The Washington University physics department recognized the need for action and convened an emergency faculty meeting regarding the publications. The department formed a Workplace Climate and Diversity Committee to spearhead department-wide efforts at reform, not only to properly react to past allegations but to proactively improve departmental climate for the future.

Students lined the halls of Crow Hall, home of the physics department at Washington University, in a sit-in to spread awareness of the lack of gender diversity among physics faculty.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent two years taking undergraduate upper division classes, several more years studying for my Ph.D. and then almost three years as a post doc researcher in the Washington University physics department. It was a good place to be a woman.

In the 13 years that Mark Alford has been the chair of Washington University’s physics department, few women have held a tenured or tenure-track professorship. Currently, that number is zero.

What fills Christopher Nolan’s mind when he looks up at the stars? We know Kubrick ponders the nature of existence; Ridley Scott has nightmares of spacecraft turned to death traps; Michael Bay dreams of robots.

A few weeks ago on campus, it was common to hear that “CERN broke physics.” Over many thousands of attempts and three years of study, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) had routinely noticed that neutrinos fired from CERN had arrived at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) detector in northern Italy several nanoseconds faster than the speed of light.