Harvard did not give tenure to a female physicist until 1992, and Princeton had still not done so by the end of last year. In all sciences taken together, there have been 400 male nobel laureates and only 9 women, but in physics there has been no female nobel laureate since Marie Curie back in 1903. The argument that all this has something to do with an innate lack of mathematical aptitude falls down over the evidence that women again 19 per cent of all maths PhDs, but only 11 per cent of those in physics.

Pythagoras’ Trousers draws some of its energy from these statistics and from the fascinating but harrowing fates of such few women as have made their lives in physics over the centuries. To take just two examples, Maria Winkelmann, the outstanding 17th-century German astronomer, had her discovery of a new comet credited to her husband despite his disavowals. And after his death, she was rejected for a minor post at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, even though she had been doing the work in question for more than ten years. Finally her son was given her husband’s old post as astronomer and she was banned from the laboratory.

Or there’s the 19th-century English physicist Mary Somerville, who translated and annoted Pierre Laplace’s monumental work on celestial mechanics from the French. Though her book became the standard text for advanced students at Cambridge for the next 100 years, she herself could neither teach nor study there. The Royal Society, who commissioned a bust of her for their Great Hall, refused to have her as a member. Perhaps a statue seemed safer.

But Wertheim did not set out to argue a case or to complain – her initial intention was to fill a perceived gap by writing, as a physicist, a popular “history of physics” that took into account social studies of science. This she manages wit a light, assured touch, if with an occasionally frustrating shortage of dates and substantiating detail. She feeds the interested nonspecialist reader like myself lucid (and slightly heterodox) pocket accounts of Galileo’s trial, of the relations between science and magic, of quantum physics and general relativity theory and the gulf between them, of superstring theory and the current belief in ten dimensions – simplifying the complexities of 2500 years of history gracefully and without strain.

But in the course of her historical researchers Wertheim completely changed her insider’s view of physics as the “transcendent science” revealing a pre-existing blueprint for the Universe. She began to see it instead as culturally conditioned, fallible, just “one of many possible ways of knowing”.

Two linked phenomena seem to have increasingly impressed her. First, the very strong connection, from its earliest origins, between physics and religion; second, the way physics mimics the Catholic Church as one of the last strongholds of male supremacy. “Physics is … the Catholic Church of science,” she tells us.

European universities, founded to provide educational training for the clergy, excluded women because they were ineligible for the Church – though Wertheim wryly points out that the rise of prostitution was often closely linked to the rise of universities. The 17th-century European scientific societies followed the universities in being exclusively masculine, none more so than the English Royal Society, whose first secretary stated its aim as “to raise a Masculine Philosophy”. In Newton’s day, fellows of Cambridge still had to be ordained ministers of the Church (Newton obtained a royal dispensation). And the monastic and masculine ethos has never quite died away; it is astonishing that fellows of Oxford and Cambridge were not allowed to marry as recently as 1882.

All this runs counter to the notion of a “war” between science and religion that I was taught at school, and which Wertheim claims is nothing but a 19th-century fiction. In fact, Kepler described astronomers as “the priests of God, called to interpret the Book of Nature”; Newton acclaimed “this most beautiful [solar] system” as self-evidently the work of “an intelligent and powerful Being”; Galileo, for all his spats with Jesuit theologians, hungered for the approval of the Pope; Francis Bacon wanted a new age of Christianity in a new technological Eden; and Einstein famously said “the aspiration towards truth and understanding … springs from the sphere of religion”. Finally we have Stephen Hawking’s grandiose desire to reveal “the mind of God”, and particle physicist Leon Lederman calling the Higgs boson, a particle thought to have played a key role in the big bang, “the God particle”.

What follows, in Wertheim’s view, from this long shared history of science and religion, apart from the exclusion of women from the holy of holies? She suggests that the physicists’ quasi-priestly status makes us forget to question their basic assumptions. (And the “blunt, bright bastards” inside physics are probably unlikely to ask the questions themselves. Wertheim does not idealise women and “non-white men”, but thinks they might bring different perspectives into physics.)

Most fundamentally, Wertheim herself questions whether maths is indeed “the obvious choice on which to base a world-view”, or physics the inevitable successor to religion. “The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, the Arabs, Indians, and Chinese developed mathematics, yet none went on to use it as the basis for their world picture.” Aristotle rejected Pythagoras’s mathematics as the basis for his philosophy “because it could not answer the questions he regarded as important”, and the Greeks chose to follow Aristotle rather than Pythagoras.

Wertheim also disputes the priorities within physics. She detects too much contemporary concentration of effort on the massively expensive attempt to find a “Theory of Everything” that would unify relativity and quantum physics in one grand design. To her the quest is hubristic, unconnected with reality and an obvious legacy of monotheism. “No knowledge, for its own sake, is worth this price … we need a physics that is more centred on human needs and concerns … we must be involved in deciding … what purposes we want [physics] to serve.”

Here for the first time (give or take one or two irritatingly anachronistic uses of the word “feminist”) I found myself unconvinced by this generally sympathetic and entertaining writer, partly because the idea of defined social purpose might tie physicists too closely to the prevailing orthodoxies and pieties of the day. Great scientists, like great artists, don’t always do as they are told or think the same thoughts as their contemporaries, as she has shown.

Kepler in the 16th century justified his shattering empirical discovery that planetary motion was ellipitcal rather than circular by the essentially medieval and mystical belief that the circle represented the spiritual and the straight line the material, so the combination of the two in an ellipse showed the planets “striving to reach the divine ideal”.

And Newton’s secret fascination with alchemy, for example, made it easier for him to entertain the apparently heretical notion of gravity. But it’s a minor quibble to raise about a book whose range, good temper and clarity reminded me in some ways of Theodore Zeldin’s recent brilliant history of ideas, An Intimate History of Humanity.

“As in any society, the best goals emerge from the dreams of men and women together,” Wertheim concludes, asking, among other things, for more role models of scientific women in film and TV. As a novelist, I found myself inspecting my female cast list, and finding not a scientist among them. Memo to self: try harder. Nearly seventy years ago, Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own imagined a most radical passage from a novel of the future: “Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together …”

The factual basis of the book is nevertheless disquieting. HIV is a
“Biosafety Level 2 agent” because it is lethal but relatively difficult to
catch. The stars of The Hot Zone are two viruses named Ebola and Marburg for
the places where they were first detected, classified as “Biosafety Level 4”
because they are more lethal than HIV but also highly contagious. This is the
story of their recent escape from the heart of the African rainforest to big
centres of human population via modern roads and planes. As Richard Preston
would have it, “A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a 24-hour plane
flight of every city on earth.”

Ebola and Marburg are filoviruses or thread viruses. They are thought to be
very ancient, but their potential to kill large numbers of people is new, as
more and more humans encroach on the rainforest. There are well-established
cases in which Ebola and Marburg were transmitted from captive monkeys to
humans. In one of the book’s alarmingly rare pauses for thought, Preston
points out that these viruses have “jumped species” from monkeys to humans at
precisely the time when human activity is threatening the habitat and survival
of other primates.

Preston adapts techniques gleaned from films and novels to chronicle
particular escapes by Marburg and Ebola, telling his story through the
supposed stream of consciousness of real-life characters he has questioned. He
does this with excessively high hopes: “If you ask a person `What were you
thinking?’ you may get an answer that is more revealing of the human condition
than any… novelist could invent. I try to see through people’s faces into
their minds…and what I find there is beyond imagining.” This is a red rag to
a novelist, but let that pass. What really emerges from this passage is
Preston’s desire to go where none have gone before him, “through people’s
faces”, “beyond imagining”, and finally – by way of a huge pile of suppurating
technicolour flesh – right over the top.

His first case history gives the flavour of the rest. Charles Monet, a
French worker with a sugar company in Kenya, falls mysteriously ill after a
brush with rock crystals “sharp as hypodermic syringes”. He gets a headache,
then a fever; his face sets into an expressionless mask, his eyeballs turn
bright red, the skin of his face turns yellow with red flecks; he is flown in
a state of galloping decomposition on a crowded Kenya Airways commuter plane
to Nairobi, virtually brain dead, his “liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet and
head jammed with blood clots”, spewing up black vomit and bleeding copiously
from both nostrils – not the passenger you hope will be sitting next to you on
a flight. By the time he lands Monet “has been transformed into a human virus
bomb” which finally explodes “with a sound like a bedsheet being torn in half”
in the hospital waiting room. All round him the pool of blood spreads: “the
agent is coming out of every orifice and is trying to find a new host”.

You have been warned. This is not for the faint-hearted. And Preston goes
on to reveal that Marburg, the virus that devoured Monet, is merely the
“gentle sister” of Ebola, the “hot mother” thread virus (what has he against
sisters and mothers?).

In 1989, Ebola travelled to Reston, Virginia, “a stone’s throw from the
White House”, in a consignment of a hundred crab-eating monkeys from the
Philippines, imported by Hazelton Research Products. Around 16 000 wild
monkeys are imported to the US annually, Preston does not spell out what for,
but presumably they are used for medical or pharmaceutical research. Far from
the mangrove swamps where they feasted on crabs, they are kept one to a cage
in steel-doored, artificially lit concrete rooms. The building’s thermostat
has failed, it’s more than 90 degrees in there, and it stinks.

Two of the crab-eaters arrive dead; soon dozens are dying, and it becomes
clear they are harbouring a highly contagious virus. The US Army diagnoses
Ebola, and once humans begin to fall sick we are rushing towards “Smashdown”,
as Preston’s chapter heading puts it – the desperate, epic extermination of
all five hundred monkeys in the building by space-suited members of the US
Army, wielding hypodermics on long poles. After three long, hot days the
monkeys have all been cornered and killed.

Given the situation, only someone totally lacking in moral imagination
could look at the shit the terrified macaques have smeared on the walls and
make the only negative character-judgement of the book: “It was a message to
the human race that came out of something crooked and mocking in the primate
soul.” One would think the human race had given a fairly clear message to the
monkeys, too. The final irony is that this version of Ebola turned out not to
be lethal in humans.

This book makes one want to substitute another word for the “humanity” we
use so self-approvingly. “Animality” might do no worse. Despite Preston’s
sporadic rushes of poetry to the head – “a sourness of dead leaves” and so
forth – he depicts human suffering as shallowly as he does animals’, lapsing
frequently into military slang or computerese: “The virus absolutely nuked the
monkeys. “Monet has crashed and is bleeding out.”

There is a sense that for preston, physical bodies have become otiose and
disgusting – interesting in view of a prevalent millennial sense that the
human race might be moving beyond its desk-bound physicality and into some
kind of global brain. Ariimals have nowhere else to go. Once we have destroyed
their habitats and taken them away from the wreckage, they are literally dead
meat, as Preston tells us in language that is unintentionally illuminating.
“There were 500 monkeys inside that building. That was about three tons of
monkey-meat, a biological nuclear reactor having a core meltdown.”

How frightened should we be of Ebola and Marburg? My feeling is that The
Hot Zone tries far too hard to scare us, as if terror and cruelty are the only
things that can touch us, as if only black horror can come out of Africa, as
if there is no past or future but only a breakneck present. I do not believe
Mr Preston. All the same, if we don’t ask more questions about what is going
on in the monkey-house, the last laugh may be on human beings.