Is There a Gender Difference?

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There doesn't seem to be much evidence that there's a genuine biological basis when you go way back into sort of early childhood studies. Our biases as adults influence kids so strongly, like they do these tests where they put babies in a room with different types of toys. The study was originally done, I think it was something like they found that the male baby, I mean, gender isn't even a binary, right? But if you take the male babies, they seem to go more for the things and the sort of,. but apparently they failed to take into account the like facial expressions and the behavior and the body language of the researchers or the parents who are in the room with the babies

Physics has always sought to deepen our understanding of the nature of matter and the world around us. But how do you conduct experiments with the fundamental building blocks of existence? How do you manipulate a particle a trillion times smaller than a grain of sand? How do you cause a proton to sail around a twenty-seven-kilometer-long loop 11,000 times per second? And, crucially, why is all this important? In The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the experiments that changed the course of history.

Shermer and Sheehy discuss: what it’s like being a female physicist in a mostly male field • Does science progress through falsification, confirmation, consensus, or Bayesian reasoning? • atoms, light, Higgs Boson, time, gravity, dark energy, dark matter, string theory, radioactivity • Gold Foil Experiment • cloud chambers • particle accelerators • splitting the atom • Is there a place for God in scientific epistemology? • Is math all there is? Is math universal? • other universes, dimensions, and the multiverse.

Suzie Sheehy is a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time between research groups at the University of Oxford and University of Melbourne. She is currently focused on developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine. The Matter of Everything is her first book.