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U.S. Postage Stamp Will Honor the 'First Lady of Physics'
- jrd259 6y agoI find the Smithsonian's title regrettable. In the USA, the "First Lady" is the wife of the President, typically someone who is important only for what her husband is (although some have used that power for positive ways.) Wu was important on her own.
- klyrs 6y agoAwkward, that. I was wondering who the president of physics was supposed to be.
- andrewflnr 6y agoYou're not the only one. https://xkcd.com/675/ https://xkcd.com/675/
- mnl 6y agoSigh... it's a well-known nickname of hers, see for instance: Caijian Jiang, Tsai-Chien Chiang (2014) Madame Wu Chien-Shiung: The First Lady of Physics Research. World Scientific. In many, many textbooks she's referred to as Madame Wu. No, no one called Maria Goeppert Mayer, Nobel Prize in physics 1963 Madame Goeppert-Mayer. That's something of a peculiar term of endearment/respect (idk) for Chien-Shiung Wu that caught on for some reason.
- eesmith 6y agoI was curious about the history of that nickname. The oldest reference I could find is: Gloria Lubkin, 'Chien-Shiung Wu, The First Lady of Physics Research', Smithsonian, Vol. I (January 1971), 52-57. I am unable to find an online copy of that issue. There are only a few publications with that phrase before ~2000, and only as citations to the Smithsonian article. The nickname became popular with the publication of "Wu Jianshong, The First Lady of Physics", a 1996 biography by Caijian Jiang. https://www.worldcat.org/title/wu-jianshong-the-first-lady-of-physics/oclc/1020219658 https://www.worldcat.org/title/wu-jianshong-the-first-lady-o... . It's in Chinese - I believe the citation you give is for an English translation. For example, in 2000 there was a talk titled 'Wu Chien-Shiung the First Lady of Physics" at the Overseas Chinese Physics Association, see https://books.google.com/books?id=1FRhDQAAQBAJ&lpg=PR7&ots=7iKU3GMrOA&dq=%22First%20Lady%20of%20Physics%22&lr&pg=PA59#v=onepage&q=%22First%20Lady%20of%20Physics%22&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=1FRhDQAAQBAJ&lpg=PR7&ots=7... . The speaker borrowed the title from the book.
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- fenomas 6y agoThis isn't generally true at all. Ella Fitzgerald has been "the First Lady of Song" since forever, various women have been called the First Lady of rock, pop, this or that sport, etc. In general I think I've only heard "First Lady of X" refer to a spouse when X is a country. In any other case it's always somebody famous in their own right.
- furyofantares 6y agoEven accepting that, just put her name in the headline too. It's not the first article I've seen about someone who hasn't gotten the recognition they deserve that also fails to put their name in the title.
- beaconstudios 6y agoIt's intentional clickbait, providing a cliffhanger in the title ("first lady of physics? Who is that?") so you click through to the article for the answer.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoThis is a perpetual problem for which there is no good solution because historically women typically were known primarily as someone's wife. So we don't really have a well-developed set of words and rubrics for how to show our respects for women in a way that is both clearly feminine in character and also clearly indicates they made it on their own merits and not as someone's wife/mom/daughter/whatever. I don't know how this will be solved. Some people don't even like the idea of needing it to be clearly feminine or female nomenclature.
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- notsureaboutpg 6y agoActually this is your own misconception. First Lady as a title means the highest ranking woman in a field or art as well. In a way the wives of heads of state are the highest ranking women in the political field also. That's why the title makes sense in both cases.
- andrewflnr 6y agoI got excited because I thought maybe Emmy Noether was going to get a stamp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
- bilbo0s 6y agoI thought it was Madame Curie.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ardit33 6y agoSame, Marie Curie is by far much more recognized/contributed to nuclear physics... She was the first woman to win Nobel, (and won it twice)
- ISL 6y agoMeasuring parity violation is one heck of a thing. Wu is less of a household name, but within fundamental physics, her experiment is one of the great milestones.
- input_sh 6y agoFor context, only four people won Nobel twice (Frederick Sanger, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen and Marie Curie), and from that list, her is the only name I recognise.
- OskarS 6y agoShe's also the only one of them who won in two different scientific disciplines: physics and chemistry. Linus Pauling (who was pretty famous to a previous generation, though maybe not quite as famous as Curie) won also won in two different disciplines, but one of them was the peace prize.
- evanb 6y ago
- exmadscientist 6y agoThe Nobel committee has many sins to answer for. Fortunately, if immortality is what you're after (rather than just the money), there are other, surer ways to get that. Being the first experiment to verify the defining property of one of the four forces of nature will do it. It's impossible to learn about weak parity violation without learning about Madame Wu. So everyone who matters will remember her :)
- leereeves 6y ago> The Nobel committee has many sins to answer for. According to Magdolna Hargittai, it's not clear that this is one of them. She wrote that there were actually three experimental groups that verified parity violation, with unclear priority, and none of them were eligible for the Nobel in 1957 because all published after the deadline for that year. And so we arrive at the question at the heart of this story: was it a fair decision not to award Wu a share of the prize? After all, there was an “empty slot” – according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation a maximum of three people can share a prize in a given category. The NBS experiment was the first to verify parity violation on 27 December and Wu had suggested and was actively involved with the experiment. But Friedman and Telegdi, who also started their experiments in the late summer of 1956 and were already doing measurements in October, may have had some preliminary results by December too. However, what really counts is publications, and in that the NBS group and the Garwin–Lederman–Weinrich group were side by side, with Garwin and Lederman actually finishing their report days before the NBS group did. Whichever way success is measured, it would have been hard to pick one particular experimentalist for the prize. As it turns out, this discussion is superfluous for legalistic reasons. As Bárány pointed out, “The awarded work must have been published before the year of the prize, in this case before 1 January 1957.” Since all three experimental studies were published in early 1957, none of the experimentalists could have been considered for the prize that year. The Nobel Committee could have decided to wait another year to award the prize for parity violation, but with the three experiments and the large number of physicists involved, the decision would always have been a hard one. Also, the committee needed strong candidates in 1957 and it is by no means certain that they had any as strong as Lee and Yang to put forward. https://physicsworld.com/a/credit-where-credits-due/ https://physicsworld.com/a/credit-where-credits-due/
- asiachick 6y agoAmazing! too bad I haven't used a stamp in many years
- lisper 6y agoHow do you send checks to people? ;-)
- asiachick 6y agoI rarely have to but since about 1991 I log into my bank (in 1991 it was via quicken and at some point became through their website) and type in their address and the amount. The bank sends a check.
- lisper 6y agoI was expecting you reply, "What's a check?"
- Xylakant 6y agoThis is a forum frequented by US folks and to my continued surprise, checks still seem to be a normal mode of payment. A US client snail-mailed us a check about a year ago - we first needed to figure out what the process is to cash that. And it took a month for payment to go through. As an interesting side note: There are cases where you want to use a check in Germany as well. There’s what’s called a “Bundesbankscheck” which is a check vouched for by the Bundesbank and it’s cash-equivalent. So instead of carrying large amounts of cash you can just carry one of those. Relevant for cases which require immediate payment.
- einpoklum 6y agoWhile her contributions to Physics proper, and to the advancement of women in science through personal example, are commendable - the article says that: > Other contributions Wu made to science include aiding the Manhattan project during World War II And I do not look up to people who work on providing the US government with nuclear weapons.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoNearly all the top physicists in the US with relevant knowledge took part in the Manhattan Project. Even Einstein, the pacifist, lent his name to the effort to persuade the US government to build an atom bomb before the Nazis.[1] I judge people much more by what they did after the war. Contrast Edward Teller's campaigning for the development of the H-bomb with the actions of Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe. 1. Einstein-Szilárd letter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...
- hilbert42 6y ago"...Wu did not receive the Nobel prize for her contributions to the groundbreaking find." It's damn time these horribly unfair Nobel Prizes were grossly overhauled or scrapped altogether and replaced with something better. Time and time again we hear of the Nobel Prize committee making both questionable and unfair decisions by failing to award deserving people and instead awarding the Prize on political grounds rather than merit, and or overlooking people who made significant contributions to a discovery such as Wu, or bypassing deserving mavericks who have upset the establishment but still deserve to be honored (Fred Hoyle for instance). The fact that Nobel Prize awards cannot be awarded posthumously is also an utter disgrace. The Nobel Prize system is a bloody sham more reminiscent of an age of patronage than it was even suitable for the 20th Century let alone the 21st. The way of fixing it would be for some other philanthropist to offer alternative awards based on a much fairer system. The Nobels could then be easily undermined if an alternative prize system offered much higher prize money to Nobel winners for them not to accept their prizes after they were awarded. If nothing else, the publicly alone would bring the Nobels into disrepute once the wider world knew the reasons. I'm well aware that rules governing the Nobel Prizes are fixed in stone by Alfred Nobel's estate but if it wanted to then Sweden could easily legislate law to override this arcane unfair system. It's a good start that at least the US Postal Service is honoring Wu.
- leereeves 6y agoIn particular, the rule limiting the award to three people needs to change. It was already a problem in Wu's case (she could have received the Nobel if not for that rule, along with several other experimental physicists who also confirmed the theory), and is now a critical problem because physics research today has a lot of huge team projects with dozens of authors. For example, the paper announcing the first observation of the Higgs boson [1] had hundreds of authors - none of whom received a Nobel for the discovery (the Nobel, like the Nobel for weak parity violation, was awarded to the theorists alone). But I'm not so sure about your proposed solutions. There are already many alternative rewards - Wu herself was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978 - and none come close to the public recognition that the Nobel has. And is it really possible for the Swedish legislature to dictate that the foundation grant awards contrary to Nobel's will? 1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312008581 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026931...
- dilippkumar 6y agoChien-Shiung Wu is the "First Lady of Physics" here. > Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-born American physicist, will be commemorated with a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) stamp for her significant contributions in nuclear physics during her 40-year career. More specifically, Wu’s experiment on parity violation that had a monumental impact on particle theory and floored physicists at the time, reports Adrian Cho for Science. Completely unrelated: "The first lady of the internet" has a more colorful story behind it. I'd recommend looking it up. Depending on what sources you find, this story might not be entirely SFW. :)
- dublin 6y agoHas Maria Goeppert-Mayer had a stamp? She was instrumental in discovering that electron shells fill from the outside in (this is still not taught in most classes - see her 1955 paper) She was a Nobel prize winning physicist, and until the modern era of Politically Correct Nobels, only the second woman to have won a Nobel in Physics other than Marie Curie.