Women explore the frontiers of physics

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

Around the world, the 21st-century successors to Albert Einstein are delving into the mysteries surrounding ghostly neutrinos, rolled-up dimensions and clouds of super-cooled gas that can freeze a light beam in its tracks.

And plenty of those successors are women.

Their work on the frontiers of physics runs counter to the claim that women might be innately less suited for math and science — a hypothesis that was most recently, and provocatively, raised by Harvard President Lawrence Summers in January. Time magazine framed the issue in the form of a question: "Who Says a Woman Can't Be Einstein?"

It's true that statistics still show a huge gender gap when it comes to female representation in academia, with women filling just 7 percent of the tenured and tenure-track positions at America's top 50 research universities. But when you survey the very edge of the frontier, the next breakthrough has as good a chance of coming from women as from men. In fact, the collaborative nature of modern scientific research makes it most likely that the breakthrough paper will list female as well as male names.

Women were involved even in the Einsteinian revolution: Historians still debate how much of a role Einstein's first wife, mathematician Mileva Maric, played in the research her husband published during the miracle year of 1905 — but there's no dispute that in letters to his wife, Einstein himself referred to "our work" and "our theory."

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During the same period that Einstein was doing his best work, Marie Curie won not just one but two Nobel Prizes for her research into radioactivity, and participated along with Einstein and other luminaries in the influential Solvay Conferences of the early 20th century. Curie's daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, won her own share in a Nobel a generation later.

But over the decades, women have had to cope with social stereotypes and discrimination that made it more difficult for them to reach the highest halls of research. The tide started turning just in the past generation or so, said Stanford University string theorist Eva Silverstein.

"I don't know what the timescale should be for eliminating the societal influences, but I'm pretty sure it would be ludicrous to expect it to have happened within one generation," she wrote in an e-mail. "Hence, the current numbers fail to provide any meaningful evidence of innate inferiority of women in science. The error bars are huge."

So who are some of Einstein's female successors? Naming names is always a tricky business, not only because it seems presumptuous to label anyone as "another Einstein," but also because some eminently deserving souls are always left off the list. Nevertheless, we've assembled a list of a dozen female researchers who are among the pioneers in particle physics and cosmology — including a couple from Summers' own Harvard.

Take a look at the lineup, and let us know who you'd add to the roster of Einstein's intellectual heiresses. We'll put together a follow-up report based on your suggestions.

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