some later regretted doing so) AND the internet (contrary to claims by Al Gore).
Women physicists are rare. I think it’s partly due to a difference in most women’s priorities and the near-singular focus required to pursue a career in the field. Worse, women have historically faced discrimination in the physics world and in the sciences in general. That makes it easy to overlook the contributions of women to the field, but they are there. Two women have won Nobel prizes in physics. Many others have worked in obscurity and contributed to the body of knowledge.
Mileva Maric helped her husband, Albert Einstein, with much of his important work, but the extent of her role as collaborator remains unknown. “As the jigsaw puzzle that was Mileva’s life is pieced together, an image emerges of a young woman whose great scientific promise ran up against the formidable institutional and social barriers that kept all but the most resilient women, at the turn of the twentieth century, at the margins of science or out of the lab entirely.” - PBS, Einstein’s Wife Here’s to you, Mileva. I hope we are on the road to breaking down the remains of those barriers that stifled the potential of countless women scientists.
-Kelly
p.s. Check out another blogger’s ALD post for much more information about the life of Mileva Maric.
