Chien-Shiung Wu

is the “First Lady of Physics”. She is an experimental physicist that won the Medal of Science, disproved the “Law of conservation of parity”, and helped fuel the atomic bomb.

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in 1912 in Liu Ho, China. Her father was women’s rights activist and wanted his daughter to be well educated. He started the first school for girls in their town and enrolled his daughter in it. They supported her in her academic career, so matter the distance or price. In 1936, Wu travelled to the University of California, Berkeley to study experimental physics and received her PhD there.

After finishing her PhD, Wu and her husband moved to the east coast and she became a professor at Princeton University and Smith college.

Wu was recruited by the Manhattan Project while she was working as a research scientist at Columbia University. Though she did not know what they project was about, during her interviewed she figure it out by looking at the equation left on the board.

Life at the Manhattan Project

While there, she developed a method to enrich uranium ore into the isotope that was required for fuel in the atomic bomb. She also had a large part in developing radiation detection. She was the only Chinese person to have worked on the Manhattan Project.

Scientific Contribution

After the Manhattan Project, Wu returned to Columbia to work as a research scientist. There she worked with fellow scientists to disprove “the principle of conservation of parity” which, up until this point, had been considered a law. This law had started that particles decayed in a symmetric way. However, when she observed the K-meson, she discovered that it did not follow this law. It a careful eye and a strong magnet, Wu discovered that the particle had a preferred direction of decay.

Legacy

Though she was not awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics with her fellow male colleagues, she author her book, Beta Decay, which is still the standard text for nuclear physicists today. She was awarded a full professorship at Columbia. Chien-Shiung Wu was the first woman to be elected president of the American Physical Society and winning many awards for her accomplishments. She expander her scope of research and helped to answer mysteries about blood and sickle cell anemia. She continued to research and teach around the world until she died in 1997.

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