How is this not a reductio ad absurdum?
Some historians assert that the original scientists departed from the concept of a loving, just, and merciful God. They felt that such a God would have to govern the universe in accordance with understandable laws -- the absence of laws being capricious and therefore tyrannical and unloving; the absence of understandability, analogously being capricious, tyrannical, and unloving.
Departing from these assumptions of consistency, predictability and understandability, scientists began investigating a universe that they believed must behave in accordance with a mechanistic model, ultimately susceptible of mathematical modeling.
The field of quantum mechanics demonstrates that at a fundamental level physical phenomena are random, and therefore arbitrary and capricious.
How is this also not a reductio ad absurdum?
When I was a physics student, my physics professor baldly stated that the Dirac delta, aka impulse function, had been proven by mathematicians not to exist; but that we were going to use it anyway, because it was useful.
Negating infinity, but using geometry and calculus based on infinity; continuing to use the scientific model after having proven it false; using mathematics while baldly rejecting it -- is physics not, at its core, a dishonest topic?
When I was a T.A. for a physics course in college, I spent many hours trying to explain to an otherwise intelligent student why, in two dimensional Newtonian mechanics, we were going to break up motion into x and y coordinates. He failed to understand this concept. I came to the conclusion, not that he had a learning disability or was stupid, but that his intuition rejected this model. Indeed, it is odd to suppose that motion can be so decomposed.
You ask why women do not enter science. In the corporate world, women have often been whistle blowers -- pointing out egregious malfeasance by male superiors. Perhaps, in science, women look intuitively at the faulty reasoning that science is laced with and reject it as nonsensical.
Also at http://tl.gd/im1u4r
Addendum 11/3/12:
I contacted my old physics professor and he denied saying that the Dirac delta had been disproved by mathematicians. He said that mathematicians have used series of probability distributions to justify it, but he did say that Dirac himself used the function without adequate proof of its existence.
