There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that is not going to the lab at all! -Chien-Shiung Wu
The common denominator is almost always the same. Ultra-famous and illustrious names of men who contributed a vital grain of sand to science, history, and humanity: Albert Einstein and the equation that made him popular, Isaac Newton and his patient genius, Nikola Tesla and his inventions, and so on. But when it comes to women, the story of Marie Curie and, as a whole, the group of women who made NASA’s most iconic steps into space possible will most likely come to mind. However, there is more. There is always more. Hence, often little is known about Chien-Shiung Wu.
Among the obstacles that this physicist born in 1912 on the outskirts of Shanghai had to face to be recognized and respected was her gender, in addition to being Chinese during the first half of the 20th century, a difficult and turbulent time for the fundamental rights of all women. But Wu was marked to fulfill the historical legacy of compatriots like Wang Zhenyi, a mathematical genius during the Qing dynasty.
When the Empire collapsed, the view that women were educated to serve men changed. One of the architects of this progress was Chien-Shiung Wu’s father, who believed in equality between men and women. It was he who also established a school for girls where his daughter was educated and proved to be a superior student. As she pursued her education, she soon found the path that called her her destiny: the sciences, especially physics.
She lived in an all-girls boarding school for seven years until she graduated. She planned to enter the National Central University of Nanjing, but access was forbidden to women, so Chien-Shiung began a period of activism. Context and circumstance smiled on her in a bittersweet way: she led a group of students who took over the presidential mansion and demanded until they succeeded, that the university open its doors to women. After four years, she officially graduated as a physicist.
Her academic journey was just the beginning. She served as a researcher at the Institute of Physics of Academia Sinica and became an expert in crystallography. On the advice of one of her teachers, she applied to the University of Michigan to complete her doctorate. She was admitted by the institution, which also offered her financial support so that she could pursue research in atomic spectroscopy.
Chien-Shiung Wu headed for the land of the stars and stripes in 1936. She arrived in San Francisco, California, shortly before beginning his courses at Michigan. There a Berkeley friend introduced him to Luke Chia Yuan, who offered to show her around the UC Berkeley campus and physics laboratories. There he met Professor Ernest O. Lawrence, the mastermind behind the construction of the first cyclotron, which used magnetic fields to accelerate and break up atomic fragments. The scientist, impressed by Wu, encouraged her to stay at Berkeley to work with him, a living legend in nuclear physics.
In 1940, having completed her doctorate, her colleagues referred to her as “The Authority.” She was certainly an expert in nuclear fission. Physics icons such as Enrico Fermi often consulted her for guidance. Fermi, who along with his team was trying to realize the first large-scale autonomous plutonium chain reaction, asked Wu how he could do it. The Chinese scientist solved one of the most complex enigmas in experimental physics.
Around that time, her husband obtained employment in New Jersey and got a job teaching at a girls’ school in Massachusetts. Wu was reunited in Boston with her professor and colleague, Lawrence, who pulled her strings and secured her a teaching position at Princeton University, making her the first woman professor of physics at that institution. With all the immense recognition and prestige she enjoyed, both as a researcher and as a teacher, she had not been appointed a professor at any university.
In 1945, she was able to continue as a research associate at Columbia University. Until then, the experiments of other colleagues had only succeeded in finding low-motion electrodes. However, Wu demonstrated that they moved at high speed through sheets of uniform thickness.
The great career-defining moment for this woman occurred in 1956 when Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yan contacted her to theoretically demonstrate one of the “irrefutable” laws of physics, the law of parity, which stated that the properties of a system are conserved in the face of specular symmetry. Wu carried out experiments that soon demonstrated that this principle was not rigorously fulfilled in nature.
In 1957, Lee and Yan received the Nobel Prize in Physics for these experiments, without any recognition for her. The scientist, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant minds that science has ever seen, continued to make transcendental and very useful contributions in the fields of medicine and biochemistry. Although she was never awarded a Nobel Prize, she did receive other important awards and recognitions, such as being the first woman president of the American Physical Society in 1975. Her little-known transit in the history of the world and science led to an asteroid being named after her in 1990.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
