A professor of physics and gender studies who has argued that "white empiricism" undermines Einstein's theory of general relativity now sits on a top physics advisory panel within the Department of Energy, raising questions from fellow scientists about the panel's integrity and providing a potential target for the Trump administration as it seeks to stamp out DEI within the federal government.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire who has suggested that string theory "failed to succeed" because the field has too many white men, was appointed to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) under the Biden administration in 2024. The panel advises the Energy Department on research and funding priorities for particle physics, giving it significant say over which projects receive federal support.
String theory failed because there was never any empirical evidence for it and in forty years of spending billions, no one has found any. The theory is a math-only, paper-only "theory" that is endlessly mutable. Every time a very expensive test rules out one configuration of string theory, they just change some of the formulas and champion this "new" model of string theory.
It's a 40-year hole we've been digging.
But for this DEI racist -- it's just that "White men" were doing the research into it, not brilliant Strong Empowered Feminist Grifters like herself.
Prescod-Weinstein will remain on HEPAP until 2027 unless the Trump administration takes action to remove her. Her role at the Energy Department has rankled some scientists, who say that an institution tasked with directing federal research should not be advised by a woman who, in one 2020 paper, wrote that "Black feminist theory intersectionality should change physics."
Prescod-Weinstein's "scientific accomplishments seem modest and her racialist and sexist view of science, combined with her uniquely destructive activism, ought to be disqualifying," said Sergiu Klainerman, a mathematician at Princeton University who studies the theory of general relativity. "It seems to me incredible that she has a voice on important decisions concerning the DOE physics division."
...
She first raised eyebrows in 2020 when she argued that a culture of "white empiricism"--in which "only white people" are deemed capable of objectivity--"undermines a significant theory of twentieth-century physics: General Relativity."
Now get ready for her to expose herself as an idiot grifter: This woman, who is now a high-ranking official in the DOE's high-energy physics department, has a grade-school level of what "relativity" means. She thinks it means what all freshmen non-science-majors thinks it means, which is that "we're all equal" or some bullshit.
I would like to put her under oath and force her to answer actual scientific questions about the theory. I don't think she could answer the most basic ones.
Einstein's theory is rooted in the "idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other," Prescod-Weinstein wrote in Signs, a gender studies journal published by the University of Chicago. "Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent ... Given that Black women must, according to Einstein's principle ... have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression, we can dispense with any suggestion that the low number of Black women in science indicates any lack of validity on their part as observers."
In other words, if a black woman knows nothing at all about relativity or even high-school level physics, her opinions about it are just as important as those of an actual specialist in relativity.
Because, see, the theory of relativity just means that We're All Equal or something.
Later in the paper, Prescod-Weinstein blamed racism and sexism for the slow pace of scientific discovery in physics. "String theory has failed to succeed in expected ways," she said, "because the community--which is almost entirely male and disproportionately white relative to other areas of physics--is too homogeneous."
The argument attracted widespread ridicule from other scientists, including New York University's Alan Sokal, the physicist who famously conned an academic journal into publishing a paper arguing that quantum gravity was socially constructed.
Prescod-Weinstein "fails to note the most obvious explanation" for string theory's morass, Sokal wrote: "String theory has failed to succeed in expected ways because the problems being studied are extraordinarily difficult."
Well, and also, string theory has not produced a single accurate prediction nor resulted in any theory that advanced any other science or technology.
Sokal, of course, hoaxed leftwing gender ideology journals, like the one that published this grifter know-nothing's musings. From Wikipedia:
The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies--whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross--[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the journal's Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review at the time, so it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.
The hoax caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; and academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors or readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had abided by proper scientific ethics.
She's a "physicist" who can't be published in an actual journal of physics, just in "gender ideology" journals riffing pottishly about relativity meaning that everyone's opinion matters, man.
After the 10/7 Hamas slaughter and rape terror campaign, she of course accused Israel of genocide. I guess "relativity" proves that all methods of conducting war are equally valid, man.
Fire them all. All of them. The entire government exists now only to pay off otherwise-unemployable Democrat polemicist and actual anarchist revolutionaries.