Margaret Wertheim (born 20 August 1958) is an Australian-born science writer, curator, and artist based in the United States. She is the author of books on the cultural history of physics, and has written about science, including for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, Aeon and Cabinet. Wertheim and her twin sister, Christine Wertheim, are co-founders of the Institute For Figuring (IFF), a Los Angeles–based non-profit organization through which they create projects at the intersection of art, science and mathematics. Their IFF projects include their Crochet Coral Reef, which has been shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Hayward Gallery (London), Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. For her work with public science engagement, Wertheim won the 2016 Klopsteg Memorial Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and Australia's Scientia Medal (2017).
Education and research Wertheim's education includes two bachelor's degrees, a Bachelor of Science in pure and applied physics from the University of Queensland and a Bachelor of Arts in pure mathematics and computing from the University of Sydney. Wertheim has been a research associate at the American Natural Museum of Natural History located in New York, and is a fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She is currently a PhD candidate and researcher at Deakin University. She was the Discovery Fellow (2012-2013) at the University of Southern California, as well as the Vice Chancellor's Fellow (2015) at the University of Melbourne.
Career
Books Wertheim is the author of a trilogy that considers the role of theoretical physics in the cultural landscape of modern Western society. The first, Pythagoras' Trousers, is a history of the relationship between physics, religion and gender relations. Reviewing the book in The Independent, Jenny Turner writes that the introduction states the book's argument elegantly and compellingly; but the text disappointed her by losing sight of what Turner thought its most interesting goal, telling how physics has been motivated by "fantasies of universal mastery". The book offered a critique of sexism in science and proposed systemic historical reasons why physics has been so un-open to women since its inception in Pythagorean principles 2500 years ago. The second, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, charts the history of scientific thinking about space from Dante to the Internet. The thesis of the book is that our conceptions of human selfhood are intimately entwined with our conceptions of space, and when our concepts of space change so do our views about the "self." In the medieval schema, there were two spaces of being: the physical space of the Earth, planets and stars, and the spiritual domain of Heaven and Hell. Here "man" was conceived as a creature of both body and soul, each aspect operating within its parallel realm. With the advent of a Newtonian cosmos and its purely physical depiction of space, "man" came to be envisioned as a solely material being. In the 1990s, the coming into being of cyberspace – to use William Gibson's term – ushered in a claim that this ethereal domain would re-open possibilities for activation of a spiritual side of our selves. Wertheim refutes this claim, and the book offered an early challenge to visions of cyber-utopia. Andrew Leonard, reviewing the book for The New York Times, calls Wertheim's thesis "ambitious and fascinating." Leonard finds her account of the evolution of physicists' concept of space impressive, but expresses the view that ultimately she loses faith in her thesis of cyberspace as a spiritual realm: even if there is, indeed, something human about a great network of relationships that "cannot be captured by an equation or a telescope". Yet as Britt Elvira Ruitenberg wrote on the website The First Supper, the purpose of the book was not to endorse cyber-spiritualism, but to challenge the very premise, this "dream of a virtual Eden that rapidly vanished away". The third, Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything, looks at the idiosyncratic world of "outsider physicists" such as Jim Carter, people with little or no scientific training who develop their own alternative theories of the universe. Freeman Dyson, reviewing the book in The New York Review of Books, notes that it describes research by amateurs, who "offer an alternative set of visions ... concrete rather than abstract, physical rather than mathematical." The leading character is Jim Carter, a man with an "unshakable belief" in a theory of the whole universe constructed of "endless hierarchies of circlons", circular mechanical objects that reproduce and split like smoke rings. Unknown to Carter, his basic idea that atoms could be explained as subatomic smoke rings had already been proposed in the 1870s by the renowned English physicist William Thomson (later Baron Kelvin), and the Scottish mathematician P.G. Tait. Tait and Thomson's theory of vortex atoms has been called by the historian Helge Kragh "a Victorian theory of everything", and is now regarded as a kind of precursor to string theory.
Journalism As a journalist, Wertheim has written for newspapers in various countries including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and Die Zeit. She has written science articles for magazines including New Scientist, The Sciences, Cabinet, Aeon, The Australian Review of Books, and Australian Geographic. Her work has been included in The Best American Science Writing 2003, edited by Oliver Sacks; and Best Australian Science Writing (2015, 2016, 2018 by Newsouth Press); and Best Writing on Mathematics 2018 (Princeton University Press).
Television Wertheim has scripted 10 television documentaries, as well as created and co-directed the award-winning series Catalyst, a six-part science and technology series for a teenage audience. She has produced several short films, and she wrote and directed the interactive Canadian public health program What About AIDS (1988), an early use of laser-disc technology. Wertheim lectures around the globe promoting science within a social justice context.
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