The woke death of space science
A Colorado astrophysicist has claimed her field is steeped in white supremacy and sexism because ‘hypermasculine’ and ‘violent’ language is used to describe stars.
Natalie Gosnell, an assistant professor at Colorado College, takes an unconventional approach to physics by comparing stars with humans to turn science into an art.
In an interview with the college newspaper she claimed she has struggled to overcome a division between art and science that is rooted in ‘systemic racism.’
Her work aims ‘to cross typical disciplinary boundaries to create art-science pieces that re-inscribe outer space as feminist space,’ she said on her website.
‘Both artists and scientists are just observing things about the world, interpreting those observations, and then sharing their interpretation,’ Gosnell told Colorado College News.
‘As an astrophysicist, I am a product of institutions steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy,’ she said.
Suggestions that academic fields like science and engineering are male-dominated are common and generally accepted but Gosnell goes further by arguing that the language used to describe scientific phenomena is sexist and racist.
The way in which stars burn through their fuel and die is viewed through a ‘hypermasculine’ lens and the metaphors used are often ‘very violent,’ she claimed.
Gosnell, who studies binary star systems using telescopes and imaging, has said she tries to combine art and science because the two fields are more similar than people think.
More recently she was involved in a creative project, The Gift, which was an experimental piece of theater that anthropomorphized blue stragglers and made comparisons between the life spans and interactions of stars and humans.
I have always been a space junkie.
I’ve written before about how I decided to become an engineer because my dad took me to see Apollo 13 in theaters as a kid.
I admired men like Kelly Johnson and Gene Kranz.
Mem who wore skinny ties, smoked Luky Strikes, and broke the sound barrier and put men on the moon with slide rules.
This is space today.
A feminist astrophysics who complains about the sexist language of stars and creates performance art pieces about her research.
I can imagine this in Houston in April of 1970.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
“That’s negative, masculine language. We don’t have a problem. We have an opportunity to do some constructive brainstorming in a safe place.”
“The CO2 scrubbers from the orbiter won’t fit in the lander, we’re running out of air.”
“Excess CO2 is a problem here on earth too.”
“We need to make this (orbiter scrubber) fit in the hole for this (lander scrubber) using nothing but that.”
“That is the sexist language of toxic masculinity. You men see everything as holes to put your things in. That’s dehumanizing and oppressive. Report to HR now.”
[Astronauts die.]
Everything woke turns to shit and the woke are going to kill space science.
The safest part is that the death of space science won’t inspire the next generation of Johnsons or Kranzs, but will inspire the next generation of mediocre scientists to use woke language to get victim status.
