Universe in Reverse: The Queen of Physics Chien-Shiung Wu
Originally published at http://www.influencehumans.com on April 21, 2018.
These were moments of exhilaration and ecstasy! A glimpse of this wonder can be the reward of a lifetime. Could it be that excitement and ennobling feelings like these have kept us scientists marching forward forever?
Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Jiangsu province, China on May 31, 1912 and had 2 brothers. As a part of her family custom, she and her siblings received the names Ying-Shiung-Hao-Jie, meaning “heroes and outstanding figures”. And that was what she was.
Her father nurtured her academics. In elementary school, she went to a school for girls founded by her father. Once she was 11, she chose the competitive option and applied for scholarships for an elite boarding school. She ranked 9th among 10,000 applicants. These early experiences profoundly effected her. Her brilliance was self evident and was naturally a part of the elite. However, what you’ll come to find is American history is self-obsessed.
In undergraduate, she was studying math, but then switched to physics. She immediately got into politics. What is known is her involvement in protests would be overlooked by authorities because she remained top of her class. That being the case, she was careful not to neglect her studies.
Her family encouraged and her ambitions called her to pursue her Ph.D. in United States. They organized the funds, she and a friend of hers set off on the SS President Hoover in August 1936. She was 24 years old. Her parents, who consistently supported her mind and fostered her pursuit of knowledge, saw her off. She would never see them again.
Wu studied physics at the University of California, Berkley, in an incredibly diverse peer group. Her classmates included:
Robert Wilson [worked on the Manhattan Project] & George Volkoff [co-predicted the existence of neutron stars], and her friends were Ursula Schafer [German immigrant, history student] & Margaret Lewis [post doctoral student].
Wu applied for a scholarship, but there was known prejudice against Asian students. So, Wu took a readership with a lower stipend.
Wu as a woman and as an Asian and as an immigrant was something she had to learn in America. This American lesson haunted her career and something she was forced to carry. Her defiance did not feel unordinary to herself.
One could tell how foriegn she was with statements like this:
… it is shameful that there are so few women in science… In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments yet she remains eternally feminine.
[I believe her parents’ love remained within.]
What was important to her was the work. Here is where she began her work on Beta Decay, testing to see the electromagnetic radiation produced by the deceleration of a charged particle when deflected by another charged particle. It was this that would lead her to discovery. She would endearingly say:
Beta decay was … like a dear old friend. There would always be a special place in my heart reserved especially for it.
Life moving fast, in 1944, Wu joined the Manhattan Project under Substitute Alloy Materials division. I’m not sure why. Many scientists were listed and the reasons they gave were unamiously vague. I believe words and quotes fall short when attempting to portray the paralyzing social pressures of World War 2. I imagine the air was sick-thick-stew of tension. Whether walking into a room or outside, one was compulsively reminded of the ongoing war. Many scientists feared Germany would build a bomb before them. When pushed further in an interview about the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman said:
I don’t want to [do secret work] because I want to do scientific research — that is, to find out more about how the world works. And that is not secret; that work is not secret. There’s no secrecy associated with it. The things that are secret are engineering developments which I am not so interested in, except when the pressure of war, or something else like that, makes me work on it. … Yes, I am definitely anti-working in secret projects. … I don’t think things should be secret, the people developing this. It seems to me very difficult for citizens to make a decision as to what’s going on when you can’t say what you’re doing. And the whole idea of democracy, it seems to me, was that the public, where the power is supposed to lie, should be informed. And when there’s secrecy, it’s not informed.
I speculate it was an opportunity to do research. She worked on an instrument that detects radiation. At the end of the war, communication with China was restored and Wu received a letter from her family, but couldn’t visit because soon-after China entered a civil war.
Wu continued to investigate Beta Decay by re-verifying Enrico Fermi’s theory of Beta Decay — he explains beta decay of a neutron by direct coupling of a neutron with an electron, an antineutrino and a proton.
To make sense of this, parity states that nature does not favor right or left. For example: If you watch a girl throw a baseball through a mirror, the laws of physics will be the same both for the girl and for her mirror image.
If P-conservation were true, a mirrored world (where left is right and right is left) would behave as an indistinguishable image of the current world. If P-conservation were violated, then it would be possible to distinguish between a mirrored version of the world and the mirror image of the current world.
As Fermi’s tested strong interactions, she sought to establish whether the conservation of parity applied to weak interactions. She thought because the OG experiment used a copper sulfate — a thick and uneven film — it caused the emitted electrons to lose energy. As it always happens in some [Hegelian] way, the problem becomes the solution.
Itching to develop a new experiment, one day, two physicists came to Wu with a problem. Two sub-atomic particles, the theta meson and the tau meson shared the same mass — suggesting they might actually be two forms of the same particle. However, they decayed in two different parity states, one positive and one negative. If they were in fact the same particle, this would have to mean conservation of parity is not upheld. But how to prove it? She crafted a new experiment.
Just a surface look at Wu, you can easily tell how sharp her focus was and how determined she was to touch reality as close as humanly possible.
Wu’s former graduate student, Leon Lidofsky commented:
She had a very, very strong sense that things had to be done right. If it was done sloppily, it wasn’t worth doing because the results weren’t reliable.
Richard Feynman pronounced the notion of parity violation “unlikely, but possible, and a very exciting possibility,” but later made a $50 bet with a friend that parity would not be violated. He lost the bet.
This experiment led to the discovery of parity violation — a new fact, a new truth, a discovery about the fabrics of reality. Wu had disproved a fundamental law of nature.
She added detergent to the copper sulphate to produce a thin and even film. She successfully confirmed Fermi’s theory, then demonstrated the discrepancies observed were experimental error. This broke the physics community.
This experiment defined the authority on Beta Decay.
Wu devised an experiment to test these 2 particles. She tested them at a weaker interaction. She showed that this is indeed the case: parity is not conserved under the weak nuclear interactions. The theta meson and the tau meson are in fact the same particle, today a.ka. kaon.
Wu devised the experiment.
Wu conducted the experiment.
Wu disproved the law of conservation parity.
Despite this, the two male colleagues who presented the problem to Wu won the Nobel Prize in 1957. She was not publicly honored until 1978, when she was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize.
Truly, a person of outstanding mind buried by the bigotry of the times. After following each step of her life, the faded impressions of time, I arrive here. After leaving her country, serving her new country, disproving a law of physics, she witnesses her own erasure. I am heartbroken.
Later in Life, Wu added to history of Physics in other ways. More notably, she became a political activist. She protested the inhumane imprisonment of physicist Kerson Huang and of the journalist Lei Chen happening in Taiwan. She protested the crackdown in China that followed the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
In 1964, she spoke out against gender discrimination at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
I wonder, whether the tiny atoms and nuclei, or the mathematical symbols, or the DNA molecules have any preference for either masculine or feminine treatment.
When colleagues referred to her as Professor Yuan, she would correct them and say she was Professor Wu. In 1975, Robert Serber, the new chairman of the Physics Department Columbia University adjusted her pay to make it equal to that of her male counterparts.
I have to ask myself: Is Serber’s act one of restorative justice or condescending consolation?
I am enlightened by a new understanding of what it means to be a hero. A hero leaves their home when they are called upon. A hero is a person who is consistently revoked of dignity and still pursues to see the world beyond it’s human measures. A hero goes forward.
Wu’s older brother died in 1958, her father in 1959 and her mother in 1962. Wu was 48, 49, 52 years old respectively. At that time the United States government had severe restrictions on its citizens’ ability to travel abroad, so she was not permitted to visit China to attend their funerals. It wasn’t until Nixon traveled in 1972 was she able to visit her brother and her uncle in 1973.
My hero, Chien-Shiung Wu
Rest in Power.
