Academics pursue project to ‘Decolonize Physics’ – ‘We aim to critically investigate if & how physics itself has contributed & still contributes to colonialism’
By: Marc Morano – Climate Depot
Click to access v77n1.0-a4130.pdf
2021 report: Decolonizing Light: A Project Exploring Ways to Decolonize Physics – By Ingo Salzmann, Louellyn White, Donna Kahérakwas Goodleaf, and Tanja Tajmel
Excerpts: The aim of our project is exploring approaches to decolonize physics, of both its narratives and contemporary research. We decided to focus on physics, as this discipline plays a special role in the field of science due to its unique scientific authority. Physics is commonly regarded as the “most objective” and the “hardest” science [2], it fundamentally defines scientific key concepts such as energy, matter, force, light, space and time, for all the other sciences.
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Related Links:
University of Rhode Island and Director of Graduate Studies Erik Loomis wrote: “Science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist because they are developed by racists who live in a racist society, whether they identify as racists or not.”
Loomis added: “This is why I have so much contempt for those, including many liberals, who “just want the data.” The data is racist!”
Also see: According to this professor, ‘Science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist’
University of Rhode Island Professor Erik Loomis said in a tweet that science, statistics and technology are inherently racist “because they are developed by racists living in a racist society.” – Loomis also said that he has contempt for people who “just want the data.”
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Identity politics invades the climate change debate
How 2 Pro-Nazi Nobelists Attacked Einstein’s ‘Jewish Science’
It’s official! The lunatics ARE running the asylum!
(Are science graduate students forced to interact with him, or can they ignore him without repercussions?)
Of course brain dead idiots who lack the most basic critical thinking skills would reject empirical data. It proves their sick world views have no basis in reality.
Is it any wonder why western civilization is so quickly falling apart??
The more woke lunacy like this I come across the more I am thinking that the World Wide Web, designed by scientists for them t exchange data and ideas has degenerated into the World Wide Wuhan Wet Market of Idiocy producing a pandemic of Imbecilicosis in academia and the eco-left political tribe.
It is pretty obvious whose brains have been twisted by the mere notion of racism. This ‘physics is racist’ lunacy is the sort of bile spewing out of Putin’s mouth about Ukrainian nazis. I think we know who the real neo nazis are.
Clearly racism is being redefined as any tendency to seek truth and insist on evidence. Let those who follow this path reap the rewards which will inevitably be cold, hunger, privation and early death. Nature doesn’t play favorites or tolerate stupidity no matter how virtuous you are in your own imagination.
Racism, much like hate speech, is anything a socialist disagrees with, but can’t refute.
These people should devote their lives to feeding themselves from the grubs and worms they can find under rotting logs. Their minds don’t seem to be up to anything more complex.
Good luck crossing bridges which have been built according to decolonised physics.
People who see racism everywhere are probably racists BECAUSE of being obsessed with it.
Yeah, but we all came out of Africa 300,000 years ago, we are all black on the inside. Just our skin faded from living in a shitty climate for so long. 🙂
Gravity must be racist. After all, it holds down black people and everything they do.
Almost all writing is racist. a small amount of black surrounded by a white page. Where is the equity in that.
It is really hard to fathom that someone could be so stupid. The effect of recreational drugs, maybe? Wherever he got his degrees from should revoke them.
Quote from the article:
“Let’s elaborate this further for the example of the Planck–Einstein relation E = h · υ describing the energy E of a light quantum, a single wave-particle of light emitted or absorbed; υ is the frequency which determines the color of light, h is the Planck number named after the German physicist Max Planck who lived around 1900 in Berlin. This formula has been found valid and enabled the development of solar panels (absorption) and lasers (emission). Every STEM student is expected to know this relation. In our project, we will not question E = h · υ. But we ask: What person was Max Planck? What circumstances enabled him (and others) to discover this relation? How was his work related to colonialism, by whom was he funded? What happened in this time around the world? Why were essentially only white men doing physics research? What knowledge about light was disrupted by colonialism? “
In relation to the last question, seriously: why do the authors believe knowledge about light was disrupted by colonialism? Was Planck constant discovered by Indigenous and Black People much earlier, was there an Indigenous Physical Society, universities, professors. Did they have a six-semester course of lectures on theoretical physics. Was quantum physics, the greatest achievement of Planck’s career, already known and disrupted?
Strange that they should use the physics, electronics, developments by ‘white’ westerners, etc., as a stage upon which to discuss victimhood. The authors should have only used computers and other artifacts that were developed in the civilizations of Africa. Oh,… guess not. What’s so crazy is that people actually waste time reading this stuff.
The following are some of the phrases and sentences that caught my eye in Salzmann et al. article:
Rather, our project initiatives are motivated by the marginalization of women, Black people, and Indigenous peoples [5], particularly in physics, as it is documented by the statistics of the American Institute of Physics [6].4
to increase the presence of Indigenous and Black students, faculty and staff on all levels.
purposefully training university students from marginalized and racialized groups in physics (e.g., by offering well funded positions to Indigenous and Black graduate students), initiating collaborations with Black (e.g., Montreal’s Haitian community) and Indigenous communities in scientific projects, and seeking conversations with Indigenous Knowledge Keepers about their cultural (philosophical as
well as practical-empirical) knowledges to include them in the curriculum.
decentering Eurocentric Western science through decolonizing curriculum in ways that elevate Indigenous scientific and intellectual contributions and develop new narratives.
Higher education systems in Canada have a history of perpetuating Eurocentric/Western canons of thought as the ‘normative discourse’ across all academic fields of study and continue to play a key role in promoting the colonization of Indigenous peoples.
Canada’s Residential schools — and by extension university systems — set the groundwork to perpetuate on-going Eurocentric educational policies and practices designed to diminish and
undermine Indigenous epistemologies, languages, histories and cultures while imposing assimilative frameworks and practices on Indigenous students [8-11].
The impacts of these institutional racist policies and practices has led many Indigenous students to drop out of school [12].
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This strikes me as a philosophy endorsing the idea that Eurocentric is bad, while indigenous-centric, black-centric and other-centric are good, which looks a lot like colonization of one centricism by another centricism. How is this not doing the very thing you say you are not doing?
Hypocrisy dressed up as scholarship is sophistry.
Its not that big a stretch to associate physics and other branches of knowledge with technically advanced societies which, as it happens, have done a bit of colonizing over the centuries and millenia. IT goes with the reality of survival in a dangerous and competetive world. The Egyptians, Persians, Hittites, Greeks, Romans and Arabs fitted that bill long before the western europeans did.
The real issue though is that the expanded knowledge base in question, of which physics is just a part, was brought forth and diseminated by the oral and written word. By comparison the sort of intellectual bulimia that shouts ‘physics is colonial’ is a contemprary phenomenon that comes forth via a different route of ideas transmission typically associated with a dose of the Trotsky’s, i.e. the sphincter of self importance and attention seking.