Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Why should new atheists engage in interfaith service?

    Why indeed.

  • Do women hate god?

    Kristin Aune brings the good news. She and a colleague surveyed “nearly 1,300 British feminists” and guess what?

    The results show that, when compared with the general female population, feminists are much less likely to be religious, but a little more likely to be interested in alternative or non-institutional kinds of spirituality.

    That’s a relief, isn’t it? Much less likely to be religious but oh whew, a little more likely to be “spiritual.” At least they’re not all hopelessly atheistic and bad.

    [Pat] Robertson was worried that feminism was challenging traditional Christian values – at least, values he considered Christian. Many liberals and feminists, concerned about the rise of fundamentalism and its erosion of women’s rights, conclude similarly that feminism and religion have little in common. As Cath Elliott put it:

    Whether it’s one of the world’s major faiths or an off-the-wall cult, religion means one thing and one thing only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression. It’s the patriarchy made manifest, male-dominated, set up by men to protect and perpetuate their power.

    Well said. At least I think so, but Aune doesn’t.

    Sidestepping the arguments about whether or not religion is irredeemably oppressive to women (Christina Odone has refuted Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s recent claim that it is), it’s important to ask why feminists think like this.

    Yes but before we do that, let’s pause over that claim about Odone. Did she refute our claim (we didn’t make that claim, in fact, but it’s perhaps close enough)? No; she disagreed with some of it, but that’s not refuting it. Besides, Odone of course was reviewing our book from the point of view of a dogmatic Catholic, which is no doubt why the Observer wanted her to be the one to review it. She was never going to agree with most of it, was she.

    Second, feminism’s intellectual public voice has largely been a secular one. As the philosopher Rosi Braidotti has argued, European feminists are heirs to the Enlightenment rationalistic critique of religion, and socialist feminism (with its dismissal of religion) was one of the major strands of British feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Even today, feminist academics tend to dismiss religion as unimportant and not worth of studying. It is likely that this secularism has influenced today’s feminists, perhaps without them noticing. (Whether this secularism has much to offer the millions of women who are, by socialisation or choice, religious, is a prescient issue that is being raised especially by postcolonial critics.)

    Yes, postcolonial critics, who see (or claim to see) universal rights and egalitarianism as a narsty colonialist plot. I’ll stick with the Enlightenment “rationalistic” critique of religion.

  • “Why feminists are less religious”

    Don’t worry; they’re more spiritual, so it’s ok.

  • On reading with a modicum of scepticism

    That recycled accounts of events or reports frequently contain inaccuracies going beyond anything in the original is a phenomenon well documented in the psychological literature.[1] I recently happened upon an extreme example of this, made more notable by the fact it occurs in an issue of the highly respected magazine, National Geographic – though not, I hasten to add, the familiar English-language publication. The article in question was published in the Hungarian National Geographic in 2005, the “Einstein Year” centenary of the publication of Einstein’s celebrated 1905 articles in Annalen der Physik. It pays tribute to several individuals whom it describes as “forgotten Hungarian collaborators” with Einstein, albeit that in the next paragraph it is acknowledged that for the most part they were not actually of Hungarian origin. Pride of place is given to Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, whose birthplace was Titel in Serbia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The most remarkable paragraph is the following:[2]

    Maric didn’t just simply enter into the history of science as Einstein’s wife, but as a mathematician who definitely developed the general theory of relativity together with Einstein. When the first scientific paper was written about this, originally they were both shown as authors, at the last minute, however, Einstein crossed out his wife’s name on the manuscript. When the editor of the scientific paper asked him why did he do this, Einstein answered: “Wir sind ein Stein.” That is, playing with his own name, “one stone”, which is how he categorised the pair of them.

    The basic factual errors here include that the paper in question was Einstein’s exposition of his general theory of relativity (which actually came a decade later) and the assertion that Marić was a mathematician, as well as the false claim that she co-authored the paper.[3] But most remarkable is the central story itself, a garbled version of what was originally itself a tall story. This report of Einstein’s supposedly explaining why he took Marić’s name off the paper originates from a passage (with no references supplied) in Trbuhović-Gjurić’s biography of Marić,[4], translated as follows by Santa Troemel-Ploetz in her 1990 article in Women’s Studies International Forum:[5]

    Together with Paul Habicht she [Marić] worked at the construction of a machine for measuring very small currents by way of multiplication. It took a long time, not only because she had so much to do [Einstein’s mathematical problems, ST-P], but also because of her thoroughness and perfectionism. She had already distinguished herself in the physics lab in Zurich. When both she and Habicht were satisfied with the results, they left it to Albert Einstein, as patent expert, to describe the apparatus.

    This relates to an electrical device that Einstein developed with his friend Paul Habicht, who had just started a small instrument-making workshop, in the period 1907-1911, the progress of which can be followed by numerous letters exchanged between the pair. While Marić may have assisted in the testing at some stage, there is no mention of her in the correspondence, and no evidence she played any appreciable role in either the theory or the construction of the device.[6]

    Trbuhović-Gjurić concludes her account, in relation to the fact that device was patented under the name “Einstein-Habicht”, as follows:

    When one of the Habicht brothers asked why she had not given her own name to the application for the patent, she answered: What for, we are both only one stone (“Ein Stein”). Then Habicht also decided to give only his last name.

    Again, no reference is supplied for this unlikely story, which is undoubtedly an example of the folklore passed down the generations by one or other of the proud folk of Novi Sad (the Marić family’s home town), recorded by Trbuhović-Gjurić in the 1960s. That this story should end up in a reputable magazine as if it related to the 1905 special relativity paper, with the words put into Einstein’s mouth, serves to illustrate just how unreliable are hearsay stories,[7] especially when related by interested parties.

    The Hungarian National Geographic article continues with more dubious contentions:

    Marić most likely helped Einstein to develop the mathematical principles, since he wasn’t really an expert in this science, as he was a physicist. Another argument also supporting Marić being the co-author is that Einstein was not the first to discover the theory of relativity, as there were two mathematicians before him, one being the famous French Poincaré who also published a similar theory. These theories were published in mathematical papers, – this is why the world did not get to know about them -, and it is doubtful that Einstein himself would have been reading mathematical papers, it is more likely that Marić knew these journals. The role of Marić however still has to be clarified by science historians, and many questions remain to be solved by them in this area.

    Now Marić failed the Zurich Polytechnic physics and mathematics teaching diploma examinations in 1900 almost certainly as a consequence of her very poor grade in the mathematical component (theory of functions), only 2.5 on a scale 1-6.[8] (None of the other four candidates in the group got less than 5.5.) Yet here we are told not only (absurdly) that Einstein was not competent to handle the conventional mathematics he used for the special relativity paper (which would not stretch a first year university physics student), but that Marić’s mathematical talents were such that she would have been reading mathematical journals and reporting on them to Einstein. In addition the remarks about precursors to Einstein’s special relativity theory are ill-informed and misleading.

    The above garbled report of an original story that is itself highly dubious perfectly illustrates how untrustworthy are Trbuhović-Gjurić’s third or fourth hand reports of Marić’s supposed contributions to Einstein’s work obtained from friends and acquaintances of the Marić family some sixty years after the events in question. (In her influential 1990 article Troemel-Ploetz treats these reports with extraordinary credulity.)

    The misinformation in wide circulation on this topic is exemplified by a statement in the 2008-2009 Europa Diary, distributed to 23,000 schools in the European Union and with a print run of 3 million copies:[9]

    Did you know? Mileva Marić, Einstein’s first wife, confidant and colleague – and co-developer of his Theory of Relativity – was born in what is now Serbia.

    So, despite the detailed refutations of the story that Marić collaborated with Einstein on his celebrated 1905 papers by several historians of physics,[10] huge numbers of schoolchildren throughout the European Union (and their teachers) will no doubt have taken this as historical fact. Yet the purported evidence for it is based on poor scholarship, recycled by equally flawed articles or books.[11]

    Unfortunately erroneous assertions, albeit on a lesser scale, may be found in the writings of highly respected authors. For instance, in E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation, the author and academic David Bodanis writes of Marić that “she really was a good student – on the university final exams where he scored 4.96, she came close, with a 4.0…”[12] But Bodanis fails to record that these grade averages in the Zurich Polytechnic final teaching diploma exams in 1900 were on a scale 1-6, which means the difference was appreciable, not small. In fact Einstein’s grade average was actually 4.91, and the highest grade for the five candidates in their mathematics and physics group was 5.45. Whether one measures it by direct grade averages or by approximate percentages, the difference between Marić’s grade and that of Einstein (in fourth place) was almost twice that between Einstein’s and the highest grade.

    Was Marić as good a student as Bodanis is at pains to emphasise? She certainly achieved excellent grades (especially in physics and mathematics) in the end-of-year examinations at high school in Zagreb in 1894, two years before she entered Zurich Polytechnic, and her grades in the Matura (university entrance level) in 1896 must have been good to enable her to be accepted for the physics and mathematics teaching diploma course at the prestigious Zurich Polytechnic. However she was required to take the mathematics component of the Polytechnic’s own entrance examination, and achieved a moderate grade average of 4.25 on a scale 1-6.[13] (Einstein, incidentally, excelled in the Matura examinations, despite being a year younger than the normal age for sitting them.[14])

    While her coursework grades at the Polytechnic were moderately good, Marić came fifth out of six candidates in the intermediate diploma examinations,[15] and twice failed the final diploma examinations. On the second occasion (1901), under the adverse circumstance of being some three months pregnant, she failed to improve her 1900 grade average.[16] (Einstein was top in the intermediate examinations, but in his final two years he neglected his Polytechnic coursework to study extra-curricular physics, and his grades suffered accordingly.)

    Bodanis compounds his misleading assertions by stating that Marić “missed her chance to retake her final university exams”,[17] when in fact she did re-sit the final Polytechnic teaching diploma examinations the following year as noted above. This erroneous information enables Bodanis to intimate that Marić’s failure to achieve a scientific career was down to Einstein’s “sexism”,[18] a contention that also occurs in the 2005 PBS NOVA production “Einstein’s Great Idea: E = mc2“ , based on Bodanis’s book. The notion that Marić’s missing out on a scientific career was essentially Einstein’s fault, rather than academic failure at the highest level as was actually the case, is now close to conventional wisdom. (It is by no means certain that she even wanted such a career. Her closest friend, Helene Kaufler, wrote to her [Helene’s] mother in July 1900 that Marić had been offered an assistantship, but that she “did not wish to accept it; she would rather apply for an open position as librarian at the Polytechnic”.[19])

    The widely disseminated myth that Einstein was responsible for Marić’s failure to follow a career in science can only be maintained by exaggerated claims about her academic prowess, and in ignorance of the evidence in the correspondence from their student days of Einstein’s encouraging Marić in her studies and expressing his hopes of their having a future life together researching physics.[20] The undoubted fact that with many women, especially in her era, factors other than lack of academic success were frequently a barrier to a career in science does not mean that this was so in Marić’s case.

    Unfortunately erroneous and misleading contentions frequently attain wide currency, and it seems that many people fail to treat factual assertions in print with appropriate caution. It is always worth bearing in mind John Stachel’s dictum: “I must emphasize that bare assertions, particularly by interested parties, do not constitute proof of such assertions, even when these assertions are repeated in print, even in a book.”[21]

    Addendum

    The fallacious story of Mileva Marić’s supposed contributions to Einstein’s scientific achievements is the subject of one of the chapters in a forthcoming book by Alberto Martínez:

    Science Secrets: The Truth About Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths.

    NOTES

    1.  Neisser, U. and Hyman, I. E. (eds.) (2000). Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts. Second Edition. New York: Worth Publishers.

    2.  Einstein és elfeledett magyar segítői. National Geographic Magyarorszag, April 2005. (Professional translation.)

    3.  See Stachel, J. (2005): Appendix to Introduction, Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers that Changed the Face of Physics. Centenary Edition: Princeton University Press.

    4.  Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1988). Im Schatten Albert Einsteins: Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić. Bern: Paul Haupt.

    5.  Troemel-Ploetz, S. (1990). “Mileva Einstein-Marić: The Woman Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 13, No. 5: 415-432.

    6.  See Esterson, A. (2010). Scholarly Standards in Feminist Science Studies. See also A. Maas, “Einstein as Engineer: The Case of the Little Machine”, Physics in Perspective, 9, 2007: 305-328.

    7.  Hunter, I. M. L. (1964). Memory. Penguin Books: pp. 160-161.

    8.  Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1, doc. 67. Princeton University Press, 1987.

    9.  Europa Diary 2008-2009.

    10. For example, Gerald Holton, John Stachel and Alberto A. Martínez. See The Einstein Controversy.

    11. For example, Andrea Gabor (1995), Einstein’s Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth Century Women. New York: Penguin Books. For a comprehensive critique of Gabor’s chapter on Mileva Marić, see Esterson 2007.

    12. Bodanis, D. (2000). E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation. London: Macmillan: p. 90.

    13. Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1988): pp. 26-28, 60.

    14. Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1, doc. 13; A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein. London: Penguin Books: pp. 44-45.

    15. Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1988): pp. 43, 63.

    16. Stachel (2002). Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’. Boston/Basel/Berlin: Birkhäuser: pp. 40-41; p. 52, n. 22.

    17. Bodanis (2000): p. 223.

    18. Bodanis (2000). p. 90.

    19. Popović, M. (2003). In Albert’s Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić, Einstein’s First Wife. Johns Hopkins University Press: p. 61.

    20. Renn, J. and Schulmann, R. (eds) (1992). Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: The Love Letters: pp. 13-14, 15, 25, 32, 33, 38, 39, 54, 71.

    21. Stachel, J. (2002), p.32 (Reply to Troemel-Ploetz). See also A. A. Martínez (2005): Handling evidence in history: the case of Einstein’s wife.  

    March 2011

    About the Author

    Allen Esterson has written articles on books by Walter Isaacson: Walter Isaacson, Einstein, and Mileva Marić, Patricia Fara: Scientists Anonymous, and Adrian Desmond and James Moore: Desmond and Moore’s Darwin, and on Darwin’s Illness and the PBS co-produced documentary “Einstein’s Wife”: Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Marić. In addition to his book Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud, he has written several journal articles on Freud.

  • Thai women resort to home abortions

    A Thai government crackdown on illegal abortion clinics has seen women turn to drugs bought over the internet.

  • An interlude

    Oh my – this is funny – tragic but funny. Aspiring author self-destructs in public. Is urged to stop self-destructing. Continues self-destruction process. Tragic…I can’t wait to read the rest.

  • Libyan woman who claimed rape is being sued

    “The boys she accused are bringing a case against her because it’s a very grave offense to accuse someone of a sexual crime,” said a government spokesman.

  • Muslim Brotherhood has a great new idea

    Women-only buses. Brilliant!

  • Roberto De Mattei responds to his critics

    “The attacks on me are a typical example of the relativistic dictatorship denounced by Benedict XVI.” Srsly.

  • Bruce Everett on masculine self-pity in cartoonists

    You’ll know nanotechnology has matured as a field when it finally creates the violin small enough to play an appropriate lament.

  • Demo against Europe’s last dictator

    Index on Censorship organized the march against Lukashenko and for freedom of expression in Belarus.

  • Hitchens files again

    It is morally unthinkable that Qaddafi should emerge from this episode with even a rag of authority to call his own, and it is morally feeble not to say so out loud.

  • Who are the Libyan rebels?

    “We want democracy, good schools, a free media, an end to corruption, a private sector, and a parliament to get rid of whoever, whenever, we want.”

  • What Egypt can learn from Palestine

    Democracy properly understood means constitutional guarantees that are not easily nullified by a ruling party and safeguards on the rights of minorities and women.

  • Experience required

    Nir Rosen was hired by the London School of Economics. Rosen is “the free-lance journalist who gained infamy and lost an NYU fellowship after celebrating via Twitter the sexual assault on Lara Logan and wishing the same on Anderson Cooper.”

    The Evening Standard reports

    Mr Rosen was forced to resign in disgrace from New York University last month after making fun of CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who was stripped, beaten up and molested by a baying mob while covering the Egyptian revolution. He admitted his career was ruined after writing a series of comments on Twitter about Ms Logan, saying she was “probably just groped like thousands of other women”.

    But this weekend he announced he will start work at the LSE, and is expected to be paid around £50,000.

    One LSE source said: “It’s an unbelievable appointment. You’d think these people would have learned their lesson by now, but all they seem to want to do is rehabilitate highly offensive individuals.”

    Nick Cohen phoned the LSE press office. He reported their conversation on Facebook:

    “Does he have any academic credentials?”

    “No but his war reporting experience is condsidered useful.”

    “You mean his experience of justifying the rape of women correspondents?”

    “I am not going to answer that.” Hangs up.

    Rosen has now resigned. You might think Nick did his bit to help; I couldn’t possibly comment.

  • LSE hired Nir Rosen after NYU forced him to resign

    One LSE source said: “It’s an unbelievable appointment.” Rosen has now resigned from LSE.

  • Other minds

    After some further conversation yesterday, I actually ended up better understanding what the latest spate of anti-gnu atheism was getting at. After yet another look, I still think Berlinerblau’s piece is terrible. It annoys me five paragraphs in, and that’s with having skipped the first two paragraphs. I’m not saying I think the piece is not so bad, but I am saying I can see why he might be riled. I always thought Hoffmann’s piece was a much better read, and now that I also see why he might be riled, well there you go.

    They’re both academics, you see; they teach; they teach undergraduates. Need I say more? You know how young people are. (For any readers who are young: you know how you are.) Young people in the US, at any rate, which is the relevant category here.

    Once you isolate that variable, it all becomes clear. They teach undergraduates, so they get smart-ass ducklings who think they know everything already and refuse to read anything denser than a Facebook update.

    They get “new atheist” undergraduates like that. They get “new atheist” undergraduates like that who grew up on self-esteem classes. Ohhhhhhhh – now I get it.

    Is that the fault of “new” atheism? Hmmm. I would say mostly no, but I wouldn’t say that none of it is. In fact I would agree that some of it probably is. On the other hand, I would add, if it weren’t gnu atheism it would be something else.

    Yes but if you teach history of religion, for instance, callow lazy undergraduate gnu atheism interferes directly with what you teach. The same is probably true if you’re the Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization.

    You can see it, right? You can see how it might go? Gnu atheist students age 20 or so, who think they already know whatever they need to know on the subject and express lofty contempt for things they can’t even spell. Why do they think this? They picked it up from PZ Myers, or Richard Dawkins – that’s the thinking. Actually it’s a lot more likely that they picked it up from commenters at Pharyngula or the RDF site, but still – that’s “new” atheism in some sense (though it’s always better to make it clear which sense is in play).

    I can sort of see how gnu atheism could seem like just another version of anti-intellectualism, and I can pretty easily see that it’s at least compatible with anti-intellectualism for followers. I say “for followers” because it’s absurd to think of any of the Name “new” atheists as anti-intellectual, much less incurious, which was Berlinerblau’s wild charge.

    I said on Facebook yesterday that I was tempted to work up a little statement to append to every post I write –

    Nothing here is to be construed as permission to refuse to read any history or philosophy of religion. There is no merit to ignorance.

  • The world as it should be

    Men in front, doing all the talking; women in back, wearing black tents, silent.

  • Research funding tied to study of “big society”

    Universities can still have some funding, provided they do research on David Cameron’s hot new idea.

  • For women in Afghanistan life is crap

    It is estimated that 70-80% of marriages are forced. The literacy rate of Afghan girls of 15 or more is just 12%. Violence and abuse are widespread.