Ada Lovelace Day: A belated post on Emilie du Châtelet, badass physicist

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.

Ada Lovelace Day was yesterday, celebrating women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics^*. I was sick, and so didn't get this out in time. Better late than never.

I first learned about Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet from David Bodanis's book E=mc², and she became one of my favourite historical figure ever. Massively intelligent, funny, polyglot, beautiful, fencer, passionate, voraciously curious, all-round badass scientist. Oh, and did I mention she did this during the so-called age of "Enlightenment," which wasn't exactly enlightened as regards to women? To illustrate: her most important lover Voltaire, with whom she established a research centre at Cirey, had to explain her thus: She was "a great man whose only fault was being a woman." Kind of on a par with binders full of women.

She might have discovered the Law of Conservation of Mass well before Lavoisier if she'd had better equipment. She wrote what is still the definitive French translation and commentary of Newton's Principia. And the story I love to share with my grade 11 physics students is how she determined how to calculate what we now know as kinetic energy.

You can read the details on the Nova site (you'll have to scroll down to the bottom to the section on ², although the rest is obviously worth reading as well). To sum up: Newton and Leibniz are at it again, this time with competing theories over what energy is. Newton's in the lead because, well, he's Newton. Du Châtelet works to understand Leibniz's mathematical arguments, and then looks around for experimental data to back up either theory. She finds experiments by a Dutch physicist, 'sGravesande, who has been dropping balls into clay with somewhat unexpected results. He doesn't know what they meant, but du Châtelet does. They confirm Leibniz's theory. Booyah.

I have been somewhat vague, but you can watch a re-enactment of her story, starting with the experiment, here, as part of Nova's adaptation of the book, and it will say pretty much what I would have said, only without the plagiarism. (You'll have to click on the previous part to see the first part of her story.)


(Incidentally, Newton's idea of energy is what we now call momentum, which is also a reasonably important concept, so at least he has that, poor thing.)

Sadly, du Châtelet died far too early. She became pregnant in her early forties, thanks to an affair with a poet, and died shortly after giving birth. She was working right up to the end.

I am convinced that many women are either unaware of their talents by reason of the fault in their education or that they bury them on account of prejudice for want of intellectual courage. My own experience confirms this. Chance made me acquainted with men of letters who extended the hand of friendship to me. ... I then began to believe that I was a being with a mind ...

Santée, Emilie!

^*aka STEM, and don't get me started on how Canada, or more specifically Ontario, doesn't really have any STEM education initiatives right now despite paying lip service to how important they are. Fairly makes my blood boil.