The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics Recently found an essay (&quot;The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics&quot; <a rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" href="https://stsinfrastructures.org/sites/default/files/artifacts/media/pdf/keller_anomaly_1977.pdf)" target="_blank">https://stsinfrastructures.org/sites/default/files/artifacts/media/pdf/keller_anomaly_1977.pdf)</a> by Evelyn Fox Keller on her experience in the Harvard Physics department in the late 1950s. Keller is typically seen as a sociologist or historian of science (she wrote *A Feeling for the Organism,* a biography on Barbara McClintock the discoverer of transposons), but she had science experiences of her own. Quote from essay on how foundational questions were undervalued in comparison to more calculation-oriented investigated &gt;I went to graduate school with a vision of theoretical physics as a vehicle for the deepest inquiry into nature—a vision perhaps best personified, in recent times, by Einstein. The use of mathematics to further one’s understanding of the nature of space, time, and matter represented a pinnacle of human endeavor. I went to graduate school to learn about foundations. I was taught, instead, how to do physics. In place of wisdom, I was offered skills. Furthermore, this substitution was made with moralistic fervor. It was wrong, foolhardy, indeed foolish, to squander precious time asking why. Proper humility was to bend to the grindstone and learn techniques. Contemporary physics, under the sway of operationalism, had, it seemed, dispensed with the tradition of Einstein—almost, indeed, with Einstein himself. General relativity, the most intellectually ambitious venture of the century, seemed then (wrongly) a dead subject. Philosophical considerations of any sort in the physical sciences were at an all-time low. Instead, techniques designed to calculate nth-order corrections to a theory grievously flawed at its base were the order of the day. and on calculation mistakes, deeper questions, and humility &gt;I needed to be humbled. Though I writhed over the banality of the assignments I was given, I did them, acknowledging that I needed in any case to learn the skills. I made frequent arithmetic errors—reflecting a tension that endures within me even today between the expansiveness of conception and the precision of execution, my personal variation perhaps of the more general polar tension in physics as a whole. When my papers were returned with the accuracy of the conception ignored and the arithmetic errors streaked with red—as if with a vengeance—I wondered whether I was studying physics or plumbing. Who has not experienced such a wrenching conflict between idealism and reality? Yet my fellow students seemed oddly untroubled. From the nature of their responses when I tried to press them for deeper understanding of the subject, I thought perhaps I had come from Mars. Why, they wondered, did I want to know? That they were evidently content with the operational success of the formulas mystified me. Even more mystifying was the absence of any appearance of the humility of demeanor that one would expect to accompany the acceptance of more limited goals. I didn’t fully understand then that in addition to the techniques of physics, they were also studying the techniques of arrogance. This peculiar inversion in the meaning of humility was simply part of the process of learning how to be a physicist. It was intrinsic to the professionalization, and what I might even call the masculinization, of an intellectual discipline. Entire essay is quite interesting and would likely resonate with many who have studied theoretical physics.