Chien-shiung Wu

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Chien-Shiung Wu (Chinese) pyin: W. Jiànxir2 (W.Giles) is a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made important contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the method for separating uranium from uranium-238 isotopes by gas diffusion. She is best known for executing the Wu experiment, which showed that parity is not preserved. Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was named recipient of the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Marie Curie's experience in experimental physics prompted comparisons to her. "The First Lady of Physics," the "Chinese Madame Curie", and the "Queen of Nuclear Research are among her nicknames."

Early life

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Liuhe, China, on May 31, 1912, the second of three children of Wu Zhong-Yi () and Fan Fu-Hua(). The family's tradition was that Chien was the first character (generation name) of their forename's name, followed by the characters in the Ying-Shiung-Jie word, which means "heroes and outstanding figures." Chien-Ying, her older brother, and Chien-Hao her younger brother, Chien-Hao, were among her siblings. Wu and her father were extremely close, and he ignited her passions by establishing a world in which she was surrounded by books, magazines, and newspapers. Wu's mother, a teacher, was a mentor and believed in both gender education. During the recent revolution led by Sun Yat-sen that modernized the world, Wu's father was an engineer who promoted women's equality and became a hero. Due to his modern ideals, her father embraced the movement. He even led a local militia that massacred out local bands and completely modernized Liuhe's little town, while still looking for girls from wealthy and poor families to enroll his new academy.

Education

Wu received her elementary school education at Ming De School, a girls' academy established by her father. Wu grew up in a wealthy and inquisitive household as a child. She did not play outside like the other boys, but rather enjoyed the newly introduced radio for pleasure and insight. She loved poetry and Chinese classics such as the Analects, as well as western literature on democracy that her father supported at home. Wu will read first, rather than children's tales until Wu learned how to read. She left her hometown in 1923 at the age of ten to attend Suzhou Women's Normal School No. 1. She lived in Laois, which was fifty miles away from her house. This was a boarding school with classes for teacher preparation as well as regular high school, and it introduced science courses that gradually became a growing passion among the young Wu. The admission to teacher training was more competitive because it did not charge for tuition or board, nor did it guarantee a job on graduation. Wu chosen the more competitive option out of a total of about 10,000 applicants, despite the fact that her family may not have afforded to pay.

Wu graduated at the top of her class in 1929 and was admitted to Nanjing's National Central University. According to federal laws of the time, teacher-training college students preparing to go to universities must serve as schoolteachers for one year. This was only nominally followed in Wu's case. She began teaching at a public school in Shanghai, the president of which was Hu Shih was the famous scholar. When she was in the United States, Hu became a very popular political figure, whom Wu regarded as a second father and would visit Wu as a second father. Hu was already Wu's tutor when she took a few classes at National China College and was immediately impressed after Wu, who sat in the front seat to be admired by her hero, completed and perfected the first three-hour exam in less than two hours. Her elders advised her to "ignore the obstacles." "Just put your head down and keep walking forward," her father always told her.

Although Wu did not end up doing scientific studies, her writing was still praised due to her early training. Some people lauded her Chinese calligraphy. Wu spent the summer preparing for her studies with her usual full force before matriculating to National Central University. She found that her experience and education in Suzhou Women's Normal School were insufficient to prepare her for majoring in science. Her father encouraged her to start learning and buy three books for her self-study this summer: trigonometry, algebra, and geometry. This was the start of her self-study program, and it gave her the confidence to major in mathematics in the fall of 1930.

Wu studied at National Central University (now known as Nanjing University) from 1930 to 1934, first majoring in mathematics, but later moved to physics. She became involved in student politics. At this moment, China and Japan's relations were tense, and students were urging the government to take a more positive stand with Japan. Wu was elected one of the university's top students by her peers because she was one of the university's best students, her involvement would be deemed by the authorities, or at least ignored. That being the case, she was careful not to neglect her studies. She was leading demonstrations at the Presidential Palace in Nanjing, where the students were welcomed by Chiang Kai-shek.

She completed graduate-level physics and worked as an assistant at Zhejiang University for two years after graduation. She began working at the Academia Sinica's Institute of Physics as a researcher. Gu Jing-Wei, a female professor who had earned her PhD at the University of Michigan, encouraged Wu to do the same. She became a key role model for the youth Wu, who increased self-confidence and was also open and honest when giving tips to close friends. Wu was accepted by the University of Michigan, and Wu Zhou-Zhi's uncle, Wu Zhou-Zhi, provided the required funds. On the SS President Hoover's journey to the United States with a female friend and chemist from Taicang, Dong Ruo-Fen (), she embarked on the SS President Hoover in August 1936. As she boarded the ship, her parents and uncle watched her off at the Huangpu Bund. When her mother was in tears that day, her father and uncle were devastated, and Wu did not know that she would never see her parents again. Although her family survived the Second World War, she would only visit the remaining members of her family decades later, when she made trips to China in the 1970s.

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Early physics career

Wu and Dong Ruo-Fen arrived in San Francisco, where Wu's graduate studies had changed after visiting the University of California, Berkeley. She met physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, a middle-class grandson from Yuan Shikai's concubine (the self-proclaimed president of the new Republic of China and Emperor of China for six months before his death). Luke did not talk much about Yuan Shikai, and Wu would tease him after her father revolted against Yuan Shikai. Yuan toured the Radiation Laboratory, where the director, Ernest O. Lawrence, who would shortly win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939 for his discovery of the cyclotron particle accelerator, was on display.

Wu was stunned by the sexism in American society when she found that at Michigan women were not even allowed to use the front door and decided to attend Berkeley in California, rather than Michigan. Wu was also influenced by her fascination in Lawrence's first cyclotron, but her decision would disappoint Dong, who studied at Michigan on her own. Despite the fact that the academic year had just started, Yuan brought her to Raymond T. Birge, the head of the physics department, and he offered Wu a spot in the graduate school. Wu resisted plans to study at Michigan and enrolled at Berkeley and enrolled at Berkeley. Margaret Lewis and Ursula Schaefer, a history undergraduate who preferred to remain in the United States rather than returning to Nazi Germany, were among Robert R. Wilson's classmates; some secretly admired Wu Wu and George Volkoff; her closest friends included post-doctoral student Margaret Lewis and Ursula Schaefer, a history student who preferred to stay in the United States rather than returning to Nazi Germany. Wu was seriously lacking Chinese cuisine and wasn't impressed with the Berkeley cuisine, so she and her friends, such as Schaeffer, dined at her favorite restaurant, the Tea Garden, often. Wu and her families would have free meals that were not on the menu due to her friendship with the chef. Wu applied for a scholarship at the end of her first year, but the department's head Birge had a bias against Asian students, and Wu and Yuan were instead given a readership with a lower stipend. Yuan then applied for and received a Caltech scholarship. Nevertheless, Birge respected Wu for her academic abilities and was the reason Wu could enroll despite the fact that the academic year had just begun.

Wu made rapid strides in her education and research. Lawrence, although she was her boss, worked closely with Emilio Segrè, the Italian physicist. She became his first teacher quickly, and the two researchers did research on beta decay, including xenons, which would have major implications in the future of nuclear bombs. Wu was a well-known student who was known for his intelligence, according to Segrè. Luis Alvarez, Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez, said of Wu in his autobiography.

Segrè praised Wu's brilliance and compared her to Wu's heroine Marie Curie, whom Wu also quoted, but Wu said Wu was more "worldly, elegant, and witty," according to Wu. Lawrence, on the other hand, referred to Wu as "the most talented female experimental physicist he's ever known" and that any laboratory will be "shining." It was two separate parts that were presented in a neat manner when it came time to present her thesis in 1940. The first was on bremsstrahlung, the electromagnetic radiation produced by a charged particle's deceleration by another charged particle, most often an electron by an atomic nucleus, with the latter being primarily an electron in an atomic nucleus. She looked at the first study using beta-emitting phosphorus-32, a radioactive isotope that can be produced in the cyclotron and used as a radioactive tracer in cancer therapy. This was Wu's first experience with beta decay, a subject on which she would be a king.

The second part of the thesis was about the synthesis of radioactive isotopes of Xe from the nuclear fission of uranium using the Radiation Laboratory's 37-inch and 60-inch cyclotrons. Wu's second part on Xe and nuclear fission was sorely influenced by her committee, which featured Lawrence and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who Wu affectionately described as "oppie" that Oppenheimer suspected Wu knew everything about the absorption cross section of neutrons, a model that would be used when Wu joined the Manhattan Project.

Wu completed her PhD in June 1940 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the US academic honor society. Despite Lawrence and Segrè's suggestions, she was unable to secure a faculty position at a university, so she stayed at the Radiation Laboratory as a post-doctoral fellow. The Oakland Tribune published "Outstanding Research in Nuclear Bombardments by a Petite Chinese Lady" in honor of her early contributions.

The report quipped,

When the Second World War began, her plans would have to change.

On May 30, 1942, Wu and Yuan were married at the home of Robert Millikan, Yuan's academic director and President of Caltech. Due to the outbreak of the Pacific War, neither the bride nor the groom's families were able to attend. Wu and Yuan migrated to the East Coast of the United States, where Wu became an assistant professor at Smith College, a private women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, while Yuan was researching radar for RCA. She found the job stressful, because her teaching duties only included teaching, and there was no space for study. She appealed to Lawrence, who wrote letters of recommendation to a number of universities. Smith retaliated by making Wu an associate professor and raising her salary. She accepted a Princeton University degree in New Jersey as the first female faculty member in the university's history, where she taught navy officers.

Wu began working at Columbia University's Subtute Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratories in March 1944. She spent time in a dormitory and returned to Princeton on weekends. The SAM Laboratories, led by Harold Utley, was created to promote the Manhattan Project's accelerated diffusion (K-25) scheme for uranium enrichment. Wu served in a group led by William W. Havens, Jr., whose job was to develop radiation detection equipment.

Colonel Kenneth Nichols, the Manhattan District Engineer, contacted Wu in September 1944. Wu was dissatisfied with her professorships and volunteered to assist with the project. Wu was originally intended to investigate the reactor's radiation effects by making her own instruments, but later, she was contacted for a larger role. The newly appointed B Reactor, the first practical nuclear reactor ever built, was unexpectedly slow to start up and shutting down at regular intervals. John Archibald Wheeler and his partner Enrico Fermi suspect that a fission product, Xe-135, had a half-life of 9.4 hours, and could have been a neutron poison or absorber. Segrè recalled Wu's 1940 PhD thesis on the radioactive isotopes of Xe at Berkeley, and told Fermi to "ask Ms. Wu." The paper was also unpublished, but after Fermi contacted Wu, Segrè and Nichols, she and Nichols visited her dorm room together and collected the typewritten draft for the Physical Review, it was also unpublished. Fermi and Wheeler's suspicions were unintentionally confirmed that Xe-135 was indeed the perpetrator of the B Reactor; it later revealed an unexpectedly wide neutron absorption cross-section. Wu, a war correspondent, waiting for a few months before her and Segrè published a complete report on the findings, which was published months before the bombs were used for the next year. Wu also used her research in radioactive uranium separation to develop the standard model for producing enriched uranium to fuel the atomic bombs at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee plant, as well as develop innovative Geiger counters. Wu, like many prominent physicists in their later years, distanced herself from the Manhattan Project due to its demise and recommendation that Taiwanese President Chiang Kai-shek never develop nuclear weapons. However, she was delighted to learn that her family was safe in China. Wu was recalled years later in an unusual occurrence that she revealed her role in constructing the bomb.

Wu accepted a position as an associate research professor at Columbia after the war ended in August 1945. She will continue at Columbia for the remainder of her career, and she was first named associate professor in 1952, making her the first woman to be a tenured physics professor in university history.

Wu experimented with Einstein's EPR thought experiment's results in November 1949, describing quantum entanglement as "spooky activity at a distance." Wu was the first to establish entanglement using photons, as her result reported Maurice Pryce and John Clive Ward's findings on the relationship between two photons propagating in opposite directions. The Wu experiment was the first significant confirmation of quantum results relevant to a pair of entangled photons (EPR) paradox, in particular.

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Honors, awards, and distinctions

• Elected a fellow of the American Physical Society (1948)
• Elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1958)
• Wu was the first woman with an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. The citation called Wu, "top woman experimental physicist in the world". (1958)
• Achievement Award, American Association of University Women (1959)
• Honorary degree from Smith College (1959)
• Wu won the Research Corporation Award, and dedicated the award to her teacher Hu Shih. The award is now housed in Nangang District, Taipei, where Hu's memorial is located. Wu spent two hours at the memorial, which was built after Hu suddenly collapsed and succumbed to a heart attack in the middle of a conference. Wu and her husband happened to be in that conference which was supposed to celebrate her career. (1958)
• John Price Wetherill Medal, The Franklin Institute (1962)
• American Association of University Women Woman of the Year Award (1962)
• First female to win the Comstock Prize in Physics, National Academy of Sciences (1964)
• Chi-Tsin Achievement Award, Chi-Tsin Culture Foundation (1965)
• Received an Sc.D. from Yale University (1967)
• Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1969)
• Wu was bestowed an honorary L.L.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The citation stated, "The charming lady who is being honoured on this occasion is reputed as the world's foremost female experimental physicist ... Dr. Wu has made one of the greatest contributions to the knowledge of the universe." (1969)
• First Pupin Professor in the history of Columbia University, which went with a citation that described Wu as "the first lady of physics research" (1973)
• Scientist of the Year Award, Industrial Research magazine (1974)
• Honorary degree from Harvard University (1974)
• Tom W. Bonner Prize, American Physical Society (1975)
• First female president of the American Physical Society (1975)
• Honorary doctorate from Dickinson College (1975)
• First female to be honored with the National Medal of Science in Physics, which is the highest presidential honor for American scientists (1975)
• First person selected to receive the Wolf Prize in Physics (1978)
• Woman of the Year award from the St. Vincent Culture Foundation under UNESCO, which was presented by the president of Italy (1981)
• Honorary degree from the University of Southern California (1982)
• Honorary degree from the University at Albany, SUNY
• Honorary degree from Columbia University (1982)
• Lifetime Achievement Award from Radcliffe College, Harvard University
• Honorary professorship from the University of Padua, where Wu was asked to deliver a lecture in the same hall as the Renaissance astronomer Galileo Galilei (1984)
• Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1984)
• Wu received only the second Blue Cloud Award from the Institute of China for her outstanding contributions to cultural exchanges between China and America. (1985)
• To celebrate the centennial of the creation of the Statue of Liberty, 80 distinguished Americans were chosen to be honored with the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. Wu was the only physicist in a group that featured Rosa Parks, Gregory Peck, and Muhammad Ali, whom she took a photo with on the day of the ceremony. (1986)
• Awarded only the second mayor's award of honor from then-New York City mayor Ed Koch (1986)
• Honorary degree from National Central University (1989)
• Has an asteroid (2752 Wu Chien-Shiung) named after her (1990)
• Pupin Medal, Columbia University (1991)
• Wu was awarded the Science for Peace prize from the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture in Erice, Italy "for her intense and vast scientific activity that has permitted the understanding of weak forces and for her engagement in the promotion of the role of women in science." The Ettore Majorana Centre, founded by the Sicilian government in 1963, is known worldwide for its scholarly meetings and graduate institutes with a membership of more than 56,000 scientists from over 100 nations. (1992)
• Elected one of the first foreign academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1994)
• Nobel laureates Chen-Ning Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee, Samuel C. C. Ting, and Yuan Tse Lee, together with other top physicists, established the Wu Chien-Shiung Education Foundation in Taiwan with the goal of promoting science to youths in Chinese communities worldwide. The foundation holds camps every summer that invite the top students in Science to participate, with many Nobel laureates of any ethnicity usually speaking in the camp's lectures. Competitions and face-to-face discussions are usually held with prestigious scholarships serving as the top prizes. Dialogues are all in Mandarin with professional translators who are hired to translate from other languages in real time. (1995)
• Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame (1998)
• Southeast University, one of the successors of National Central University, opened a college named in her honor. Wu was previously honored as an honorary professor in the university in 1990. (2003)
• The Taicang Normal School of Jiangsu Province was renamed into the "Suzhou Chien-shiung Institute of Technology" in her honor. (2004)
• First female nuclear and particle physicist to be honored with a street name at CERN called, Route C.S. Wu, and the second woman given the honor after Marie Curie (2004)
• Mingde Middle School held a memorial ceremony at Wu's cemetery located in the school campus. The 1,300 sq m cemetery was designed as a rounded viewing stand surrounded by flowers and trees, and was built by Southeast University in collaboration with the famous architect Ioeh Ming Pei. An educational activity titled "Promoting the Scientific Spirit of Chien-Shiung, and Be a Person of Moral Integrity" was launched among primary and middle school students across the city. Honorary president Jada Wu Hanjie was in attendance, as she habitually visited the school every month. The ceremony was sponsored by the Taicang municipal government. (2012)
• The Suzhou Chien-shiung Institute of Technology celebrated Wu's 100th birthday with a 23-foot bronze statue that weighed 8 tons at the center of the school in front of Xinjing lake, where it is surrounded by pine trees and cypresses. It was designed by Professor Zhang Yonghao and was based on her visit to the White House in the 1970s. Together with the statue was the inauguration of the Chien-Shiung Wu museum in the school. Other monuments, structures, and edifices include a stone inscription of Wu's biography, a large park called the Knowledge Square, and plenty of other tributes. (2012)
• Portrait was added into New York City Hall (2020)
• For the centennial of the 19th amendment that gave suffragettes the right to join fair elections, Time magazine released the 100 Women of the Year. This list was to represent each woman of the year from 1920 to 2019. The woman of the year would be the female counterpart to the disused, so-called "man of the year" that Time changed to "person of the year". Wu was on the magazine cover where she was called the woman of the year in 1945 for her crucial role in the Manhattan Project. This was the same year when US President Harry Truman was labeled man of the year for fully utilizing the very bomb Wu built, which he tested on Japan. (2020)
• Wu became only the eighth full-time physicist to be honored with a United States Postal Service postage stamp. The others include John Bardeen, Feynman, Fermi, Millikan, Einstein, and Josiah Gibbs. (2021)
• The United States Postal Service issued a Forever stamp featuring a portrait of Wu, designed by Ethel Kessler with art from Kam Mak. (2021)