Witch Hunt at CERN

From the BBC website:

"A senior scientist has given what has been described as a "highly offensive" presentation about the role of women in physics, the BBC has learned. At a workshop organised by Cern, Prof Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University said that "physics was invented and built by men, it's not by invitation". He said male scientists were being discriminated against because of ideology rather than merit.

He was speaking at a workshop in Geneva on gender and high energy physics. Prof Strumia has since defended his comments, saying he was only presenting the facts. Cern, the European nuclear research centre, described Prof Strumia's presentation as "highly offensive". The centre, which discovered the Higgs Boson in 2012, has removed slides used in the talk from its website "in line with a code of conduct that does not tolerate personal attacks and insults".

Prof Strumia, who regularly works at Cern, presented the results of a study of published research papers from an online library. He told his audience of young, predominantly female physicists that his results "proved" that "physics is not sexist against women. However the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside".

This is all wearisomely familiar from the James Damore case at Google a year ago. If the institutions which are dedicated to truth in science can't defend it against political pressure, who can?

Here's the offending slide presentation (PDF) by the way. It's ponderous-humorous and a bit technical; the BBC cherry-picked remarks they could use out of context. Read it if you dare!

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On the strength of it all I decided to let Luboš back.

The Reference Frame is hereby reinstated on the right-hand side of the web version in the blog list. For all his extravagant language, grotesque and offensive personal insults and tone-deaf histrionics, the physics, though partisan, is good and the attacks on SJW nonsense merited.

In Luboš's post yesterday, "Nasty SJWs persuade spineless CERN officials to start an inquisition trial against an Italian scientist", the professor at the centre of the row, Alessandro Strumia, added this piece in the comments:

"Thank you Lubos for writing me alerting about this mess; let me clarify.

CERN organised this "gender workshop". Having recently worked on bibliometrics, I had the data relevant for the workshop, so I did the simple checks that should have been done before claiming that physicists are sexist, etc etc etc

Next I went to hear the workshop, that was ignored by almost all theorists who privately have bad opinions about it.

One of the speakers told (as if this were common knowledge) that words such as “competitive”, “conservative”, “hardworking” are bad. A participant said that physicists are second only to military in sexual harassment. And the rest was along similar lines, as clear from the quotations on my second page. Have a look at the other talks still kept on line by CERN, and switch “men" with “women”, and then decide if they are sexist.

It was clear that anything different from their line would have been discredited and ignored. And the objective results that I got from bibliometrics did not support their line: there is no discrimination against women.

This is a good news, but it's not what they want.

Like with LHC results, which are not the best we hoped, it’s our duty to present honestly what we get.

That’s why I decided that the only option (apart from self-censorship) was openly talking about the alternative ideas “discredited” in past gender workshops and that they don’t want to hear, from Simon Baron Cohen, to Summers...

Having spoken with many physicists and friends (including female physicists who attended the workshop), I am fully sure that the big majority understands, although many of them fear the consequences of speaking. I myself tried to find somebody else who dared to speak in my place, and I decided I had to speech only after having seen courageous people that in the past years begin to openly challenge the ideology (like the guy who said “ideological echo-chamber" and was fired by google), and that people thinks very different than media etc.

So I hope to survive and keep doing the physics that I like. Although I am worried that, acting on self-conservation instinct, CERN might worsen a bad situation.

After the talk, I warned important physicists there “a mess will happen”, and they believed my worries were exaggerated. So I am sure that good honest people hosted and funded the workshop underestimating that it was politically-charged and driven by people who dislike our culture based on hard and smart work and on gender-neutral merit, which I think is worth defending.

The sexist attacks against physicists might violate CERN code of conduct, but I liked that CERN is so open to free speech that we can discuss the unpleasant issues raised by the workshop. The fact that my talk is no longer freely available makes me fear that somebody might want my head to appease a political area which is highly voted by academicians, but recently not so much by the people.

I am happy if somebody wants to discuss and check honestly what I wrote in the talk, but tomorrow I have to work full day.

PS Lubos: when you started blogging, I believed you were a totally wrong idiot. But your blog contains good physics, so I kept reading, and with time, I come to realise that I was wrong, and you were right, although too much ahead of time. A very great US physicist told me that you were even moderate, before what happened to you."

That final paragraph - very interesting. But I believe, based on his words above, that Professor Strumia is too naive and trusting to be long for this world.

Update (Oct 5th 18): BackReaction has been taking a look at the citation data Prof. Strumia was using, and at his slides: "Gender-bias in Academia: The Case Strumia". This seems the kind of debate you would expect within the physics community.