Yesterday, a friend of mine who is a physics major told me about a paper he read. This paper put forward the idea that stars don’t exert a gravitational force, but instead exert a repulsive force, and that this is why the universe is expanding.
Naturally, we had a good laugh. It never crossed our minds that this was an opinion worth bothering to refute.
So why exactly was this opinion piece by Ms. Potter worth the effort of refuting (especially since it turned out to have been sarcasm)?
Seriously people, I disagree with it as much as anyone, but who would realistically believe that such an opinion is worth so much as a nod, even if the person saying it is serious?
We should be past this by now. Women have the same rights as men do these days, and so any challenge to that should be met in the same way.
If someone wrote the same type of commentary about male engineers, would we meet it with anything but laughter?
Troy Kuersten
Aerospace engineering junior