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Chien-Shiung Wu
United States: 1912 - 1997
First Woman President of the American Physics SocietyFirst Woman to Receive the Comstock PrizeProved that the Law of Parity is Not Conserved in Beta Decay
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| Born in China,
Chien-Shiung Wu attended the prestigious National Central University in
Nanping, where she obtained her undergraduate degree. In 1936, she
left China and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley
where she studied physics under Oppenheimer and Lawrence. In 1940,
she received her Ph.D and became known as an authority on nuclear
fission.
During World War II she participated in the Manhattan Project and developed the process of separating Uranium-235 from Uranium-238 by gaseous diffusion. Her work also led to the development of more sensitive geiger counters. In 1957, she became a full professor at Columbia University. It was here that she was approached by noted physicists Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang. Because she was known as an expert on beta decay, they asked her to devise an experiment to prove their theory that the law of conservation of parity did not hold true during beta decay. The law of parity states that all objects and their mirror images behave the same way but with the left hand and right hand reversed. Beta decay occurs when the nucleus of one element changes into another element. Wu's experiments, which utilized radioactive cobalt at near absolute zero temperatures, proved that identical nuclear particles do not always act alike. Lee and Yang went on to receive the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their theory. Although Wu was never recognized for her contribution to the project, she went on to win many other coveted scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Comstock Prize, and the first honorary doctorate awarded to a woman at Princeton University.
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