JulesNew book: M.R. Carey's "Infinity Gate". Part one of a duology. Humanity accidentally discovers parallel dimensions, AI threatens everything. Some things always stay the same, I guess.
"She was a genius, but only in a small way. Her greatest discovery was made almost completely by accident, and it had been made before by others in a great many elsewheres. In fact Hadiz’s contribution to history is marked throughout by things done casually or without intention."
Why of course. A woman who's a genius scientist, period? Now, we can't have THAT. Just a genius in a small way! Making discoveries by accident! Unlike the male geniuses-in-a-big-way!
"Campus Cross was a small side project jointly owned by the Catholic Church and by three billionaires who had all separately decided that the world was now so badly screwed that their individual fortunes might not be enough to unscrew it."
I am kind of staring speechless at this concept.
Okay. We are going to need the "science. It does NOT work like this, folks" speech.
Hadiz is introduced as a "particle physicist" whose work requires "no mind or muscle other than her own". Which is a stretch even for a theoretician, but apparently she has a lab? There's no way you can run a modern research lab without assistants and grad students. It's not the 1500s anymore, folks.
Proto Himbo European@quidcumque I am acquainted with a prof (female, as it turns out) who teaches a course about depictions of high intelligence in literature, especially (IIRC) sci-fi. I think depictions of "scientists" (or even "professors") by people who have equal ignorance about the institutional and intellectual realities of actual science is in this domain. If I wrote books about lawyers and courts, I'm sure they would sound just as stupid to people who knew anything about those domains.