Why are physicists almost always men? Why, at a time when women are increasingly well represented in biology, chemistry, and mathematics, does physics remain a male preserve?

In this prize-winning book (an award from the Templeton Foundation for outstanding books in theology and the natural sciences), Margaret Wertheim, a highly skilled science writer, proposes a surprising and provocative answer to those questions.

The explanation, Wertheim argues, lies in the religious motivations behind the development of mathematical physics: the exclusion of women from physics is largely a result of the association of physics with religion. Physicists are an association of priests, and women are seen as unfit for membership for the same sorts of reasons that they have been barred from ordination. Wertheim makes a strong case, but even if the reader does not accept this final conclusion, the evidence provided for both the marginalization of women and for the religious origins of science itself is quite compelling. In support of the latter, she deftly traces the history of mathematical physics from its origins through the current search for a Theory of Everything.

Wertheim's story begins with Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570-500 b.c.), "who fused the rationalism of the West with a mysticism he learned from the East and created a unique philosophy cum science cum religion. From the seed of his extraordinary vision would be born the science of modern physics." Pythagoras believed that, as divine knowledge, mathematics should be revealed only to those who had purified both mind and body; his followers approached its study "in the spirit of a priesthood." The intriguing title of the book comes from the fact that Pythagoras wore the trousers of the Persians rather than the robes of the Greeks. Pythagoras's trousers symbolized for him the Eastern, religious associations of physics; for contemporary readers they symbolize the male dominance in the field.

The Pythagorean belief in the mathematical foundations of reality was marginalized through much of ancient and medieval history by Aristotle's more qualitative approach to science. Nonetheless, it has had an important influence on the development of Christian theology via Neo-Platonic thought. Historians have pointed out that modern thought was shaped by a two-way struggle: one against the dominant Aristotelianism of the later Middle Ages; the other against Neo-Platonism, which then combined a Pythagorean emphasis with magic and alchemy. While the magic was rejected, largely for theological reasons, the Pythagorean strand, which aimed to describe the world in mathematical terms, triumphed. And it triumphed largely for theological reasons.

In the Renaissance, Nicholas of Cusa, "the premier fifteenth-century champion of mathematical science," taught that mathematics was nothing less than the image of God's mind. (Cusa was a churchman-a cardinal-as well as a mathematical savant.) Another "Christo-Pythagorean" was Nicolaus Copernicus, who in the sixteenth century established the heliocentric picture of the cosmos. Wertheim sums up much of recent schol arship on the Copernican Revolution in her argument that Copernicus was motivated not by empirical data but by the theological belief that a mathematically minded Creator could not have created anything so asymmetrical as Ptolemy's system of celestial motions.

According to Johannes Kepler, whose discovery of elliptical orbits (as opposed to the perfect circles posited by earlier cosmological thinkers) laid the foundation for a truly empirical cosmology, geometry was "implanted into man together with God's own likeness." And Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity and formulated the three laws of motion ("They are to physics what the Ten Commandments are to Christianity: the basic principles that are supposed to govern all action"), was deeply involved in theology as well; his intention that his science might serve theological interests is now becoming more widely known. For example, Newton's concept of absolute space was essentially a theological concept: God's sensorium. Rarely, says Wertheim, "has the Church found such an influential ally, and rarely has the bond between physics and religion been stronger than in the mind of this immortal Mathematical Man."

Just as in Pythagoras's community, early modern scientists compared their work and lifestyle to that of a religious association, a priestly class. Many not only preached chastity as a prerequisite to good scientific work, but eschewed the company of women altogether. Francis Bacon envisioned a scientistic future in which women would be kept hidden behind screens. When the Royal Society was founded it was hailed as the beginning of the realization of Bacon's dream-and not surprisingly, women were barred from admittance.

Wertheim speculates that one reason for the reverence paid to Albert Einstein is that his work reintroduced a Pythagorean tone in physics, which had been lost after modern intellectual currents drove a wedge between science and theology. In addition to his openly religious attitude, Einstein's "elegant equations put back onto the scientific agenda the old question of the mathematical form of existence itself. In doing so, Einstein reignited a quasi-religious attitude to physics."

An enduring religiosity within the physics community is manifest both in titles of popular books (Paul Davies, The Mind of God; Leon Lederman, The God Particle) and also, Wertheim contends, in the deep commitment of theoretical physicists to a Theory of Everything, a single theory relating all four of the basic physical forces. "The idea that there must be one force ultimately responsible for all action and form in the universe (despite the lack of evidence) can be considered as a scientific parallel to monotheism."

Pythagoras' Trousers is highly accessible to lay readers. A more enjoyable account of the 2,500-year history Wertheim recounts is hard to imagine; it is high on human interest and devoid of technicalities. While I do not share the whole of Wertheim's agenda (which includes the rejection of the religious undercurrents in physics), I want to promote this book for entirely different reasons.

In the past century, historians such as John Draper and A. D. White promulgated with great success what can now only be described as the myth of the warfare between science and Christianity. While this widely influential account has been thoroughly discredited by more recent historians (see especially David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, eds., God and Nature [University of California Press, 1986]), the notion that there is an irreconcilable enmity between science and faith has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in many evangelical circles. I am grieved by the fact that so many of my students have been taught to see science as the enemy. Such attitudes result in ignorance of science, which produces further misunderstanding and provokes animosity from scientists.

A book like Wertheim's can make available to a wide audience an entirely different and more accurate picture of the historical relations between Christianity and science. Here we catch a glimpse of the deep religious motives that have driven the development of science and also see the ways science has served the goals of the church. Even the Galileo affair, taken as the epitome of church against science, appears in a different light. Of the church's refusal to accept Galileo's hypothesis, Wertheim observes: "To demand concrete proof of a radical new theory is not an act of tyranny but good scientific practice."

Wertheim does not discuss biology, the scientific hot spot for evangelicals, but her book ought to raise some important questions. First, we have to ask whether a scientific approach to biology can be rejected without rejecting the whole of science. Recent developments in cosmology in which the most basic laws of physics appear to be "fine-tuned" for life make it even less acceptable than before to try to drive a wedge between evolutionary biology and physics. Second, if the deep, positive connections between Christianity and the other natural sciences were so well concealed for so long by biased historiography, might not the (apparent) negative relations between Christianity and biology be due to misunderstanding as well?

Mathematical Man

One of the reasons more women do not go into physics is precisely that they find the present culture of this science, and its almost antihuman focus, deeply alienating. As do many men. After six years of studying physics and math at university, I realized that much as I loved the science itself, I could not continue to operate within such an intellectual environment. It was not that I had lost faith in the value of physics, only that I could not function in the atmosphere in which it was being practiced. Since then, I have dreamed of an environment in which one could pursue the quest for mathematical relationships in the world around us, but within a more human-centered ethos.

Let me stress, then, the problem is not that physicists use mathematics to describe the world, but rather how they have used it, and to what ends. There is nothing in a mathematical approach to nature that demands a focus on particles and forces, or on arcane abstraction. . . . Again, the issue is not that physics is done by men, but rather the kind of men who have tended to dominate it. Mathematical Man's problem is neither his math nor his maleness per se, but rather the pseudoreligious ideals and self-image with which he so easily becomes obsessed. He does not need a sex change, just a major personality realignment.

-From Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars

By Margaret Wertheim

Times Books

252 pp.; $23

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 11

bcsep96sc6B50116919