Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) was a Chinese language-born American physicist who labored on the covert Manhattan Project creating the primary nuclear weapons for the U.S. throughout WWII and later performed a landmark experiment that established her as one of many premier experimental physicists in historical past.
Born in a small city close to Shanghai, Wu attended a faculty began by her father who believed in training for women, an unusual perception in China on the time. In 1929, Wu went on to check training and physics on the Nationwide Central College in Nanking, China. After graduating, she emigrated to the US in 1936 to pursue a graduate diploma in physics on the College of California at Berkeley and studied below Ernest O. Lawrence, a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of nuclear science.
After Wu obtained her doctorate in 1940, she taught physics at Smith School and at Princeton College. She married Luke Yuan, a fellow physicist, in 1942. Two years later, she joined the Manhattan Venture on the Substitute Alloy Supplies (SAM) Lab at Columbia College the place her work targeted on radiation detection. When the B Reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Site within the state of Washington mysteriously shut down simply after it started working, Wu helped determine xenon-135 poisoning because the offender.
Wu was supplied a place at Columbia College after the warfare and he or she started investigating beta decay, which happens when the nucleus of 1 component modifications into one other component. By her work, she made a number of vital contributions to nuclear physics, together with being the primary to substantiate Enrico Fermi’s theory of beta decay.
In 1956, Wu was approached by theoretical physicists Tsung-Dao Lee of Columbia and Chen Ning Yang of the Institute of Superior Research at Princeton who had been conscious of her experience in beta decay. They proposed that parity is just not conserved for weak nuclear interactions and so they requested her to plot an experiment to show their concept. For years, physicists had been married to the precept of conservation of parity, which held that nature doesn’t distinguish between left and proper in nuclear reactions; two phenomena, certainly one of which is a precise mirror of the opposite, behaves identically, aside from the mirror picture impact. Researchers made all their observations match this concept, regardless that no experiments had ever solidly confirmed it.
With a gaggle of scientists from the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC, Wu examined the proposal by experimenting with radioactive cobalt-60 at close to zero temperatures and proved that an identical nucleus particles don’t all the time act alike, shattering the fundamental concept of nuclear physics. The success led to worldwide acclaim and resulted in Lee and Yang receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for his or her concept, though Wu’s work was not acknowledged.
Wu continued to make vital contributions all through her life, together with in 1958, when her analysis helped reply vital organic questions on blood and sickle cell anemia. That very same yr, she was elected as a member of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences and later, in 1975, she was elected as the primary feminine president of the American Bodily Society.
She obtained a number of prestigious awards and honors for her work. Her eight honorary levels included the primary honorary doctorate awarded to a lady by Princeton College. She was awarded the primary Analysis Company Award given to a lady (1959), the Comstock Prize in Physics (1964), the Nationwide Medal of Science (1974), and the primary Wolf Prize in Physics (1978). In 1990, Wu turned the primary residing scientist to have an asteroid named after her. Moreover, her e book Beta Decay, revealed in 1966, stays a normal reference textual content for nuclear physicists to at the present time.
Wu retired from her professorship at Columbia in 1981. She died in New York Metropolis in 1997.
As one of many foremost nuclear physicists on the earth, Dr. Wu’s work essentially formed fashionable bodily concept and blazed a path for ladies in science.
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