TIL 38- Overlooked Female Legend

Today I learned about Chien-Shiung Wu, one of the most overlooked pioneers of 20th-century Physics. Referred to as ‘The First Lady of Physics’, ‘The Chinese Madam Curie’, and ‘The Queen of Nuclear Research’, Wu’s contribution to particle Physics, primarily her experiments falsifying parity between weak subatomic interactions, has been a phenomenon.

And yet despite this breakthrough, she did not win the Nobel prize for it.

Born in China in 1912, under conditions that did not allow women to pursue any formal education, Wu rebelled against the system and pursued her Physics degree from the prestigious Nanjing University. She then moved to the US for her Ph.D. at the UC Berkley in the 40s and was one of the prime contributors in the Manhattan Project set up by Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi.

Eventually, Wu fulfilled her dream of being a Professor of Physics at Columbia University, New York. And over there she made her greatest contribution to Physics by studying ‘The Law of Conservation of Parity’ between subatomic particles.

‘The Law of Conservation of Parity’ states that all objects and particles govern the law of physics, behave the same way independent of any direction- up, down, left, right.

Take Gravity for instance. An object will have a force attracting them towards the Earth no matter what its orientation is. Whether it’s erect or upside down, the direction of force is still the same.

However, Wu, along with two other male particle physicists Lee and Yang, demonstrated in an experiment that this may not be the case in all situations.

They took the example of Cobalt particles in a system and found out that when rotated in two different directions- clockwise and counter-clockwise, the electrons in the Cobalt atoms shot out in two different directions.

In an ideal case, following the laws of parity, the electrons should have shot out in two similar and random directions.

However, through the experiment, Wu concluded that this may not be the case, because weak subatomic forces in those particles don’t exactly follow the laws of parity that govern large bodies.

This is to say, in a way, that the laws of physics may not be applicable to all entities in a universe after all.

The experiment could also be extrapolated, not just to the relationship of parity between the clockwise and anticlockwise spin of matter, but also to parity between matter and antimatter. Antimatter may not necessarily react to external forces in the same way as does matter.

And this could be one of the reasons for the ‘creation of the universe during the Big Bang. Since the universe is comprised of both matter and anti-matter, violating the law of parity may have lead to the existence of more matter in the universe and life as we know it.

This is a gross simplification, and yet these were all pathbreaking discoveries.

Unfortunately, in 1957, Lee and Yang received a Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery, while Chien-Shiung Wu’s contribution remained unacknowledged.

Critics blame the blatant sexism of the scientific community, which at that time was majorly male-dominated.

Wu, in her speeches and writings, remained ardently vocal about female representation in Physics.

She wrote- ‘I believe that women’s commitment to science and technology is natural, healthy and promising.’