Thanks for posting this.

Thanks for actually typing out a coherent comment; I appreciate it.

Hmm, this is another interesting study; I suspect, like many social studies, that there is a lot of interpretation to the results based on the nuances of the questions asked, and the methodology used. Its been my observation that the scientific - or claiming to be scientific - community has room for improvement. If you don't think that we stifle underrepresented groups in the field, read through the massive trolling on this comment thread. Granted, comment threads are the place where you see the worst of people, but seriously, can imagine being in an underrepresented group, looking at this headline, then reading through the next 500 comments?

On the other portion of the comment : Sure, I think that politicization of science is a bad thing; and I think that there is a fair argument to be made that science (actually, academics in general) espouses to a liberal viewpoint. I also roll my eyes at the dramatization of climate science, and the bold and often contradictory claims made in other fields probably deserve a second look. Similarly, we're probably not yet at a level where we know how to properly handle affirmative action in STEM fields. There are improvements to be made, and I don't know how to make them. I think we're still getting used to, as a society, some of the ideas here. Science moves quickly, opinions and practices (and bureaucracy!) are slower. And, I think that what many people are objecting to in this thread is the idea that we should apply the ``swift'' standards of science to these social problems. It's wrong to tag them with "science."

But Dr. Metcalf's argument is a general audience article. I mean, she's not claiming to do ``science on science,'' except in the last paragraph, where she asks for people to conduct future research on the existence or non-existence of such biases. I think mostly the article is an observation on the scientific community through a nonscientific lens.

Real scientist.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I agree, the fact that there are many more men as opposed to women does not indicate that there is mispractice in hiring. But! it suggests that we should look into it. ... and if fact, people have. I like to rip on the social sciences as much as anyone else does, and I have the feeling that the following argument is not immune to the "Social Sciences fail to produce reproducible results, " but I encourage you to take a look at http://www.pnas.org/content/10... . In this study, Faculty are asked to evaluate to resumes for a science position, the only difference being that in one case, the candidate is given a male name, and in the other case, the candidate is given a female name. The study (if you take it at face value -- I can't unpoison the well) suggests that *isms does show up in sciences: a lack of equal opportunity at the hiring level.

I think the diversity argument is a separate thread of thought, and I'm not sure why I can put my finger on if diversity in the workforce is a good thing. I do, but I freely admit that is a personal opinion. However, if there is a lack of equal opportunity at the hiring level in the sciences, then we aren't hiring the best applicant for the jobs; we're hiring the applicants which fit some preconceived mold for the bast applicant. And if you're a scientist, consciously or unconsciously, that mold probably is white or asian, and male.

The first sentence really strikes a chord with me: Our science community still struggles with diversity, equity, and inclusion issues, including systemic bias, harassment, and discrimination among other things.

The thing I notice when I head into my office everyday is the huge imbalance of gender in my colleagues. Almost all of them are white or Asian males, like myself. I think this is a problem which is worth addressing. In a lot of ways, Science (and related TEM) has been the envy of other fields of study for the rapid amount of progress that we've made in the last century. The way that we conduct science, for the most part, produces novel and exciting results that shape the human experience. I don't think that we should change the way we objectively try to reach our goal of better modelling the world around us.

But we're behind fields in other ways. Other fields have made leaps and bounds in workforce diversity that we've really struggled at. Perhaps science isn't best equipped to understand why we've failed to make this jump, but it's troubling that to me, as a scientist,that we're so behind the curve here. I encourage you to take a moment to read through the below comment thread, and you'll get the feeling that there are a bunch of sciencey-folks whose beef with this article whose best argument is that Metcalf's article uses "science" and "people who do science" interchangeably. Yeah, science may be "unbiased" by definition, but Metcalf's point is that we, as people, let our biases in and are changing the way that science is done. The comment thread reads more like an attack on those trying to bring diversity to science than an actual critique of the article-- but maybe I shouldn't have expected any better of slashdot.

There are points of Dr. Metcalf's argument that I disagree with, but I also would never claim to be qualified to assess this article. Equality and the politics of science are something that I think about in my free time-- the author holds a doctorate in these subjects, and I'm sure if I spent an office hour talking to Dr. Metcalf, I would probably be convinced of their argument. This person has seriously thought about these, and granted this is an article for general audiences. Perhaps slashdot would be rather enjoy some of her research? https://www.researchgate.net/p...

  To end with another line that resonates with me from this article:

"Regardless of whether our work is scientific, being objective, then, does not and cannot mean ignoring our biases, assumptions, or background beliefs"

Yes, you don't need to be good at math to learn to code. It is also true that you don't need to be good at math to learn math.

However, I think that if you are good at coding or mathematics, it'll make you life easier learning the other.

Ah Interesting-- Sorry, I seemed to have missed bullet point one in your original post. If we lived in a closed 3D space, and were able to observe the whole thing, then we would see some sort of repeating pattern in the CMBR. That's really interesting (and cool that somebody has looked into this!)

I guess I don't know enough about what cosmologists mean by ``flat.'' There are different kinds of flatness, and they have different interpretations.

For instance, if you wanted to look at a surface, and just assign a single number to each point to describe the curvature, then things like cylinders are flat.
If you take the General-relativity definition of flat, then I would believe (although, I don't really know!) there are a lot of manifolds which are Ricci-flat.
If you take the curvature to be zero (in the curvature tensor sense), then there are only a few closed manifolds which are flat (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... for all 6 examples in dimension 3)

A mathematical note: Tori can be flat.

If the universe (and here we are talking about the large spacetime structure, not any of the weird tiny compactified extra string dimension stuff) is globally flat, it can still have the structure of a torus.

The torus when viewed as a 2 dimensional space in 3 dimensions, is not flat-- it has some positively curved parts (think the outer edge of the donut) and some negatively curved portions (think the saddle like regions on the inner ring of the torus.) However, the total curvature (when I sum up all contributing curvatures) on the torus is zero. This is related to a mathematical fact that the total curvature of any surface is given by a topological quantity called the genus. In simpler terms, no matter how I deform the torus, the sum of the curvature will be zero. This is very different from the sphere, whose total curvature is always 2\pi.

So, a flat universe would imply that we cannot live on a 4 sphere, because such objects must always have at least some positive curvature. However, there are examples of tori that have no curvature.

In the 2 dimensional case, it is best to see this from the ``Pac-Man'' perspective. The pacman game is played on a flat surface, and whenever you head off the top of the screen, you arrive at the bottom, and whenever you go off the left side of the screen you wind up on the right hand side. This describes a possible shape for the universe, and this shape is the torus! To see this, imagine that you took the playing field, and glue the top and bottom sides together. That would give you a cylinder. Taking the left and right sides and gluing them together would give you a torus. Now that we believe the pacman game is played on a torus, notice that the original interpretation was a flat surface. So , there is a flat representation of the torus.

To avoid some confusion and people trying to draw flat tori in 3 dimensional space, it can't be done. Every surface viewed in 3 dimensional space will necessarily have some positive curvature around its maximal value. Sorry folks!

In fact, of all the 2 dimensional (compact) surfaces, the only one that has a flat representation is the torus. So, if the universe is compact (and 2 dimensional, which seems unlikely,) there is hope for a Pacman world.

Sure. I don't work in physics, but here is my understanding of the holographic principle.

Imagine that you are in a bathtub. There is a certain kind of physics that dictates the motions of waves in the bathtub. Now, you might believe that you need to understand the entirety of water to predict its future motion. You could develop a theory of water in bathtubs, and run experiments to verify if they are true.

After a lot of thought, you might come across the realization that in order to understand the mechanics of the water in the bathtub, it is only necessary to understand the way the surface of the water moves, or maybe even how the water interacts with the edge of the bathtub. This means that you've reduced the dimension of your theory in some way. While this analogy isn't true, there are examples of where it is-- for instance, the physics of harmonic oscillators, like strings, drumheads, etc, can be understood by looking at the boundaries of those oscillations.

Now, in physics, there are several ways that holography shows up. The most famous of these holography theories is called the AdS/CFT correspondence. It conjectures that a certain 5 dimensional string theory can be understood as a 4 dimensional field theory on the boundary. Now, I think that this perspective is interesting to physicists not because of the dimension change (dimensions in theoretical physics usually have little correlation with the observable dimensions of spacetime) but because it was one of the first known correspondences where a string theory reproduced the results of a field theory. Quantum Field theory is the most validated theory of physics we have, but it is thought to have foundational errors. String theory is suppose to offer a way out, but is... hard.

Hope that helps!