Chien-Shiung Wu proved nature can tell left from right; colleagues got the Nobel
Physicists long assumed the laws of nature do not distinguish a process from its mirror image. Chien-Shiung Wu's experiment showed that assumption, parity conservation, fails. Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, who proposed the idea, received the 1957 Nobel Prize. Wu later won the first Wolf Prize in Physics, in 1978.
Wu was born on May 31, 1912, in Liuhe, Jiangsu. Her father, an engineer and social progressive who had joined the 1913 Second Revolution, founded a girls' school where she studied, and read her passages from science journals in place of bedtime stories. At 11 she won a place at a teacher-training boarding school, placing ninth among about 10,000 applicants. At National Central University in Nanjing she switched from mathematics to physics and led student protests, including a sit-in at the Presidential Palace where Chiang Kai-shek met the students.
Encouraged by Ku Zing-whai, China's first woman with a physics doctorate, she sailed for the United States in August 1936, planning to attend Michigan. Hearing that women there could not even use the front entrance, she chose Berkeley instead, drawn also by Ernest Lawrence's cyclotron. She would not see her surviving relatives again until trips to China in the 1970s.
At Berkeley, officially under Lawrence but working closely with Emilio Segre, she studied beta decay and radioactive xenon from uranium fission. Her 1940 thesis so impressed J. Robert Oppenheimer that he considered her an authority on neutron absorption. Even so, no university would hire her. She married physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan in 1942 at the home of Robert Millikan, taught at Smith College, then became the first woman on Princeton's physics faculty.
In March 1944 she joined the Manhattan Project's laboratories at Columbia University under Harold Urey, supporting the gaseous diffusion effort to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238, and helped develop radiation detectors. Her precision drew comparisons with Marie Curie, and admirers called her the First Lady of Physics and the Queen of Nuclear Research. She died on February 16, 1997.
Source: Chien-Shiung Wu
