A Long Ago Los Alamos Colloquium
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Ah, we’re talking about women’s emotions at that time of the month again. This perennial subject always reminds me of an incident at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Harold Agnew was director. And yes, that’s Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The name wasn’t changed until 1981.
It must have been 1970 or 1971. The Lab had a colloquium for staff members most Tuesday mornings at 8:10, since the Lab was run by the University of California. All technical people with advanced degrees were staff members, no subdivisions of that title. The weekly colloquium was a direct descendent of Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project colloquia.
This colloquium was to be given by Estelle Ramey. It might have been the first in which a woman was the speaker. Ramey was a professor of endocrinology at Georgetown University. She was married to James Ramey, who was an Atomic Energy Commissioner and a friend of Agnew’s.
Ramey started out her talk with “Everything living has cycles. Carrots have cycles. Pigs have cycles. Men have cycles.” The last occasioned the intake of breath that characterizes physicists preparing to rebut. But she continued. The talk was basically a refutation of the nonsense about women’s emotions and their hormones, just like what we are seeing on social media today, fifty years later.
She also managed to work the word vagina into her talk, probably the first time it had been uttered over a microphone in the Ad Building auditorium. Agnew was sitting down front, and you could see the red overtaking his ears.
He was a good sport about it, though, as he would later be in response to some of my actions.
Photo: Photograph of the 1946 colloquium on the Super at Los Alamos. Front row left to right: Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J.M.B. Kellogg. Second row left to right: Colonel Oliver G. Haywood, unknown, Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, Phil B. Porter. Third row left to right: Edward Teller, Gregory Breit, Arthur Hemmendinger, Arthur Schelberg. Los Alamos National Laboratory – http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/welcome/history/17_org-chart.html Archived.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner