Sixty-six million years ago,
according to Harvard cosmologist Lisa Randall,
a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos
hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan towards Earth,
at least 700 times the speed of a car on a freeway.
That collision produced
the most powerful and awesome earthquake of all time
and released energy a billion times that of an atomic bomb,
heating the atmosphere into an incandescent furnace
that killed three quarters of all living creatures.
No creature heavier than 55 pounds, or about the size of a dalmatian survived.
The dinosaurs who walked the Earth much longer than we have perished,
with their unfortunate demise,
made possible the subsequent rise of mammalian dominance
which allowed you and me, and all of us humans,
to evolve, to ponder the perplexities of the cosmos.
One of these perplexities was the evolution of women
as a so-called substandard sentient being,
a virtually misunderstood, invisible, and mysterious entity
co-existing with mankind
– well, humankind, as we exclusively state nowadays –
or presumably so, according to the troglodytes,
the terrestrial dwelling denizens,
and the testosterone-driven, androgenic species we now denote to be homo sapiens.
Dark matter and women –
for most of the vast millennia have been out there evolving, contributing, creating
and yet, both are perceived as, well, just not essentially there.
Dark matter can’t be seen, detected, or measured.
So how do we know it really exists?
And women are often times unseen, undetected, and unmeasurable,
even unmanageable in the work force and the world.
So how do we know they exist?
Since time immortal, men have served as cartographers
mapping the Earth, the great oceans, and the vast Universe,
but dark matter and women continued to elude.
Like dark matter, women have existed but in a cloak of invisibility.
We hope to reveal here today the enigma
of four billion years of creation,
and 500 million years of higher evolution.
Where do we begin?
How about the 20th century,
when the cosmos ushered in a new era for astronomy
and for one woman’s role in it.
In 1965,
astronomer Vera Rubin became the first woman allowed to observe
at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California.
It was home to the most powerful telescopes in the world at that time.
It was here that she began her pioneering work on galaxy rotation
which led her to calculate the existence of dark matter,
one of the most significant milestones in our understanding of the Universe.
While dark matter captured the world’s imagination overnight,
it remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time.
And there’s good reason for that.
Research has proven
we often fail to see things that we are not expected to see.
For example, our very bodies host vast colonies of bacteria.
Ten times more bacteria cells than human cells reside inside us
and help us to survive.
Yet, we are barely aware of these microscopic creatures.
Only when bacteria misbehave and make us sick
do most of us even acknowledge their existence.
Only when dark matter and women reveal themselves to our perception of reality,
do we know they exist.
So, like the bacteria within us,
dark matter is one of those other universes right under our noses;
unseen, undetected, and unnoticed.
And like those microscopic creatures who inhabit us,
dark matter too,
not only passes through us but is all around us.
It is literally everywhere.
Let’s take a closer look at what you cannot see.
Hold up your hand.
Now put it back down.
Did you notice anything?
Even more important, did you feel anything?
In that brief window of time, your hand interacted with dark matter;
the elusive, mysterious stuff
that comprises the vast majority of the universe.
Best guess is that a million particles
of dark matter passed through your hand just now.
Imagine that!
Dark matter, in other words, is not just the stuff of deep space and black holes.
It is all around us, ubiquitous, and everywhere.
Dark matter is unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
Billions of these strange particles pass through everything
they encounter every second.
According to one theory, they are so massive
they are 800 billion times the mass of the Sun,
and they have that power to make up the entire galaxy.
Maybe the next time you gain weight, blame it on dark matter.
(Laughter)
Think about that as you’re sitting here in this room.
We, humans, have no sense of existence;
in part, because we don’t cleave to the forces
that regulate our movement in the world,
like the forces of gravity and electromagnetism,
for example, which we can – in some way, at least – feel or witness.
In other words, if we can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, it’s just not there.
Right?
Wrong.
Scientists insist dark matter exists.
In fact, the evidence is everywhere.
It’s overwhelming.
They surmised in one study
that it accounts for a staggering 88% of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Billions of dark matter particles
are passing through each of you at this very second.
What they don’t know is what it is made of,
but they do know that it is invisible, mysterious, and it’s out there.
And therein lies its fascination.
What’s even stranger and more perplexing is
that people’s attitudes toward dark matter is bedeviled
by the same exact instincts that influence their responses
to different classes, castes, cultures,
races, and yes, even genders
who they might not truly see
but who are, nonetheless, essential to society.
We even have a name for this: gender fatigue.
In fact, dark matter can be compared
to the underappreciated and undervalued rank and file.
Even when invisible to the male decision-makers
in a predominately patriarchal society,
the many billions of women over the course of history
– who built the pyramids, fought in wars, including the Civil War,
contributed to the Manhattan Project,
designed and built computers, missiles, and discovered nuclear fission –
were all crucial to the development of their civilizations.
But, like dark matter,
their presence and contributions are largely omitted from history.
Like her.
This is a slide of Mary Sherman Morgan, also known as “Rocket Girl.”
One out of 900 men,
Mary created the secret formula
for the fuel that powered Wernher Von Braun’s rocket
in the race for space.
Or her, Jerrie Cobb,
the number-one world-record-breaking pilot-trained astronaut
who was denied her ride into space.
It was 20 years before Sally could take her ride.
Or like Lise Meitner,
mother of the atomic bomb and discoverer of fission,
all but forgotten for her gift to humankind.
Or her, Rosalind Franklin,
credited for the discovery of the DNA helical structure,
but never awarded the Nobel prize.
Or Vera Rubin herself,
who’s reluctantly credited but unconfirmed for her theory of dark matter.
That Rubin has yet to receive a Nobel prize
is a testament to the systemic flaws
in how these accolades are awarded.
Or them – here’s all female employees en masse,
legitimately entering the workforce in the 50s
for the first time in the country’s history.
And here is Boudicca Queen of the Celtic Iceni.
She defeated the Romans,
she wiped out their capital in England, and yet, another damsel of dark matter,
who for very similar reasons, as these former women,
will go down in history for daring to become visible
and be a force to be reckoned with by changing history for all time.
But this is, according to one female voice,
not the death of sexism but a new birth of a nation
in which women’s inferiority and invisibility isn’t a given.
The fact that for the first time in our world history
a female presidential candidate lost
does not make women wrong and won’t make us disappear,
even if they don’t believe in us.
As we gather here today, 13 billion years and counting,
we’re still hoping to see dark matter
just as we’re hoping to see these women and others like them rise
out of the dark passages of time immortal.
The most wondrous aspect of science is how inherently unpredictable it is.
Each new discovery illuminates a new frontier of curiosity.
Each new known unravels a myriad of new unknowns.
And the measure of good science is the willingness to reach for that unknown,
even if it means recalibrating what we’re sure we already know.
It’s worth remembering that nature has often been found to favor ideas
that initially seem wildly improbable.
The great Danish quantum theorist Niels Bohr knew this.
Bohr said to Wolfgang Pauli after his presentation
of Heisenberg’s and Pauli’s “Non-linear field theory of elementary particles”
at Columbia University in 1958,
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy.
The question that divides us is
whether it is crazy enough to have a chance at being correct.”
The pairing of women and dark matter could also be viewed as a little crazy,
or a collusion so thrilling, so mind bending,
so jubilantly out of this world, it has the potential to reset
the default of civilization’s impact on this planet.
Why compare the two entities, women and dark matter, you might ask?
And I ask back at you, why not?
Look what women and dark matter have in common.
For starters, they’re both studied intensively,
yet they remain quixotic, complicated, intensively defiant, misunderstood,
enticing, overwhelming, unreadable, disagreeable, immeasurable,
and last but far from least, a force to be reckoned with.
(Applause)
And this is my favorite,
“Hell hath no fury like dark matter formed.”
(Laughter)
There’s something else rather wonderful that women and dark matter have in common;
dark matter – or missing matter, as was once called –
is the matter de facto in our universe holding our entire universe together.
Dark matter web is
the invisible scaffolding that underpins the entire visible universe.
Dark matter and women are propping up our universe;
they’re holding us all together.
Women seem to be the backbone of our nation.
They keep our families intact.
Yes, single and married moms are gaining momentum
as almost half our primary earners
for heads of households.
I am proposing a new way
of seeing and thinking for unique ideas, solutions, and out-of-the-box thinking,
and bringing us all along on the same wavelength,
from electromagnetic radiation to radio, gamma, and gravitational waves.
Like the Lord Shiva, we seem to have
multiple arms, and legs, and heads, and brains, and to do all kinds of tasks.
Plus, don’t forget our longer life span.
Women are the sine qua non needed for getting the world back on track.
The whole she/he paradigm is gone.
We’re focusing on women as being the dark matter,
the invisible, mysterious stuff we don’t understand, never did, never will
until we expand our ways of seeing, understanding, and coalescing.
Just like there have been extinctions of the dinosaurs, the passenger pigeon,
or even the most recent, the western black rhino,
so too will be a mass extinction of women
being thought of as second-class citizens.
Women are aggregating in greater numbers than ever.
They’re following their dreams and desires as never before.
They’re forming a critical mass to create an amazing transformation
unlike any this planet has ever known.
Get ready for another great impact here,
and we’re not talking about a comet.
Like that comet that transformed and upset our world forever,
so too, will women create change like you have never seen or can imagine.
Just like you have never seen dark matter,
women and dark matter are changing the world for all of us.
Just like that comet which crashed into our planet long ago,
I predict women will leave a great impact on our world
and will communicate in ways never before thought probable or possible.
Get ready.
Ursula Gwen, the winner of the Hugo, the Orion, and the Nebula awards,
calls it the mother tongue, spoken or written.
It expects an answer.
It is conversation, a word the root of which means “turning together.”
The mother tongue is language
not as mere communication, but as relation, relationship.
It connects; it goes two ways; many ways, an exchange, a network.
Its power is not in dividing but in binding,
not in distancing but in uniting.
I want all of you now to use your prefrontal cortex
– this is your most highly evolved brain matter –
and remember: size does not matter, unless you’re comet, of course.
Matter matters,
which may be the final mystery unraveled and a big relief for many.
And wipe away all those stereotypical confirmations,
all the cognitive biasing, all those preconceived negative notions
like “throw like a girl”, “think like a man”, “love like a lesbian,”
and become the most utilized brain we were all meant to be
and then come together to solve all the world’s problems.
We are going to need all the brain matter we can muster to colonize Mars,
feed and house all the people in the world – 9 billion by 2050 –
cure zika, chikungunya, malaria, AIDS, and all kinds of diseases.
We need to create a sustainable planet
and stop all these ugly wars, these senseless killings.
And yes, uncover all that dark mysterious matter
with our very precious white and grey matter.
But we won’t get there unless you turn to your partner, your significant other,
your POSSLQ, your lover, your other,
even your homunculus, if you’re a loner,
and say,
“Yes, you and all that beautiful, alabaster, white matter matter to me.”
Thank you.
(Applause)
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