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| This is what happens when you don't get your time machine serviced regularly. Lesson learned. |
The service, however, is phenomenal (the tech from the future is here with parts and working on the thing right now but it's going to take a while) so while we wait let's talk about a scientist you probably haven't heard of before.
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| Another in a long list of people we should probably have learned about in school but didn't. |
The great thing about this project is the blindspots it exposes in my own education. This is Chien-Shiung Wu a brilliant experimental physicist and one of the members of the Manhattan project. Yes, this woman is one of the folks who helped let the genie out of the bottle.
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| Oh if only the genie she helped release were this entertaining. Though admittedly, in the wrong hands, he's just as destructive. |
I was looking to end up in ancient china for this trip, but as I said, didn't manage that. Instead today we deal with a woman who was born in 1912 in a small town in China called Taicang. Just a small girl with big dreams of becoming a scientist and raining death and destruction down upon her enemies along with ensuring the potential for a hellish nightmare apocalypse. Sigh. Why hasn't anyone made a movie about this woman yet?
Kidding aside Chien-Shiung Wu was, by all accounts an incredibly determined, skilled and terrifyingly brilliant woman. She was a student of note in her home in China. Spurred on by her father, who supported girls' education in general and hers in particular, Ms. Chien was always interested in the sciences. She studied physics extensively attending multiple scientific study programs and working in more than one research center in China. There was only one problem for the voracious learner. There was no doctoral program in China to sate her hunger for knowledge at the time.
While studying at the Academia Sinica as a researcher her advisor encouraged her to push her studies by traveling to the U.S. to get her Doctorate degree. She would arrive in the U.S. in 1936 and do her Doctoral studies at Berkley. Her timing was perfect and between that and her staggering intelligence she quickly caught the eye of and began studying with the leading physicists of her day. Her P.h. D. studies were complete by 1940... but that date and her profession should be setting off alarm bells for everyone because like so many other figures in this time (remember Heddy Lamaar) the 1940's would be a time that churned out a lot of fascinating people and events and molded people greatly.
She'd be tapped for the Manhattan project early on in WWII. Her specific contribution was the discovery of how to enrich uranium for nuclear purposes. Her research essentially helped fuel the atomic bombs.
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| Pictured: The Queen of Physics with a look that says, BOW! |
That said, her scientific achievements didn't stop there but she did suffer from an all too common effect of the era and one that's still too often present.
In the 50's there was a generally accepted theory known as "the Law of Parity" in physics. It held that objects that were mirror images of each other behaved the same way. You may think that the reason you haven't heard of this Law the same way you've heard of the Law of Gravity or the "Theory of Relativity" is that it's a dry, high level physics thing that wouldn't be known to those outside the field. Now you'd be partially correct but the other reason you haven't heard of it is that science tends to discard things that don't work and Ms. Chien helped kick the theory to the curb. Two colleagues of hers devised a hypothesis that could disprove the Law of Parity but it wa Chien, an EXPERIMENTAL physicist who made their hypothesis a reality and devised the experiment to check it.
The experiment was hailed as a major breakthrough and a massive step forward for the field, solving one of its biggest riddles of the time. Ms. Chien's collegues were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in disproving the theory. Chien got snubbed liek Leonardo DiCaprio on Oscar night!
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| Oops, can't make those jokes anymore can I? Darn it! |
Here we see a recurring theme with female scientists being overlooked and marginalized in favor of their male colleagues. The snub here is one of those stories where you see clearly and in stark relief the fears too many men had and still have about women being good in fields that were generally seen as the work of men. Though she was snubbed by the Nobel committee, other scientific circles didn't make the same mistake and Chien herself was neither surprised nor ill prepared for the slight.
She was, along with being a bad ass physicist of serious intellectual ability, a strong advocate for women and girls as well as being well aware of the sexism that was rampant in her field, encouraging women to continue anyway and smash down the barriers and glass ceilings with extreme prejudice.
And if smashing down the barriers didn't work I'm sure she'd approve, at least on some level of more... shall we say extravagent measures to eradicating those barriers and obstacles within the sciences...
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| I say we call this the Chien-Shuing Wu solution |
Okay folks that's all for today and so I'm signing off. The Wayback machine is almost fixed but I'm told it shouldn't make any huge trips for awhile. Instead, we'll make a short hop next time to see a woman about some music. Until next time.
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