There's Nowt so Queer as Folk
(And quantum mechanics - that's pretty queer too)
Daughter number 2, the “spare one” as she calls herself, is a fan of Matt Walsh’s brand of sarcasm and humour and she alerted me to a segment of his in which he discusses the ideas of a quantum physicist, Dr Jessica Esquivel.
If you enjoy that delicious feeling of your brain liquifying and dribbling out through your nostrils, you can see one of her talks here
Personally, I think there are better ways of spending 15 minutes of your time. You could create imaginative sculptures from your toenail clippings, or count the number of blades of grass in your lawn, for example.
Esquivel’s thesis is that because quantum is weird, the world is queer. She muses at the end of the talk that if we were to “become one with the queer universe” then we’d be able to figure stuff out. Or something. I don’t really know, because by that point I’d lost the will to live.
You can find a bio for her here.
She seems to be inordinately proud of the fact that she’s black, lesbian, queer, latinx and neuro-divergent and describes herself as having “literally” shattered glass ceilings (echoes of self-aggrandizement of the Jennifer Lawrence variety here, perhaps?). Although an image of blue-haired activists armed with slingshots searching through cities to find glass ceilings to shatter did pop into my head at one point.
She is, probably, a very good physicist although she doesn’t really talk about her accomplishments and discoveries - the focus is on her and her queerness and how this is important - and there’s next to nothing about actual physics.
Jess, love, I honestly don’t give a flying fornication what you look like, what your gonads are, what ethnicity you are, what your pronouns are or whether you change them every few hours, who you sleep with, how many people you sleep with, what you do with them when you sleep with them, or whether you enjoy topping your breakfast cereal with pickled herring.
Are you any good at physics?
I don’t know. All I can find out is what I can only describe to be an unhinged and narcissistic focus on personality traits, sexual orientation and ethnicity.
Her claim, at the outset, is that she’s a “badass” physicist precisely because of all of these characteristics.
I am a Black, Mexican, lesbian woman and proud of all the things that make me myself. I am a badass particle physicist because of—not in spite of—these identities. The way I approach particle physics problems, the way I think, and the way I communicate is unique, and this's what makes me good at my job in STEMM.
Physicists, especially brilliant ones, are not often noted for their humility. Even Newton’s famous quote
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants (Isaac Newton)
is actually a dig at his rival Robert Hooke’s diminutive stature. Newton was not really known for his self-effacement.
Murray Gell-Mann, an utterly brilliant physicist, is reputed to have adapted this quote to
If I have seen further, it’s because everyone around me is a midget
Arthur Eddington was once asked after a lecture why General Relativity was so difficult to understand that, it was said, only 4 people in the world could understand it. After an uncomfortably long pause, Eddington was prompted for an answer. “Sorry”, he said, “there’s Einstein and me, and I’ve just been trying to think of who the other 2 are”.
Dr Esquivel goes on to say the following
I’m queering STEMM everyday by re-envisioning what it means to be a physicist. To me, a physicist recognizes the impact their work can have on society, believes engaging with the community is paramount to their work, communicates their science effectively to broad audiences, and works toward the equity and justice of marginalized people in STEMM, not because “Diversity leads to Innovation (read capitalism),” but because it is our moral duty. I’ve carved out this definition of a physicist; I’ve actively rejected the idea of only focusing on the science and ignoring the humanity of the scientists.
Engaging “the community” is not paramount to one’s work as a physicist. It’s a nice thing to be able to do - and Feynman was probably the ‘gold standard’ here because he could make really difficult ideas seem accessible in a way that didn’t make you feel like you were an idiot (most people could reasonably be described as being an “idiot” in comparison to Feynman).
Dirac, by all accounts, was atrocious at communicating with ‘the public’. He wasn’t all that good at communicating with other physicists either, and his undergraduate and graduate lectures were not well-regarded. He was, however, one of the 20th century’s greatest minds. Other physicists looked up to him and, if they worked something out in QM that they didn’t understand, the advice was to “ask Dirac”.
There’s a famous (probably apocryphal) story in which Feynman is looking for an academic position after the war. He worked on highly classified stuff which couldn’t be included in any CV and so he relied on references. Hans Bethe (another brilliant physicist) is supposed to have written the following reference
Feynman is another Dirac, only this time human
It shows the extremely high regard both Feynman and Dirac enjoyed amongst other physicists and also highlights the very significant difference in their personalities and characters.
But being good at, well, erm, physics, is actually paramount - whatever the personal characteristics of the individual physicist.
How terribly old-fashioned and out-dated, not to mention colonially whiter than whiteness itself I must be.
But, apparently, it has been a difficult journey for Dr Esquivel
My journey to becoming a physicist wasn’t easy. I didn’t fit the mold of what a scientist looked like, or who could be a scientist. Most of the time I have been the only (or one of a few) in these physics spaces, and the realization of the fact that these laboratories, these physics classrooms, these halls weren’t built with me in mind hit me like a ton of bricks.
I am reasonably certain that in no admissions process for physics, ever1, did the interviewers say “you’re amazingly good at physics, but we’re going to have to reject you because, well, you just don’t look like a scientist”
And what in the name of the Photonic Torpedoes of Destiny does it mean to say that a lecture hall wasn’t “built with me in mind”. What the fuck is she blathering on about?
I think that Dr Esquivel may have, unwittingly, discovered a new elementary particle - the Narcisson.
OK - that’s not strictly true, because there was a regrettable amount of sexism in operation historically. Emmy Noether (1882 - 1935), for example, could not get a permanent position for a while, simply because she was a she. Noether is one of my scientific heroes and made many very significant contributions.
Don’t know If she is any good at physics, but you would have a hard time firing her.
It is a fine sermon, and she is following the impulse to explain the world by myth. Which is what we all do, and what helps us to lead a successful life (in almost all circumstances, it is useful to consider the sun as rising, not the earth as turning). On the other hand, the success of science so far has depended on scientists letting go of that impulse when at work. The idea of a queer universe can only come up in a queer university.