How 2022's Nobel Prize Winners In Physics Proved Einstein Wrong

Richard Milner - TODAY

Every now and then, news hits that "such and such has gotten a Nobel Prize. Hurray!" So Nobel Prizes are good, right? Big, prestigious something-or-other awards that confer some vague honor upon the recipient, and then: done. Folks return to their keyboards, lattes, gas bills, what-have-you, and nothing seems to change. What's the big deal, anyway?


Mathematical universe image© Lia Koltyrina/Shutterstock

To answer that question, let's look at past recipients on the Nobel Prize website. Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 "for his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population." Sir Alexander Fleming won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases." In the realms of art, science, and humanitarian work, Nobel Prizes are awarded to people "who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind," as award creator Alfred Nobel said in his will in 1895. He gave away his fortune to subsequent generations, to reward those who advance and enrich the world within the domains of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, and peace.

This year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was split between Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger. Even if you've never heard of them, their work proved Einstein wrong, shattered our understanding of reality itself, and led directly to the quantum computing revolution. To understand how and why, we've got to do a big-brain dive into history, science, and the very nature of space and time.

The Mesh Of Spacetime


Moon spinning around Earth© canbedone/Shutterstock

So what's the official reason for granting Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger 2022's Nobel Prize in Physics? "For experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science," as the Nobel Prize website says. To understand what that means, we've got to go back that most oft-cited, frizzy-haired genius of math and science: Albert Einstein.

Einstein's 1905 Theory of Special Relativity (the E = mc2 one) said that anything with mass -- you, a leaf, Mars -- can never move faster than the speed of light. Space and time are one bounded mesh, spacetime; moving faster through space means moving slower through time. It so happens that on Earth, folks are close enough together, and slow-moving enough, to experience time the same. Einstein's 1915 Theory of General Relativity said that gravity is like a dent in spacetime. An object like Earth makes a dent big enough to make the moon spin around it, like a ball around a drain. The sun is so massive that all of our solar system's planets spin around it, and so on (both per Live Science).

In the end, Einstein believed that space exists "locally," meaning that objects affect each other by being in direct contact with each other, per Space. To creatures like us, that should make sense. Why would a book fall over if nothing pushed it? But when objects get really, really small the rules change, and things get weird.

Spooky Action At A Distance


Entangled quantum particles across apce© YouTube/Dr. Ben Miles

So how in the heck could a particle a galaxy away affect what happens in my coffee mug? That's impossible, surely. Nothing travels faster than light, Einstein said -- things far away are in my past and will take some time to get here. For big objects, this is totally true and Einstein was right. But for objects smaller than an atom -- quarks, neutrinos, bosons, electrons -- it's false. At sub-atomic size, quantum mechanics -- the physics of the really small -- has proven that space is not "local," as The Conversation explains. Particles can affect other particles light years away, instantly. How? We'll get to that later.

Related video: Good News | Meet the Nobel Prize winners: This is how they have changed our lives

Einstein thought that such "spooky action at a distance" was an absurd idea. Other physicists, like Richard Feynman, thought differently. During the 1930s at the onset of an investigation into quantum mechanics, Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen published a paper debunking non-local, quantum physics (readable on the Physics Review Journal Archive). On the other side, Richard Feynman joined up with Julian Schwinger and Shinitiro Tomonaga to say that quantum physics was real. The latter three, much like the current 2022 winners, were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.

Feynman, like Einstein, worked in the realm of mathematics. It took until the 1960s for another physicist, John Bell, to develop the math into something testable. It took until the 1970s for 2022 Nobel Prize winner John Clauser to actually test it.

The Entanglement Of Bell's Theorem


Quantum particle diagram© RAGMA IMAGES/Shutterstock

To be clear, Einstein didn't doubt any researcher's results, he doubted the reasons for the results. If quantum mechanics is real and two particles can interact at any distance, instantly, he figured there must be some "hidden variables" at work -- something we don't know about. Physicist John Bell, however, demonstrated that there are no hidden variables -- none -- that can account for quantum mechanics, as Brilliant outlines. This work, known as Bell's Theorem or Bell's Inequality, focused on sussing out patterns in particle behavior that could be tested later, as Dr. Ben Miles explains on YouTube.

As far back as 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger had tried to explain quantum mechanics through his now-famous Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment. In a nutshell: if a cat is in a box, is it alive or dead? Well, so long as I don't check, there's a 50/50 chance either way (barring any horrible smells).

Similarly, imagine that we want to measure a light particle (a photon), which can oscillate either vertically or horizontally like a sound wave: either, a) It's oscillating one way from the moment its created, and we don't know until we measure it (this is what Einstein thought), or, b) It obtains a characteristic the moment it's checked; before then, it's in an either/or "superposition." Believe it or not, the latter is true. But for every particle measured, a twin with the opposite measurement exists somewhere in the universe. That's quantum entanglement.

A Provably Weird Universe


Picture of space© Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

But really, you might think, how could something not have a characteristic until it's measured? Judging by everyday life, such a notion is absurd. If I drop a coin behind the couch, of course, it lands face up or face down regardless of whether or not I see it. If I check and it's face up, then that's the way the coin's been since I dropped it. And yet, as we keep learning: this is simply not the case at sizes smaller than an atom. Why? No one still has any clue, don't worry. But thanks to the work of 2022's Nobel Prize winners, we know it's true. Those winners -- Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger -- are the ones who finally developed ways to test and measure quantum entanglement in real life, beyond the theoretical realm of paper and mathematics.

All three gentlemen built on the work of the previous ones, starting with Clauser and ending with Zellinger, as Nature explains. The details of their tests, described on the excellent YouTube channel PBS Spacetime, are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that each researcher closed loopholes in testing methods that might have allowed for the presence of Einstein's hidden variables. Clauser did his work in the 1970s, Aspect in the '80s, and Zellinger in 1997. As Zellinger humbly said, "This prize would not be possible without the work of more than 100 young people over the years."

The Quantum Computer Leap


IBM Q System One quantum computer© Boykov/Shutterstock

Alright, so quantum weirdness is true. So what? you might ask. Back when John Bell wrote his hidden variable-disproving theorems in the 1960s there was no practical use for investigating the truth of quantum entanglement. David Kaiser, physicist at MIT and colleague of the Nobel Prize-winning Clauser, said of quantum physics in the '60s, "People would say, in writing, that this isn't real physics -- that the topic isn't worthy," per Nature. And now? We've got quantum computers based on such supposedly once-useless theory.

And what in the world is a quantum computer? Why, it's a computer that isn't there until you log in, we glibly joke. But truthfully, explaining quantum computers would require thousands of more words. The short version is, as Quanta Magazine outlines: they're computers with greatly expanded processing power because of the same quantum mechanics that influences sub-atomic particles like electrons. Regular computers make computations based on values of 1s and 0s -- binary values. In a quantum computer, quantum superpositions -- the possibility for either a 1 or 0 until measured -- allow for differently complicated calculations. This is useful because microchips are reaching the limit of their smallness. The smallest are 10 nanometers, smaller than a single virus, per semiconductor company ASML.

In the end, such work is possible not only because of the current Nobel Prize winners, but because of nearly 100 years of collective research. And in a very real way, we also have Einstein's skepticism to thanks.

Read this next: Everything We Know About The History Of The Universe

A 4,000-Year-Old Writing System That Finally Makes Sense To Scholars

Carlo Massimo -


You could be forgiven for never having heard of the civilization of Elam. Elam flourished in southern Iran, in the modern state of Khuzestan, about four or five thousand years ago. The Elamites had close cultural ties to the Mesopotamian civilizations to the west, like the Babylonians; they built ziggurats, for instance (via Britannica). They had a number of unique customs, though, including royal succession, and possibly property rights being passed down matrilinearly, from mothers to sons (instead of fathers to sons), which suggests that Elamite women enjoyed a degree of importance. The Elamites were eventually swallowed up by other cultures, and their capital, Susa, would become the home of the kings of Persia.


cuneiform© Viacheslav Lopatin/Shutterstock

But what vexed archaeologists and philologists for centuries was the Elamite language. They simply couldn't read it. According to Smithsonian, the earliest Elamite script looked like Mesopotamian cuneiform (like the one shown above), but no one could quite decode it.

Linear Elamite


elamite script cuneiform© alexreynolds/Shutterstock

Smithsonian notes that only 43 examples of this early script, called Linear Elamite, have ever been discovered. It had fallen out of use by about 1800 B.C., replaced by western forms of cuneiform and then by Greek. It wasn't clear whether the words expressed or depicted by Linear Elamite were words of the same language as the later, readable texts. Perhaps it was a different language altogether.


In 2015 came a breakthrough. A certain François Desset, professor of archaeology at the University of Teheran, was curious about the inscriptions on a collection of silver beakers once thought to be a hoax to fleece collectors, but recently confirmed as genuine. On many of them he found two parallel inscriptions: one in the familiar Elamite language, and another in Linear Elamite. He had found the key to the puzzle. The Linear characters were pictograms, rather than alphabetical letters, which made them hard to translate, but Desset guessed from the context that some of them stood for names. Slowly the language revealed its secrets. Desset would translate 72 Linear characters, leaving only a handful still unclear.

Like The Rosetta Stone


rosetta stone© WH_Pics/Shutterstock

Desset's work bears a remarkable resemblance to the translation of the Rosetta Stone. The first archaeologists could not decipher Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, with their suns and birds and abstract shapes instead of letters. But when Napoleon invaded Egypt, his men found a tablet inscribed with three languages (shown above) in the Nile mud near the town of Rosetta.


According to the British Museum, this was one of many "mass-produced" tablets from the year 196 B.C., a kind of public bulletin. It repeated the same message in three kinds of script: hieroglyphics, "demotic" Egyptian, and Greek. A Frenchman named Champollion realized that the names of non-Egyptian people were recognizable in the jumble of hieroglyphics. Slowly, he began to pair Greek words and phrases with ancient Egyptian ones, eventually unravelling the code. It is remarkable that another Frenchman, 200 years later, should use exactly the same method to decode Linear Elamite: recognizing names in the band of script, and deducing the rest from there.

THEY DON'T DO FILTERS
The Republican National Committee is suing Google over Gmail's spam filters

The RNC has accused the company of political bias.


I. Bonifacic
@igorbonifacic
October 22, 2022 1:37 PM

SOPA Images via Getty Images


The Republican National Committee is suing Google. According to Axios (via The Verge), the organization filed a lawsuit with California’s Eastern District Court on Friday. The complaint accuses Google of sending “millions” of RNC campaign emails to Gmail spam folders in an extension of the company’s “discriminatory” filtering practices.

“At approximately the same time at the end of each month, Google sends to spam nearly all of the RNC’s emails,” the complaint claims. “Critically, and suspiciously, this end of the month period is historically when the RNC’s fundraising is most successful.”

The lawsuit comes after Google launched a controversial program to appease GOP lawmakers concerned about its filtering practices. In June, after a study found that Gmail was more likely than competing email clients to filter emails from Republican campaigns, the company said it would work with the Federal Election Commission to pilot a system designed to prevent political messages from ending up in spam folders. The concession came after Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that sought to ban email platforms from using algorithms to route campaign messages automatically.

According to a recent report from The Verge, the Republican National Committee is not taking advantage of the program Google built to address the party’s concerns. The organization’s complaint doesn’t explicitly mention the pilot. Instead, it points to a training session the RNC attended on August 11th, the same day the FEC approved Google’s program.

“This discrimination has been ongoing for about ten months — despite the RNC’s best efforts to work with Google,” the organization claims. Google did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment. “As we have repeatedly said, we simply don't filter emails based on political affiliation," the company told Axios, adding that Gmail’s spam filters reflect user actions.

Expert: Pupils and teachers must be taught about pornography to combat sexism and misogyny

HUMAN SEXUALITY AND JEALOUSY NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED IN COURSES; THE SENSE OF OWNERSHIP IN RELATIONSHIPS IS TOXIC

By Stephen Stewart

October 23, 2022

Professor Megan Maas

Schoolchildren and their teachers in Scotland must be taught about pornography to combat sexism and misogyny, according to a leading expert.

Professor Megan Maas believes lessons to curb the influence of adult material on young minds would help cut an epidemic of sexual harassment in schools.

She spoke after we reported girls attending more than 360 Scots schools have detailed incidents of sexual harassment and violence on a campaigning website in the last year.

Everyone’s Invited, a platform campaigning against “rape culture” that encourages survivors of sexual assault and harassment to post anonymous testimonies, received accounts of sexual harassment from youngsters in 466 primary and secondary schools, up 361 from 105 in 2021.

Adolescent sexuality expert Maas, of Michigan State University, has urged policy-makers in Scotland to consider adopting her classroom programmes, which show how popular culture and pornography shape behaviour towards sexual misconduct in schools.

She said: “The goal is for participants to become critical consumers of pornography instead of passive viewers.

“When it comes to staff, the goal is to increase awareness of the changes in pornography so educators can better understand students’ lives.

“Given that pornography is a default sex educator in the absence of sex education, many young people are getting the wrong idea about what sexual experiences should be like.”

Respect - read more:

• 

  One in five teenage girls has been sexually assaulted: Survey lays bare crisis of consent in Scotland’s schools

  December 12, 2021

• 

  Experts’ action call: Improve the way we teach pupils about relationships and tighten control over internet porn

  December 12, 2021

• 

  Sexual harassment in schools: ‘We knew it was going on but it is devastating to know how many girls are suffering’

  December 12, 2021

A survey commissioned by The Sunday Post in December as part of our Respect campaign discovered one in five teenage girls had been sexually assaulted and three out of five endured some form of harassment. The abuse suffered by girls and young women prompted calls for urgent action to transform how children are taught about relationships and sex and to curb access to online pornography.

Almost 70% of the girls and young women interviewed did not believe the scale of the crisis is understood while nearly 80% said more must be done to curb harassment.

As pornography becomes more prevalent and the issue of sexual harassment in schools attracts more attention, pornography education provides a tool to prevent sexual violence, according to Maas. Her PopPorn programme has four modules for pupils covering pop culture and the history of pornography, gender differences in how teens learn about sex and relationships and research on porn use.

She said: “We’d be happy to do training with school staff in Scotland. I think the programme would translate well to Scottish culture. Although this study publishes our findings with school staff, we also do these trainings with teens themselves and with parents.”

Sandy Brindley, chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, agreed that sexual harassment continues to be a major problem for pupils across Scotland.

She said: “A study conducted by Glasgow University in schools involved in our Equally Safe At School programme pilot found two thirds of students in those schools had experienced some form of sexual harassment in the previous six months.

“Sexual harassment has a very negative effect, with pupils reporting feeling ashamed, embarrassed and afraid.

“In some cases, experiences of sexual harassment can have very harmful impacts on young people’s mental health.

“Despite these harmful effects, we also know that young people are not always confident in naming sexual harassment, particularly when it involves behaviours which have become normalised or trivialised.

“They don’t always feel able to challenge these behaviours or talk to school staff about them – and school staff themselves can also struggle to identify these behaviours and to challenge them appropriately.

“We continue to work extensively with schools to tackle these issues. Our Equally Safe At School programme now works with around 200 secondary schools to deliver evidence-based workshops to young people on identifying and preventing sexual harassment, and accessing support. We also provide tools and resources, including training and policies, to support staff teams in achieving this cultural change.

“Many schools are already working hard to address these issues, but it is vital that all schools engage with the problem of sexual harassment to ensure that young people feel fully safe at school and in their everyday lives.”

The Scottish Government said: “There is absolutely no place for harassment or abuse in schools or anywhere else. We continue to take forward actions in schools to address gender-based violence and sexual harassment and we are developing a national framework for schools to help tackle these issues.

“As part of relationships, sexual health and parenthood education, secondary school pupils learn about the damaging and exploitative aspects of pornography and how it can negatively affect mental health and healthy relationships.”

Reading ‘Iranian Love Stories’ as a New Wave of Young Women Fights Back in Iran

By Alyssa ShotwellOct 21st, 2022

On the final The Mary Sue Book Club entry of 2021, I recommended a translated graphic novel by a French duo that goes by the pseudonyms Jane Deusart and the artist known professionally as Deloupy, entitled Iranian Love Stories. (The name “Jane Deusart” is a shared pseudonym between the two journalists and kept a secret to protect the people they spoke to.) This series of interviews in graphic novel form features vignettes of people aged 20 to 30 speaking on love, freedom, and politics (both intimately and more broadly) in Iran

Despite it appearing like this has nothing to do with the ongoing protest following the death of Mahsa Amini (22), there’s a lot in common, and this book lays the background as to why Gen Z is leading the current fight.)

The journalists didn’t just speak to young people because they have less to lose and everything to gain from their stories being told. These Iranians speaking to the journalists (whose voices are mostly limited to a transition spread between chapters) were teenagers during the Green Movement in 2009. The crackdown and deaths color how they navigate contemporary Iran and their limited pushback against authority, even within their own family (who they put at risk by demonstrating in public or even interviewing for this book.)

More than about love

A significant portion of the book discusses actual love and relationships. Most of the romantic relationships (like the first section about Mila) involve secrecy, as getting found out before marriage can result in terrible consequences, especially for women. However, others include familial concerns. One man has dreamed of leaving and working abroad, but even if he could get out, he fears the state and morality police punishing his mother for his actions.

There’s also a story of a couple not quite being in sync because they didn’t get to know each other fully before moving in—thanks to strict laws in Iran. Even in their own homes, there is a division between politics and freedom.

(Graphic Mundi)

Despite the title and focus of the novel, many of the Iranians interviewed don’t want love alone or, really, at all. They want choice, freedom, and hope. This is not dissimilar to the Green Movement or even the ongoing protest in Iran right now, in which the freedom for women to express themselves is the rallying cry, but is really the tipping point. Several of them, like 20-year-old Saviosh, have done everything “right” as far as going to college, etc., but cannot find work, and the U.S. sanctions at the time squeeze the economy.

Speaking of the economy, not everyone spoken to was wholly upset with the status quo. Because of extreme circumstances, one woman was allowed to leave the country regularly and made bank smuggling over goods. Another pair of women, Kimia and Zeinab, gawked at the idea of working and called American women’s wants misguided, as they felt a semblance of freedom in not wholly participating in public life. With all three of these women, despite general contentment, they did wish for more, but not enough to disrupt their chance of survival. Everyone finds small and large ways of rebelling.

The Green Movement

I’ve talked a lot about The Green Revolution without actually saying what it is. It began as a protest following the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It’s widely considered the first social media resistance as it was largely organized online. The Arab Spring (proper) wouldn’t begin until 2011 or later, across the Arab region. Please note that most Iranians are Persian and speak Farsi (not Arabic), but are considered a part of the Arab or SWANA (South West Asia & North Africa) region.

Anyways, not to downplay the action in 2018, outside of the revolution that led Iran to become a semi-independent state, the most impactful protest in recent history is the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Green Movement. Hundreds of people died in the 2009 protests, people disappeared, and cameras went up everywhere. In Iranian Love Stories, Vahid (26) meets the journalists at the largest cemetery in Iran and tells them, after the events of 2009 and the crackdowns after, he has nothing to lose.

(Graphic Mundi)

As stated earlier, it’s not just love that guides these people or a single candidate running on reform that influences these young Iranians. They face jail time, public harassment, torture, and execution (regardless of age) for disobeying laws or being suspected of being under “Western” influence. The year before the election, 130 children were sentenced to death or were already awaiting execution. Iran’s government is set up as a theocratic democracy, so people can vote (including women), but a top religious leader can veto laws passed. Also, extremists have their own party in the Iranian government

Amplifying the voices of the current moment

Spurred by the death of Amini, this current moment is both very similar to The Green Movement and yet very different—even more so if justice is brought to the Iranians. Similarly, it is starting with a single grievance but is symbolic of larger issues. Also, like before, this is a protest growing through social media, especially TikTok, and the most vocal are teenagers and preteens.

However, unlike the initial spread mostly staying within Iran, these are spreading across the world. Anyone half paying attention is seeing the siege of college campuses by the morality police and the community gathering as women cut their hair and burn their compulsory hijabs. Also, still early into the protest, people are not demoralized and pessimistic about the idea of change like most of the people spoken to in the novel. Many current protesters and activists are asking for international attention.

Amini’s death so young and as a part of an ethnic minority group (her family is Kurdish) has created solidarity among them. This is under-discussed and reported on in the U.S. because of the way we tend to flatten people we deem so different from us, but this is still important.

Correction 10/24/2022: Initially, I wrote both Jane Deusart and Deloupy were pseudonyms. While Deusart is a secret name for the two journalists, Deloupy is the illustrator’s last name and the one he goes by professionally. This book featured two writers (journalists), and one artist.

(featured image: Graphic Mundi)

 #WomanLifeFreedom: How Digital Technologies Enable Transnational Solidarity for Iran’s Feminist Uprising

byAtoosa Kasirzadeh

October 21, 2022

 

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Image by Roshi Rouzbehani (http://www.roshirouzbehani.com/)

#WomanLifeFreedom: How Digital Technologies Enable Transnational Solidarity for Iran’s Feminist Uprising

An unprecedented feminist uprising in Iran has been ongoing since September 16th, 2022. This movement was born from accumulated fury and rage against unjust conditions of oppression for Iranian women. So far, new possibilities for fostering transnational solidarity through digital technologies have significantly helped the progression and continuation of this uprising.

The uprising started after a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, was arrested by the so-called “morality police.” According to the morality police, she was arrested because—even though she was wearing her hijab—she did not have on “appropriate attire.” Mahsa Jina Amini died in police custody on September 16th, 2022. Since the revolution of 1979, women and minority groups in Iran have suffered from misogyny and unjust legal conditions. The accumulated anger of over 40 years of repression erupted in the uprising that followed Amini’s death. Women began taking off their mandatory headscarves, waving them in the air, and burning them. They cut their hair as a symbol of rage and fury rooted in Persian poetry. The slogan “zan, zendegi, azadi” (in Persian) or “woman, life, freedom” has become the socio-political slogan of this uprising.

Social media and some mainstream news outlets provide a glimpse of the uprising to the rest of the world. It is a glimpse only, however, because the Iranian government does not want the public to know that this uprising is happening. The government has disrupted the internet and blocked access to popular digital platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, and Signal. Professional journalists in Iran, like Niloofar Hamedi, whose news reporting sparked the protests, have been detained or imprisoned. The combination of digital technologies such as virtual private networks for bypassing internet censorship and social media platforms such as Instagram or instant messaging services such as Signal has allowed ordinary people in Iran to become reporters on the ground by sharing live images and footage of their reality, resistance, and solidarity while risking arrest and death.

The demands of the protesters now go beyond the abolition of the mandatory hijab. The feminist uprising, which now encompasses inclusive voices across generations and is supported by multiple internationally renowned Iranian filmmakers and athletes, wants more: the end of injustice and oppression, and the end of the status quo! Challenging the status quo does not come cheap. Hundreds of people, including children, have already been detained, imprisoned, or killed across Iran—from Kurdistan to Sistan-Baluchistan—during the crackdown on protestors just because they publicly shared their hope and demanded to live with freedom, self-determination, and justice.

The mandatory hijab is perhaps the most visible symbol of the unjust conditions of being a woman in Iran. It is one of the government’s tools to oppress women. But it is not the only form of oppression Iranian women face. The collective consciousness of Iran still struggles with the devastating repercussions of the Iranian revolution, when people of all walks of life—including ethnic minority groups, clergy, landowners, and religious and non-religious intellectuals—revolted against the Pahlavi dynasty, the constitutional monarchy governing Iran from 1925 to 1979. Three reasons underpinned the 1979 revolution: (i) lack of political freedom under a one-political party state; (ii) rapid Westernization programs that disappointed those respecting the traditional values of Iran; and (iii) deeply unequal distribution of economic and social resources across different socio-economic classes. Diverse voices unified by these reasons cried out for equality, freedom, and justice.

The result of the 1979 revolution was a new form of governance—the “Islamic Republic of Iran.” Ayatollah Rohollah Khomeini, for many the leader of the 1979 revolution, assumed power in the form of a supreme leader. The question of what it could mean to govern according to both Islamic and Republican ideals had not yet been answered, and responses are sketchy, vague, and ambiguous even today. As it stands, the consequences of the 1979 revolution have been devastating for women; for example, the supreme leaders have made a woman’s testimony in Iranian court worth only half as much as a man’s, and a married woman cannot leave the country without her husband’s permission.

Iranian women—and some men—have since 1979 resisted the unjust conditions of their existence in multiple ways, both within and beyond the borders of Iran. The current uprising builds upon decades of activism and a long history of resistance. Women’s demands for justice and freedom have been loudly proclaimed in the works of Iranian artists such as Marjaneh Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, the unprecedented legal efforts of Shirin Ebadi and Nasrin Sotoudeh for human and women’s rights, and the activism of Sepideh Gholian, to name just a few of many examples.

What women are and are not supposed to wear has been an integral part of Iranian politics for nearly a century. A bitter pill to swallow for the generation that grew up in post-revolution Iran is that at the time of the 1979 revolution, women could freely choose what they wore. This is perhaps hard to believe in light of the current uprising, but the concept of mandatory hijab in contemporary Iran became a socio-legal construct only after the 1979 revolution. Indeed, in the early 20th century, women were told that they could not wear Islamic veils. The founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah, issued an official decree (known as kashfe hijab) in 1936 that banned all Islamic veils (including the headscarf and chador) and some traditional forms of male clothing. At that time, many Iranian women from the educated elite participated in movements which resulted in this ban. However, by the time of the Islamic revolution, women no longer lived under a mandatory dress code of any kind. Our moms, our aunts, and our grandmothers could choose what to wear.

After the Islamic revolution, women held a protest against mandatory hijab on March 8, 1979. Even the clergy who assumed political power could not agree on whether hijab should be mandatory or not. But eventually, the voices against mandatory hijab were silenced. In June 1981, two years after the revolution, a compulsory hijab policy in the public sector was enacted, forcing all women working in the public sector to choose between putting on hijab or losing their jobs. My mother, like many other women of her generation, lived through the transition from the Pahlavi monarchy to wearing the mandatory hijab just to be able to continue working in the public sector. The enforcement of this policy continued in universities, schools, and the private sector. In 1983 in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, the first codified law of mandatory hijab was established under Iran’s Islamic penal code.

Digital technology has enabled powerful new forms of collective solidarity to connect Iranians and non-Iranians beyond borders in this current feminist uprising. While we must strive for meaningful solidarity rather than mere empty words or gestures, effective transnational collective solidarity, fostered by the support of awareness-raising celebrities as well as cultural and political campaigns on social media, has resulted in global recognition as large-scale protests in support of the uprising have happened and continue to happen around the world. Such inclusive and transnational solidarity reinforces the idea that justice without freedom for women and minority groups is impossible on the national or global stages and the fight for the preservation of basic human rights is a shared transnational goal.

Digital technologies have helped to make visible to both Iranians and the rest of the world what their political leaders want to keep hidden. Fueled by acts of political solidarity, digital technologies have also helped the world to see Iranian society beyond a myopic focus on nuclear research programs. As a philosopher and ethicist of digital technologies, I am wary of the risks and challenges of digital technologies. But I cannot stop being grateful to the unprecedented role of technology-powered solidarities by hacktivist groups such as Anonymous, who have launched DDoS attacks against government websites and disrupted state TV News with anti-government messages. The impact of technologies such as Tor browser, Snowflake proxy server, and VPNs to thwart internet censorship is beyond words. Freedom is transparency and digital rights activists are furthering this ideal more than any other actor so far. Despite the serious ethical and social concerns that social media platforms and the dark web raise, they have filled a deep lacuna of action for basic human rights in the fragmented socio-political global world. Zeynep Tufekci explains how social media has changed social movements. As social media continues to shape social uprisings, we should explore how digital technologies can introduce new forms of solidarity and what kinds of digital-technology-enabled solidarity are worth pursuing. Digital platforms provide a powerful means for the silenced and marginalized. It is time for big tech and democratic governments to facilitate systematic efforts for free and safe internet access to Iranians inside Iran who are charting the path for a free and just future.

Part of what sustains this feminist uprising is the hope fueled by transnational collective solidarity. Born as a woman in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, my family raised me on principles of hope. My father was fired from his job as an economics lecturer at Sharif University of Technology during the cultural revolution. Despite multiple opportunities to emigrate, he decided to stay in Iran and work outside of academia because of his hope for building a better future. Hope fuels the ongoing uprising. And the transnational solidarity facilitated by digital technologies might fuel new theories of hope.

Cover image by Roshi Rouzbehani

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.

Atoosa Kasirzadeh

Atoosa Kasirzadeh is a tenure-track assistant professor in the philosophy department and the Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science and technology from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal. She works on philosophy and ethics of emerging technologies (in particular artificial intelligence), philosophy of science, and increasingly their intersection with political philosophy and philosophy of language.