See
Linda Jean Shepherd: The Feminine Face of Science
. see
jane goodall, marie curie, rosalind franklin, grace hopper, rachel carson, emmy noether, fabiola gianotti, lisa randall
Lifting the Veil - Smart is BeautifulJuly 4, 2012:if confidence is lovely, then smart must be ravishing
Fabiola Gianotti
Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful atom smasher, reported they have discovered what could be the ‘God particle’ – a subatomic particle that imparts mass to all matter in the universe. Is there an invisible energy field that fills the vacuum of space? Harvard particle physicist Lisa Randall calls the discovery unbelievably exciting, saying, "I really didn't expect this. They got enough data and improved analysis to the point where we know about a new particle months before I expected (based on asking lots of people)! It is unbelievably exciting."
Discovering the so-called "God Particle" (the Higgs Boson)
Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian particle physicist, in charge of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, considered the world's biggest scientific experiment.
Fabiola started at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1987 and after 18 years has risen to the post of spokesperson and coordinator of the lab’s ATLAS experiment. Fabiola is one of 3,000 scientists from 38 countries working on the ATLAS project and is the leader of strategic planning as well as responsible for communicating the group’s findings to the rest of the world (Hoare,2012). She is the first woman to lead an LHC particle physics experiment and hopes to become an inspiration for other young women considering careers in science (Ananthaswamy, 2009).
Information on her earlier career with CERN is difficult to find, except the following entries found on Wikipedia:
She joined CERN in 1987, working on various experiments including the UA2 experiment and ALEPH on the Large Electron Positron collider, the precursor to the LHC at CERN. Her thesis was on data analysis for the UA2 experiment.Gianotti began working on liquid-argon calorimetry at the LHC in 1990 and continued that work for ATLAS when the collaboration began in 1992. Gianotti also worked on LEP2′s supersymmetry search between 1996 and 2000.
Gianotti is also a member of the Physics Advisory Committee at Fermilab, the particle physics laboratory at Batavia, Illinois (Wikipedia, 2012).
She was involved in a bit of controversy for her choice of the Comic Sans font in a presentation of the Higgs Boson findings at the 2012 International Conference on High Energy Physics, as many members of the media and scientific community felt it was too whimsical and unprofessional for such an important event. An online petition was created to change the name to Comic CERNS with even its creator supported (Wikipedia, 2012).
thanks Heather Williams (blog)
Gianotti began working on liquid-argon calorimetry at the LHC in 1990 and continued that work for ATLAS when the collaboration began in 1992. Gianotti also worked on LEP2's supersymmetry search between 1996 and 2000. Gianotti is also a member of the Physics Advisory Committee at Fermilab, the particle physics laboratory at Batavia, Illinois. A trained pianist, she has a professional music diploma from the Milan Conservatory. Gianotti is member of the Accademia dei Lincei for the category of physics.
As if in tribute to the American impetus, on July 4, 2012, at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, Gianotti announced that a team at CERN had discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson predicted by the Standard Model of physics.
Fabiola also was a finalist for the Time's Person of the Year for 2012.
On November 13, 2012, Milan Municipality assigned Gianotti the Gold Medal (known as "Ambrogino d'oro", named after the patron saint of Milan, Saint Ambrose) that would be given to her by the Mayor Giuliano Pisapia on December 7, 2012.
On December 11, 2012, she was awarded the 2012 Special Fundamental Physics Prize.
Lisa Randall
Harvard professor Lisa Randall researches theoretical particles and cosmology. By connecting the ideas about theoretical particles to the questions about the universe that physicists have yet to answer, she has developed new understanding about dark matter and extra dimensions in space. She is a leading expert on particle physics and cosmology. She works on several of the competing models of string theory and is a pioneer in the field of 5-dimensional warped geometry theory.
See Lisa Randall - Higgs Boson, Physics and the Real World
Emmy Noether was also known for making connections that no one else had seen before. She came up with an algebraic theorem that connected two fundamental laws of physics. Noether's Theory is seen by some to be as important as Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. In fact, Einstein considered Noether to be the most significant female mathematician.
Marianne Williamson, while not a physicist, nevertheless points the insight that: "Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes." (See: The Science of Being ~ The Spirit of Community)
The Amazing Dogon People. These ostensibly primitive Africans have mystified modern science, with their "sophistication." French researchers investigating the Dogon have reported that they seem to possess advanced astronomical knowledge. How, for example, did they know with so much certainty and detail about Sirius, as we call it? The world was baffled.
Huma Abedin - why are men sometimes such jerks? See "A woman of valor : her price is above rubies." The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source. [Lucretia Coffin Mott]
Unexplained - why "numerology" seems to unclock the answers that not even theology is able to touch? Is there a divine beauty secreted in the Bible code of Torah (so-called numerology is more properly named by Kabbalist adepts as Gematria)
Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider (Aczel) For further research. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely hot and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the first trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. [Amir D. Aczel]
The Feminine Face of Science
Linda Jean Shepherd was born and raised in the Philadelphia area. She holds a B.A. summa cum laude in biology from Millersville University, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Pennsylvania State University. Her book, Lifting the Veil: The Feminine Face of Science earned the Washington Governor's Writers Award. This book led Anna Harrison, past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Chemical Society "to think anew about science and about women in science."Linda's love of Nature led her to become a scientist. She wanted to know about Life, to understand Reality. She wanted to know how plants create such a cornucopia of chemicals, medicines, and structures from just air, water, sun, and dirt. She was curious about dreams and the mind. Her Ph.D. research on the mechanism of anesthesia was as close as she could get to studying consciousness within a biochemistry department in the 1970s.
Her questions strayed into other fields; she was stimulated by courses in anthropology, Eastern philosophy, and quantum chemistry. She read books on spirituality and Jungian psychology. As much as she loved science, it alone didn't satisfy her. Over time, she came to the conclusion we need to expand the definition of science to include studying more realms of reality than just the physical.
As a scientist, Linda worked in the biotechnology industry developing clinical diagnostic products, obtained a U.S. patent, and published ten scientific papers. At the same time, she began to explore inner realms through Jungian analysis, and discovered the wonders of the body through training in massage therapy. She began to wonder what it meant to be a woman in science, read widely in the feminist literature, and then left her biotech job to write Lifting the Veil: The Feminine Face of Science. For several years, she participated with a group of scientists who engaged in monthly discussions about the relationship between science and spirituality.
Her awe of plants led her to apprenticeships in herbal studies and ethnobotany, which enabled her to develop personal relationships with plants, to know them in their habitats, to understand our reliance on them. Her study of the Waitaha, a peaceful matriarchal people who lived in New Zealand for two thousand years before the Maori, has given her a vision of the degree of peace and harmony that is possible within a culture and with Nature.
Today, she feels a deep commitment to being a voice for the plants, animals, minerals, lands, and waters of Earth. As human activities increasingly threaten our biosphere, she feels called to work toward a transformation of human consciousness, values, and institutions.
Linda is enlivened by interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches, which she finds give birth to our most creative work. Today's problems are complex, and she wants to help weave interactive, inclusive, cooperative strategies to solve them, drawing on the knowledge, wisdom, and perspective of diverse fields.
She has gone on a sacred journeys to visit the stark beauty of the deserts of Israel and Jordan; learned about compassion and the abuse of power in the Mayan Yucatan; experienced the bridge of connection and abundance of life in the rainforests of Costa Rica, explored her heart's desire in Machu Picchu; wove with the rainbow rays of creation in the Galapagos Islands; sought the divine feminine in New Zealand and the divine masculine in the dolmens, standing stones, and caves of Ireland, Scotland and Spain. Perhaps if far-reaching political, economic, and business decisions were made in places such as these, rather than in climate-controlled buildings, humans would make wiser choices.
As a writer, Linda contributed an essay to the anthology The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World and has published articles in New Zealand Geographic, Resurgence, New Realities, Ancestry Weekly Journal, and Coping. She is currently writing a novel about Mileva Maric, Einstein's first wife.
Lifting the Veil
What do we miss seeing of reality when we don't include the feminine perspective? The feminine principle with all its unique qualities is restoring the lost soul to disciplines once limited by principles of logic, analysis, and reductionism. The experiences of contemporary scientists show how the unveiling of the feminine is enlivening modern science, infusing it with a new spirit of cooperation and compassion, and changing long-held ideas about progress and about what makes "good science."
From Library Journal
Lifting the Veil quietly chastises science and scientists for relying too heavily on objectivity, logic, and competition, all typically associated with a masculine philosophy of science. Simultaneously, it beckons to science to cultivate traits such as cooperation, nurturing, receptivity, and intuition, usually considered more characteristic of the feminine. Drawing on basic tenets of Jungian psychology, biochemist Shepherd describes how science is successfully unveiling the feminine in newer areas like quantum physics and chaos science. She uses numerous examples from the experiences of men and women to illustrate this unveiling, concluding that science can only improve, and so help humanity to prosper, by uncovering its feminine side. Though Shepherd might reject labeling her book a feminist critique of science, it certainly reads like one. For academic science collections.
- Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia
The terrible case of King James I of Scotland
He "proved" that women have no right to rule a country, or be a monarch. (It says so right in the Bible, he felt). Yet his own beautiful mother was Queen, till the rebels chased her into Elizabeth's England. So he goes down in history as inaugurating the single most successful Bible translation project in the history of Western Europe --- but also single-handedly sent more "witches" to the gallows than any other monarch or leader in the entire history of the British people.
Yet he was convinced his witch hunting was all for the public good.
He assiduously studied the Malleus Maleficarum (commonly rendered into English as "Hammer of Witches." All very scientific. All very "Christian." And oozing with misogyny, hatred of women. Sounds eerily like today's (mostly "Republican" War on Women." These overgrown adolescent males forget that "Woman - was our First Home as Quakers USED to say. But even Quakers are silent these days.
Nowadays, Quakers play it safe. No longer go to prison alongside Eugene V. Debs. No longer does anyone call them Devil Worshippers, or call their "scripture-less" praxis heresy, or label it "the OCCULT." No longer are they regarded as Deists. In fact nowadays a great many Quakers freely call themselves Christians, in direct contradiction to the earliest Quakers. (Who were merely Friends.) See John 15:15.
I am certainly proud of the courageous stand of Bayard Rustin, not only on behalf or Martin Luther King and the March on Washington. But also both women's movement and, as much as then were possible, gay rights. I am certainly proud of Paul Robeson -- and many others. Joan Baez. Those who marched with Dr. King. All I am saying is that it is so easy to choose the comfortable life. It is so easy to "dodge the bullets" and avoid the barrage of names.
In those early days (that other "divine right Stuart, Charles II's reign, Quakers were branded devil worshipers. They were publicly flogged and imprisoned, flogged again (naked), often starved. They suffered loss of economic security, and frequent whippings, flayings, if we can believe the accounts. So desperate were they that they literally willed the asylum of Penn's woods into being. They envisioned, then CREATED, their Beloved Community of "Philadelphia." And there they turned all that temporary pain (back in Wales and Merry Olde England) -- scourgings and lashings and starvation in His Majesty's gaols, into something good for all the world. The first example of religious freedom anywhere in modern times. Not since the convivencia in Moro-Judaic Spain was there a deliberate state policy of religious tolerstion, co-existence, and an objective of real brotherhood.
What the "hell" is OCCULT?
In fact, one of the most learned and scholarly kings, King James, was also supposedly "righteous." He proved right out of the Bible things like the inferiority of women, their susceptibility to witch craft. (He could have taught Rush Limbaugh and Reverend Mike Huckabee plenty.) He also believed in the Divine Right of kings. And was clearly a secret Catholic until Titus Oakes tried to blow him up.
Where is your oldtime zeal, lukewarm Quakers?
They used to be on fire for the suffering world.
They got women the right to vote. They led the first fight against domestic violence (first wave of the temperance movement). They led the fight for Prison Reform (Philadelphia, in early America), and led the movements both for abolition (ante-bellum days) and the Freedmen's Schools (Reconstruction and after). But now they have turned into a philosophical elitism. Going to jail once in a while protesting this or that war. Joining a protest or march for marriage equality. But mostly they just donate, often generously to whoever really does the leg work. The Occupy people. The Moral Monday.
What the "hell" is devil worshiping?
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"Walk with the dreamers, the believers, the courageous, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground. Let their spirit ignite a fire within you to leave this world better than when you found it…" (Wilferd Peterson) |
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Frankly, I am indeed fascinated with symbols & sigils & semiotics, emblems, glyphs, iconography, writing systems, semiotics, alchemical imagery, illuminations, orthography, grimoires, heraldry, numerology with recent interest in (although certainly not limited to) occult and western esoteric systems of thought. I get criticized (not harshly but yes, people do not understand). Am I weird? Is it occult? Am I into divination or black magic? I sure don't see it that way. I guess I am following my heart. Following my bliss. I am "Seeking God" in my own way. |
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coincidentia oppositorum Hieros gamos: God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger, assuming various forms, just as fire when it is mingled with different kinds of incense is named according to the smell of each. [Heraclitus of Ephesus] |
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Robert Shepherd
photograph
The eight-spoked Quaker star is actually far more anciently the Buddhist Wheel of Law or "dharmachakra." One of the Auspicious Signs - it is also found in Jainism and Hinduism as well.