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As I was attempting to retrieve them from under the table there was a scuffle and the bowl of sweeties disappeared.At first I was a little disappointed – imagine it, mums, every single blueberry parfait gone! But I had to eat my words when I discovered that they’d only taken the sweets in order to carry out dental research. Timon explained that he had eaten all 20 sweets – five chewed back left, five chewed front right, five chewed in middle etc – in order to witness the creation of cavities first-hand.Things weren’t so positive with Nicky I have had to ask her several times to return Gran’s teeth. I thought I spotted them hanging up with Timon’s knives, but he swore he saw the eldest boy pocketing them. When I approached Nicky for the third time, she turned her back on me. It finally dawned on me – get with it, Penny! – she must be wearing them!”Poor dentition is nothing to be ashamed of,” I shouted after her reassuringly, as she rushed towards the car.

An exhausting day learning all about teeth – and, just this once, well worth a family box of Quality Street as a reward.. A recent headcount carried out by the Institute of Physics revealed that only 3 per cent of tenured physics academic positions in the UK are held by women. It’s a forlorn statistic and one I am reminded of whenever I visit physics departments around the country and want to locate the ladies lavatory, which will inevitably be a dingy little-used facility in a remote corner of the building

A dearth of women physicists is not unique to Britain. The writer Margaret Wertheim finds much the same picture in the US, and thinks she knows why. In the course of researching her book Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars, Wertheim experienced a revelation too shocking to be ignored – that physics is, and always was, a quasi-religious culture indulged in by “priestly” male physicists.

According to Wertheim: “The age-old link between physics and religion has set up powerful psychological and cultural resonances in our society that continue to serve as a barrier to women.”
History abounds with examples of the misogyny of priests and male physicists. Even in the late 19th and early 20th century severe restrictions were placed on women attempting to enter academia. Even Marie Curie, who won not one but two Nobel prizes for her work on radioactivity, and was a distinguished professor at the Sorbonne, was never accepted into the French Academy of Sciences.This is a familiar tale. So familiar that we have heard it of all professions requiring creative insight or intellectual rigour It is in no way peculiar to female physicists. History records equally few women composers, painters or High Court judges. The condition of women and the evolution of society is well-trodden feminist terrain.But Wertheim is arguing something different for the lack of women physicists.

She believes that it is a result of a historical conspiracy between physics and religion to create an intellectual framework that has a peculiar appeal to men. Wertheim points to a line running from quasi-religious Platonism, which first sought mathematical relationships controlling but outside nature, through the medieval European monastic academic system which also excluded women, to 20th-century theoreticians who seek a Theory of Everything (TOE), again based on a transcendental mathematical structure.Modern male physicists are, the argument goes, obsessed with synthesising a unified set of fundamental relationships between the elemen- tary particles comprising all matter and the fundamental forces (electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces and gravity). This is seen to represent a divine signature to be interpreted only by the priesthood of physics. Her evidence for this is that physicists, when writing popular books, frequently allude to God, often including the word God in the title.