Nuclear physicist Chien-Shiung Wu was part of the nuclear experiment that changed the history of the world. However, it was a struggle for her to get where she did. She had to travel 50 miles, then 150 miles, and then finally to the other side of the world in order to pursue her dreams.
Her expertise in experimental physics has made people compare her to Marie Curie. She was given nicknames such as "the First Lady of Physics", "the Chinese Madame Curie", and the "Queen of Nuclear Research."
She developed improved Geiger counters for measuring nuclear radiation levels and was hailed as she was thought to be the only Chinese person to have got involved in the Manhattan Project on uranium enrichment. However, she also found that it wreaked terror in 1945 on Japan.
At least, she did hear that her family in China had survived World War II. But she continued to work in Columbia University until her death. Her biggest contribution to modern physics was a number of experiments that tested the law called "conservation of parity," showing "a fundamental symmetry in the behavior of everything in nature, including atomic particles."
Her male colleagues, who had postulated the theory, won the Nobel Prize. However, though Wu tested the ideas, she did not get the award. "Neither Yang nor Lee is an experimental man," reported TIME in January that year. "When two experimental proofs came through early this year, parity was dead, and the Nobel Prize was practically in the bag."
Still, though Wu was never appreciated for her contribution, she did bag a number of other creditable scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Comstock Prize, and the first honorary doctorate for a woman at Princeton University and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her book Beta Decay, which was published in 1965, is considered a "standard reference for nuclear physicists."
Wu was born in 1912 in a small town in Jiangsu province, eastern China. Her parents were extraordinary and wanted to educate girls, setting up a school for the purpose.
At the age of 11, she outgrew what they could teach, so she went out to a girls' boarding school in Suzhou, 50 miles away. After that she travelled first to National Central University in Nanjing, and then on to the prestigious Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, where she started postgraduate studies in physics. In 1936, at the age of 24, she sailed from China to America for further studies.
The following years brought war to China with Japanese invasion leading to World War II. Wu was isolated from her family, and just had to continue her studies without hearing from them. Finally, even though her family lived through the war, she could not ever get in touch with them due to the Communist rule from 1949.
On looking back, Wu's journey had been long and hard. She first arrived in San Francisco, planning to travel to Michigan to study further. However, at nearby Berkeley, the nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence just erected a new kind of particle accelerator, and was converting it into the "epicenter of atomic research."
Though she was in town for only a few days, Wu met and impressed him, along with another Berkeley physics student, Luke Yuan, whom she soon married. She stayed on in Berkeley and concentrated in the emerging field of nuclear physics.
However, due to the "sexism and anti-Asian racism" in that era, Wu could not get a creditable academic position. She married Yuan and shifted to the East Coast, taking up a teaching job at Smith College, even though she wanted to pursue research. She shifted next to Princeton, and continued to study beta decay, looking into how a particle changed form inside the nucleus of an atom.
It was only after diplomatic ties were established between U.S. and China in the early 1970s that she could finally visit the tombs of her parents, which had got desecrated during the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese prime minister sent a personal apology for the damages, and later she visited her country regularly. Yet she also criticised the government's approach and mindset regularly, especially the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
In the US too she fought for gender equality. She retained her maiden name and wanted to be paid the same as her male colleagues at Columbia. Finally, after she died at the age of 84 in 1997, Chien-Shiung Wu's ashes were spread in her parents' schoolyard, as she requested.
