The first person who made a crucial demonstration in nuclear physics was a Chinese woman from the 50s

In the 50s of the last century China was a very different country from the current one. He Chinese Communist Party Led by Mao Zedong he had defeated the nationalists who made up the Kuomintang After almost three decades of armed conflict. Imperial power He had disappeared and the country had embarked on very deep structural changes that culminated in the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

The members of the Kuomintang retired to Taiwan that same year and left the land clear to the complex social, political and economic transformation that Mao Zedong had already pergeated. The new regime had erected on communist principles with the purpose of leaving behind many centuries of a feudal organization that had drastically limited the country’s development capacity.

The problem was that their foundational tools were A strong ideological control and an aggressive political repression that did not admit any kind of opposition. So China was an eminently agricultural country that desired to modernize and go The same path of industrialization in which they had many decades plunged other nations, such as the United Kingdom, the USA, France, Belgium or Germany.

The Mao government launched a very ambitious agrarian reform that pursued agricultural production and increase its efficiency. In this context, scientific development was an important part of its progressive strategy, but was subordinated to the ideological and political principles of the communist regime. This was not at all the ideal culture broth to flourish a young China passionate about science. And much less for nuclear physics. But he did.

Chien-Shiung Wu had everything against him

At the beginning of the 20th century, most women in China did not have the slightest opportunity to study. But Chien-Shiung Wu was special. He was born in 1912 in the province of Jiangsu, and when he was barely five or six years old, his parents realized that she was a very intelligent girl who was endowed with a curiosity and improper cunning of such a young person. Fortunately for her, her parents appreciated the value of education despite how difficult it was to a relatively humble family to access it.

Wu was given mathematics and physics. He highlighted so much from his youth in these scientific disciplines that he managed to access higher physics studies in The prestigious Central National University (It is currently known as Nankín University). It is important that we do not overlook that at the beginning of the 30s of the 30s of the last century China was, as we have seen, a fundamentally agricultural country that was mired in the revolutionary seizure triggered by the disappearance of imperial power.

In this social and political context it was very difficult for a woman to get access to university studies. And it was even more unlikely to stand out in a scientific career. But Chien-Shiung Wu did it. He graduated in Physics in 1934, and two years later he decided to travel to the US to complete his training. His extraordinary academic curriculum helped him be admitted at the University of California in Berkeley under the supervision of Ernest Lawrence, The inventor of the cyclotronand in 1940 he obtained his doctorate in Physics.

From this moment on, a meteoric career began as a researcher specialized in gamma ray emission in particular, and in nuclear physics in general. Its domain of nuclear spectroscopy, a technique that serves to study the behavior of atomic nuclei observing the radiation they emit or absorbwas the presentation card that caused it to be signed by the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. And shortly after, already in the middle of World War II, he participated in the Manhattan project as part of the Delegation of the University of Columbia (New York).

A good part of her professional career ran in this last institution as a researcher and starting professor, and during her early years at Columbia University was highly appreciated by other teachers and physics students for which she was her greatest contribution to the Manhattan project: The development of separation technology of uranium isotopes. However, their achievements had just begun. And it is that the work for which it has definitely gone into the history of physics came, as we have advanced in the head of this article, during the 50s.

Wu has gone down in his experiments in nuclear physics

In 1956 Chien-Shiung Wu designed a very ingenious experiment using cobalt-60 cooled to an extremely low temperature. Its purpose was to study whether electrons emitted in the presence of a magnetic field of great intensity are distributed asymmetrically, as theoretical physicists had hypothesized Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, with which it collaborated. His experiment worked correctly, allowing WU to demonstrate that the emitted electrons During the disintegration process They were preferably dismissed in one direction. And not in a symmetrical way, as physicists believed so far.

This test has gone into the history of science as “the experiment of rape of Wu’s parity.” Its importance lies in its ability to demonstrate that in weak nuclear interaction, which is the fundamental force responsible for some atomic processes, such as, for example, Beta disintegration, Symmetry is not fulfilled. If we express it in this way it may not seem important, but it is. It is very important knowledge.

In fact, he not only supported the theory of Beta Disintegration of Enrico Fermi; Without him, physicists would not have been able to elaborate the theories that currently shape the Standard model of particle physics. Wu’s experiment played a crucial role in the concession in 1957 of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Lee and Yang. Many scientists consider that the right thing would have been for Chien-Shiung Wu to have received this award with his colleagues, but it was not so.

His publications in the field of precision nuclear physics and their many contributions to particle physics were rewarded with the US National Medal of Science, in 1975, and with the Wolf Prize in Physics, in 1978. In addition, it was The first woman who presided over The American Physics Society. Its legacy remains fully in force and is an irrefutable proof that with perseverance, effort and passion it is possible to go very far even although the starting point is not at all auspicious.

Image | Generated by Xataka with Dall-e

Portrait | Smithsonian Institution

In Xataka | The CERN has a plan to make the impossible possible. If it goes well, the standard model will demolish forever

In Xataka | World War II and Radar gave semiconductors the push that has brought them here