Hey, everybody, we have some very exciting news. Our trip to Paris was a great success. We had an amazing time. So we are planning another trip, this time to Rome and Florence. It is from May fourteen. Folks from the US will depart on I guess if you're coming from somewhere else in the America's you would also depart on the thirteenth. We will spend four nights in Rome and three nights in Tuscany. Some highlights of what are in the plans the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's David, and the Chinqui Chetta, among others. Plus you're gonna have some free time to explore both Roman Tuscany on your own. So to get more information about this trip, go to defined Destinations dot com. That's D E F I N E D destinations all one word dot com. Scroll down to our trip right there on the home page and it'll have all the information about the itinerary, the pricing, how to reserve a spot, all of that. Welcome to stuff you missed in history last the production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we are going to talk about she and Chung Wu and she was one of the greatest experimental physicists of her era. She published papers that were influential before she was even out of graduate school and made multiple major contributions to the field during her career. In China, she became known as the Chinese Marie Curry. There's been a little debate about that nickname though, because in some folks minds, she and Curie were equals, so it was really apt. But to others whose work and her influence were beyond what Marie Curry was doing, and that makes the name Chinese Marie Curry a little maybe deprecating in some ways. Uh. And we have a note on names. Here you will see whose name both in the American style with her family name last, and in the Chinese style with the family name place first. Most English language sources in the United States and Europe used Shan Jung Woo, and she often styled her own name C. S. Woo. But she was born in China, she grew up there, and when you read about her family members and her friends in China, it's pretty much always the other way around, so when we were talking about her upbringing in China and her Chinese family will have their family names first rather than last, as well as hers, just so it's not weirdly inconsistent in that first chapter of the episode. Woo Chia Chung was born in Leohu, which is northeast of Shanghai, China, on mat one of nineteen twelve, that is April twenty nine on the lunar calendar. Her parents were Woo zong ki and Fan Fuhua. She was the middle of their three children, and she was their only daughter. Who's father was an engineer with a military background, and he had really progressive ideals. When he was in school, he had read a lot of Western material about the principles of equality and democracy. These publications are actually banned in China at the time, but in reading them, he really wanted to put these concepts that he found into practice. These were turbulent years, though the Shinhai Revolution also called the Chinese Revolution of nineteen eleven overthrew the Qing dynasty and established China as a republic. The region where the Wu family was living also had a bandit problem, and when Wu Chang Shuing was still a baby, her father established a militia to help deal with that problem. Once that was handled, though, he started turning his attention to his daughter's education. When and where they were living, it wasn't common for girls to be educated, especially highly educated, but Wuzani thought that educating girls would not only benefit the girls themselves, but would also help dispel prejudice against women, so he established the ming Do Women's Vocational School specifically to provide an education for girls and young women in the area. The first students at this school were relatives and friends of the Wu family. It eventually went on to have more than fifty female students from Leah and neighboring towns. The girls learned practical skills that they were likely to need in their later lives, including things like sewing and gardening, along with academic subjects like language, classical Chinese literature, science, and math. Wuchi and Seong, of course, started her education at this school and was described as a thoughtful, quiet child, but by the time she turned eleven, she had really gotten to the end of the school's curriculum. So in ninety three, she applied for admission into a boarding school that was the Studio Women's Normal School Number two. This school had two tracks. There was a regular high school and a teacher training program. The teacher training program was considered to be more prestigious, so that's the one that we applied for, and she placed ninth among ten thousand applicants to the school. Once she started attending, though, she learned that the regular school program had more in depth instruction in English, math, chemistry, and physics, so she started borrowing textbooks from her classmates to teach herself these subjects in her off hours. She graduated at the top of her class in nineteen nine, and she basically completed two different tracks at the school, one of them being studied that she was doing on her own. Because Wu had chosen the teacher training program, she normally would have been expected to spend a year teaching after she graduated, but she was a truly exceptional student. She was described as just brilliant, but also not arrogant and extremely devoted to her studies. So instead of teaching, she was recommended as a student at the National Central University which is now Southeast University in Nanjing, China. She started out as a math major, but in nineteen thirty, she switched to physics. She was partially inspired by a biography of Marie Cury that she had read as a team. But aside from that, there was a lot of groundbreaking work happening in physics at the time. Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in nineteen eleven, with Neil's Boors model of the atom following. A few years later. Einstein published his theory of general relativity in nineteen sixteen. These and other discoveries were still very new, and physics just seemed like an exciting, dynamic, and rapidly evolving field, so that is where Wu wanted to be. We studied at the university until nineteen thirty four, and during these years she was also called on by her classmates to act as a leader during student demonstrations. The social, political, and military climate of China was still really turbulent, especially in the context of escalating tensions between China and Japan. Japan invaded Manchuria on September eighteenth of nineteen thirty one while we were still a student at the university, and that led to students in China demanding that the nation declare war on Japan. Wood did not really think of herself as an activist or a revolutionary. Her classmates looked to her for leadership because several factors made it seem less likely that she'd be punished or penalized for what she was doing. She was a truly exceptional student, and people thought that the university was going to be less likely to penalize one of its best and brightest for their political involvement. Her father's own background in political views also made it seem like her family might be more supportive of her actions than other students families might. She was also very careful about how she planned these demonstrations, one of which was a peaceful sit in outside the presidential Palace. She intentionally chose locations where they were less likely to encounter police or the press. She also liked to choose dates that were just before holidays, reasoning that people would be eager to get home and so the protest would break up before things got too heated or do too much attention from law enforcement or the university. She really seems to have been trying to strike a balance between the expectations of her fellow students on her and her more pragmatic side. After graduating, in nineteen thirty four. She spent some time as a teaching assistant at a university before becoming a research assistant at Academia Seneca, which is a research academy in Taiwan. Her mentor there was another woman, goujing Wai, who had returned to China after earning her PhD in the United States, and she strongly encouraged Wou to pursue a similar course for herself. So in August of nine thirty six, Wo left China for the United States. Since there was not any passenger air service between China and the US yet, she and a friend planned to travel by boat, but they ran into a problem. They only had enough money to pay a second class fair, but the second class cabins were all sold out. Their only option was the one remaining first class cabin, which they really couldn't afford. Woo couldn't wait for a later sailing, so she negotiated for the two of them to be allowed to share the first class cabin while paying only the second class fair, as long as they only ate in the second class dining room, and this was fine with them. The first class cabin required formal dress for dinner, which they didn't really want to do. Woo dressed very elegantly her whole life, but dressing up for dinner every night was just too much. On this boat trip, Yeah, they were not. They were like, that's it, that's fine, it's fine if we do that. When we got to the US, though, things didn't go exactly as she had planned before leaving, and we will get to why after a sponsor break. When she left China, she planned to pursue a pH d at the University of Michigan and then to go back to China once she had finished her studies. She had secured financial support from the university, as well as some help from an uncle to make this happen, but first she planned to spend a week visiting a former classmate who lived in San Francisco. The classmate's husband worked at the University of California at Berkeley, so while she was in San Francisco, Wo got a tour of the campus, including the Chinese Students Association. One of the students there heard about her plans to study physics and introduced her to Luke Yuan, who was also from China and was studying physics at Berkeley. You once showed Wu through the university's physics research facilities, and Wu was very impressed. Berkeley had a radiation lab and a cyclotron and other new, cutting edge facilities that would offer a just incredible opportunity for research. Berkeley's physics faculty was also extremely impressive and included theoretical physicist Jay Robert Oppenheimer, as well as Ernest Lawrence, who would go on to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in nine. There was also Emilio Sega, who would later be awarded a Nobel Prize and had also studied under Enrico Fermi. Ernest Lawrence was extremely impressed with Wu, so much so that he encouraged her to stay at Berkeley rather than going on to Michigan as planned, and this was definitely a special case. Berkeley's academic calendar was ahead of Michigan's and classes had already been going on for a couple of weeks, but even so Wu decided that she would stay. In addition to her opinion of the facilities and the faculty, Will also realized that Berkeley was much more liberal than Michigan was likely to be, and she thought she might face less discrimination there. The university for her a comparable financial assistance package to the one that she'd had in Michigan. While she was at u C. Berkeley, who was described as kind, brilliant, thoughtful, and just really devoted to her studies, she immersed herself in the English language and American culture, but she also stuck to parts of her Chinese roots. She mostly ate Chinese food. She made arrangements with a local Chinese restaurant for her and three other students to eat there for twenty five cents a meal apiece. As part of this deal, they weren't ordering their own food, they were being served whatever the restaurant had extra of that day, plus as much rice as they wanted. She also mainly wore cepaw, which is a fitted high necked gown that was introduced in Shanghai in the nineties. That's also called h hansm. We made her own when she couldn't get them from China. For her entire academic career to this point, we had really focused on her studies, refusing to allow herself to be distracted by romantic relationships, and that changed at Berkeley. She dated a few and fairly steadily, eventually becoming more serious about Lukuan, who she had met during that earlier tour. By nine they were exclusive, although by that point he had transferred to another university because he had been receiving less financial aid than his peers, something that he attributed to discrimination. During her pH d work, Wo developed a reputation for just relentless accuracy and precision, something that she put into play for the entirety of her career and experimental physics. If she needed different materials to get more precise results, she used to them, and if she needed different or better equipment to get consistent enough measurements to answer the question she was trying to answer, she got them, sometimes figuring out for herself what specifically needed to be adjusted to get a fine enough level of accuracy. She proved herself to be truly masterful at designing the right experiment to test a particular theory and to get results that weren't muddied by inaccuracy or unclear data. Whose PhD research focused on the products of uranium fission, and she identified to xenon isotopes that were part of the process in uranium decay. She finished her PhD in nineteen forty. Her published thesis was regarded as way ahead of other PhD work. As a side note, previous podcast subject Luis Alvarez was at Berkeley for postdoctoral work while she was there, and he was on her thesis defense committee. Although she had planned to return to China after finishing her pH d work, when the time came, she couldn't. The Second Sino Japanese War had started in July of nineteen thirty seven, and that made returning home just impossible. By the time she finished her PhD, a lot of Europe was also at war with Germany, so she stayed in Berkeley for a while, but the university wouldn't offer her a faculty position. At the time, there were not any women on the physics faculty in the top twenty research universities in the United States, and in general, universities were reluctant to hire women, as well as racial, ethnic, or religious minorities wose Chinese nationality was a particular issue with this. The United States had banned immigration from China completely in the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two, and by nineteen forty, when she was graduating with her PhD, there were still strict quotas on immigration from China, with Chinese immigrants also banned from becoming US citizens. Eventually, though she was hired at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Lukewan had finished a PhD from the California Institute of Technology and was offered a job at r c A near Princeton, New Jersey. They married on May ninety two and moved east. Who was not really happy at Smith though she really missed Berkeley and her friends and the California weather. There's a lot of snow on the ground in Massachusetts right now, is a recording this, So I understand that she also missed doing research. This was a teaching position and not a research position, and she missed her husband. Northampton and Princeton are just hours apart by car. Eventually, Ernest Lawrence was at this point a Nobel laureate, wrote letters of recommendation to several universities on her behalf, and after that she was offered multiple jobs, including one at Princeton, which she took so that she could join her husband. She was the first female physics instructor at Princeton. In ninety four, Wu became part of the Manhattan Project at the Columbia University Substitute Alloy Materials lab. Her work there was primarily related to the development of radiation detectors, as well as the separation of uranium two thirty five and to thirty eight from uranium, or in other words, enriching uranium into a usable fuel. This and her earlier work on nuclear fission folded into the development of the atomic bomb. Wood didn't talk much about how she felt about this aspect of her work. I mean, scientists who were part of the Manhattan Project and the development of the bomb all had their own opinions and feelings on this. On the one hand, having grown up in China, she was acutely aware of Japan's wartime atrocities towards China and the need to bring World War Two to a swift end. On the other hand, she also thought the power of the atomic bomb was just too immensely destructive, and she hoped that one day the world could live together peacefully rather than needing that kind of weaponry. During these same years, WU helped troubleshoot an issue with the nuclear reactor at the Hanford site in Washington, which was part of the Manhattan Project as well. After being shut down, it took the reactor much longer than expected to restart, and it was not clear why this was happening. Wu helped pinpoint the problem as zenon one thirty five, which was one of the fission products of the reactor's uranium, and that was poisoning the process. That circled back to some of her pH d work. In March of ninety four, We started working as a senior scientist at Columbia University. This made her the first woman to hold a tenured faculty position in Columbia's physics department. This was also her return to academic research after spending time teaching at Smith and Princeton. She started studying beta decay, becoming one of the world's leading authorities on that subject, including experimentally proving Enrico Fermi's beita decay theories. In addition to her research work, she also taught, and she was described as having extremely high expectations of her students. She was also described as having a deeply loving and sweet relationship with her husband, one that did not follow the stereotypes of the time. Wu was extremely dedicated to her career and she was sometimes in the lab at all hours, so her husband did a lot of the cooking and housework, although Woo would cook if she had time or if they were having company. Yeah, they were both physicists, both working as physicists in their careers, and uh, he was maybe even doing more of the share of the household labor than she was. On February fifteenth, seven, they had a son, who they named Vincent, who's labor was really long and difficult, and she finally delivered via C section. In the process of all this, she lost a lot of blood and had to stay in the hospital for three weeks after. While she was there, Albert Einstein visited her. His sister was actually being treated in the same hospital. Wu and her husband were still hoping to return to China someday, but after the Communist Party came to power in nineteen nine, they decided to stay in the US. They did not want their son to be raised in a communist country, and soon the Korean War and increasing anti communist sentiment in the US made it impossible to even visit China. At some points, they hadn't even been able to send or receive mail from home. During the Sino Japanese War, for example, mail service was completely disrupted at this point, they had both come to the US to go to graduate school, and neither had been able to go back. By the nineteen fifties, though, they both needed to travel for their jobs, and they were having difficulty getting the necessary visas. Because of all the governmental changes and upheaval that China had gone through, their passports were no longer recognized as valid, so they went through a long immigration process. By this point, Chinese people could become US citizens, but there were still really tight quotas in place. We was naturalized as a US citizen in nineteen fifty four. Her most famous accomplishment was still to come, though, and we'll talk more about that. After we first paused for a little sponsor break. In nineteen fifty six, to scientists both born in China and working in the US came to chen Chung Wu for help. They were named Sung Down Lee and chen Ning Yang. They had noticed that no one had tested whether parody was conserved in beta decay, and they thought that it might not be. They wanted Wu to design an experiment to prove whether or not it was okay. So beta decay is a type of radioactive decay, which is when one of the sub atomic particles in an Adams nucleus breaks down, specifically, in beta decay, a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and an anti neutrino, or a proton decays into a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino. The electrons and positrons that are part of this are known as beta particles, and this type of decay is possible thanks to the weak nuclear force, which is one of the four fundamental forces in physics and parity in an extremely basic sense, is about the mathematical depiction of a sub atomic system as in a graph. Essentially, the universe does not really care whether one of these systems is spacing to the left or to the right. Everything going on in that system should still work the same way, and there should be no detectable difference in the graphs representing the left hand in the right hand version. The graph of each should just be a mirror image of the other. If you're thinking about this and it's making your mind hurt a little, please don't feel bad. Uh. Folks have probably heard about things like the law of conservation of mass and the law of conservation of energy. Basically, the idea that you cannot create or destroy mass or energy by normal chemical or physical means. Similarly, the conservation of parity was a fundamental understanding and quantum mechanics, just like the laws of conservation of mass and energy, are an accepted and fundamental part of basic physics. So the idea that maybe parody wasn't conserved in beta decay was potentially earth shattering. It was also hotly discussed among physicists, with some of them placing bets that nobody would ever prove that parity was not conserved. One even said that he would eat his hat if anyone ever did. Wu was so eager to study this question that she canceled a vacation with her husband to work on the project. At the time, the National Bureau of Standards in Washington was doing some work related to the polarization of nuclear systems, and Wu teamed up with the NBS to study beta decay using radioactive cobalt sixty. In this experiment, they cooled the cobalt down to an extremely cold temperature, as in barely above absolute zero, so that the atoms were moving as slowly as possible, and then they polarized to those atoms so that all of their nuclei were spinning in the same direction. Then they observed which way the beta particles went when they were admitted from the nuclei of the cobalt atoms. If the beta particles had symmetrical distribution, regardless of the polarity, parody was conserved. It turned out that they didn't. Most of the beta particles went in the opposite direction of the nuclear spin, and that means if you graph these results, you would see an obvious difference between the experiment and its mirror image. In other words, parody was not conserved. I'm gonna say again, if your mind still hurts my mind as too, it's okay. Louse experiment was the first to prove that parody was not conserved during beta decay, and she did this definitively. I mean, it was an unquestionable result. At the same time, though, there were people who were absolutely sure that parody was always conserved, and they were convinced that she had just made an error. Soon afterward, though, other experiments took place and they had the same results. We published a paper called Experimental Test of parity conservation in Beta decay in nineteen fifty seven, and that described what came to be known as the Wu experiment, and this was a huge development. It was regarded as the decade's biggest achievement in the world of physics. Lee and Yang were awarded the nineteen fifty seven Nobel Prize in Physics as a consequence. Sometimes this comes up as an instance of men getting credit for women's work undeservedly, but that's not exactly what happened. Wu created the first experiment that proved definitively Lee and Yang's theoretical work. That experiment and the theory were two different parts of the same discovery. And there were also some frustrations around the paper that she wrote. We wrote it herself without input from the four scientists of the National Bureau of Standards who had been part of this work. They had all thought they were equal partners with her in this experiment, but when Wu wrote the paper herself without consulting them, she they real eyes that she had been considering them as sort of her support team with her as the lead. That said, there were absolutely people who believed that Wu should have been included in that nineteen fifty seven Nobel Prize for Physics, including Jay Robert Oppenheimer, who said in a speech that Woo, Lee, and Yang should have all been recognized rather than just Lie and Yang. Yeah, they were all doing different but related work about the same question. It was not that Woo did something that Lie and Yang claimed that they had done, like, which is sort of how it's presented sometimes in articles on the internet about times that women did work that man got credit for. Right. They had figured this out, but they needed proof, and she was like the mechanism that provided the proof, right, right. So yeah, there's totally an argument about how the Nobel could have included all three of them, but they like, they were doing two different aspects of the same thing. Wu continued on with their teaching and her experimental work after this, including becoming a full professor or at Columbia. She applied her nuclear physics research to the study of sickle cell anemia at the atomic level, and she contributed to medical understanding of how that condition works in nineteen fifty eight. In nineteen sixty two, she and her husband made their first trip back to Asia, visiting Taiwan to deliver lectures, attend receptions, except awards, and just tour the region. By this point, both Wu's parents and her elder brother had all died. She had never seen them again after leaving for graduate school, and she had not been able to attend their funerals. In nineteen sixty six, her book Beta Decay was published, which she co authored with Stephen Masnowski of u c l A. This continues to be a fundamental text on that subject. As US diplomatic relationships with China improved, Wu made her first of several visits back there. In nineteen seventy three. She learned that her parents tombs had been desecrated during the Cultural Revolution, something that she received an official apology for. In nineteen seventy five, who became the first woman to serve as President of the American Physical Society. Although she was still doing research and teaching, she started spending more time working on social issues in the seventies as well, specifically on educational opportunities for women and on getting women into physics and other scientific fields. She was very critical of the fact that women still had so many fewer educational opportunities in a lot of the world than men did, and at one point she said quote, the world would be a happier and safer place to live if we had more women in science. She had applied this focus to her own work as well. She always insisted on equal pay with her male colleagues, and she corrected people when they called her by her husband's name. In ninety eight, who became the first person to be awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics, which is an international award by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. During her career, she was also awarded the National Medal of Science, the Comstock Prize, and many many other awards. She became the first woman to be a at an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. She was also the first Chinese American person in the United States National Academy of Science. During her career, she had also worked at some of the most notable research facilities in Europe and Asia, including it CERN. In night, Wu made a trip to China for what would have been her father's one hundredth birthday, and while there she established a memorial foundation to help fund scholarships and the library. She also campaigned for human rights and improved opportunities for girls in China. Chin Chung Wu died on February sixteenth, nine seven, at the age of eighty four at her request. Her cremated remains were scattered at the school that her father had founded. Today, asteroid two seven five to Woo Chien Shung is named after her. The citation at the I A U Minor Planet Center reads quote named in honor of Woo Chiang Shun. Born in China and currently pupin Professor Emerita at Columbia University. She is renowned for her work in nuclear physics, particularly in the experimental study of the beta decay of radioactive atomic nuclei. The precision and elegance of her experiments have earned her the title of greatest living woman physicist with co workers, she made her most famous contribution in ninety six with a critical experiment on polarized cobalt sixty beta decay. The result of this work, which substantiated the theory of Lee and Yang, shocked the world of physics and overthrew the concept of parody conservation in weak interactions. There's also a Chance Hung Wu Memorial Hall at her alma mater in Southeast University, and in she was inducted into the American National Women's Hall of Fame. In the words of Sun Dao Le Quote c. S. Wu was one of the giants of physics in the field of beta decay. She had no equal. I find her to be really incredible. Yeah, she's fantastic. Um, do you have a little bit of listener mail to go with this? I do. This is from Stacy and Stacy. He says, Happy Thanksgiving, Holly and Tracy. This came in on Thanksgiving Day. I wanted to share how excited I was to see your episodes on the occupation of Alcatraz pop up on my feed. I worked as a teacher at a tribal school in the Pacific Northwest for a year, and several of my colleagues from our culture department traveled to Alcatraz with our school canoe to participate in a paddle to Alcatraz to commemorate the anniversary. There was a pow wow and they got as many of the original occupiers as they could manage to get there. Once on Alcatraz, they gathered at the prison and sang a blessing song. The video is so deeply moving. The tribes in the Puget Sound area do a major canoe paddle in the Sound every summer, and I believe some of the tribes around the Bay area want to start something similar in the future. It was so amazing to see the photos and stories my colleagues brought back from that weekend. Another movement that definitely helped to fuel the occupation was the fishing wars here in the Pacific Northwest, which started early mid sixties. It was a movement of tribes in the area to finally access their treaty right. It's to fish, and they're accustomed places. There's a member of the tribe that I worked with who tells a powerful story about fishing with her family when she was four or five and having to be quickly taken away from the river by her grandma who tried to shield her eyes because the game wardens were there and arresting everyone who was fishing, her parents included. The area tribes won a landmark case in nineteen seventy four that finally granted them their treaty fishing rights. Uh. Stacy's email continues on on a more personal note, So I'm just gonna end what we're reading today there. Thank you so much, Stacy for this note. Um. I wanted to read it for a couple of reasons. One, I'm glad that somebody wrote in with a connection to some of the folks that went out to Alcatraz for the anniversary this year. And also, uh, if all goes according to plan, the Fishing Wars and the Fishing Movement UM is going to be part of an episode after the first of the year. So fingers crossed that my plan does come to fruition UM folks will get to hear about that a little later on. So you so much, Stacy. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast where History podcasts at I heart radio dot com. That's a new email address that we have started getting some email from, So thanks, folks for updating your your address books if we're in there. We are also all over social media at missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can come to our website, which is missed in History dot com and find show notes for all the episodes Holly and I have worked on together and a searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can subscribe to our show in Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and anywhere else you get podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radios. How Stuff works for more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, everybody, we have some very exciting news. Our trip to Paris was a great success. We had an amazing time. So we are planning another trip, this time to Rome and Florence. It is from May fourteen. Folks from the US will depart on I guess if you're coming from somewhere else in the America's you would also depart on the thirteenth. We will spend four nights in Rome and three nights in Tuscany. Some highlights of what are in the plans the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's David, and the Chinqui Chetta, among others. Plus you're gonna have some free time to explore both Roman Tuscany on your own. So to get more information about this trip, go to defined Destinations dot com. That's D E F I N E D destinations all one word dot com. Scroll down to our trip right there on the home page and it'll have all the information about the itinerary, the pricing, how to reserve a spot, all of that. Welcome to stuff you missed in history last the production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we are going to talk about she and Chung Wu and she was one of the greatest experimental physicists of her era. She published papers that were influential before she was even out of graduate school and made multiple major contributions to the field during her career. In China, she became known as the Chinese Marie Curry. There's been a little debate about that nickname though, because in some folks minds, she and Curie were equals, so it was really apt. But to others whose work and her influence were beyond what Marie Curry was doing, and that makes the name Chinese Marie Curry a little maybe deprecating in some ways. Uh. And we have a note on names. Here you will see whose name both in the American style with her family name last, and in the Chinese style with the family name place first. Most English language sources in the United States and Europe used Shan Jung Woo, and she often styled her own name C. S. Woo. But she was born in China, she grew up there, and when you read about her family members and her friends in China, it's pretty much always the other way around, so when we were talking about her upbringing in China and her Chinese family will have their family names first rather than last, as well as hers, just so it's not weirdly inconsistent in that first chapter of the episode. Woo Chia Chung was born in Leohu, which is northeast of Shanghai, China, on mat one of nineteen twelve, that is April twenty nine on the lunar calendar. Her parents were Woo zong ki and Fan Fuhua. She was the middle of their three children, and she was their only daughter. Who's father was an engineer with a military background, and he had really progressive ideals. When he was in school, he had read a lot of Western material about the principles of equality and democracy. These publications are actually banned in China at the time, but in reading them, he really wanted to put these concepts that he found into practice. These were turbulent years, though the Shinhai Revolution also called the Chinese Revolution of nineteen eleven overthrew the Qing dynasty and established China as a republic. The region where the Wu family was living also had a bandit problem, and when Wu Chang Shuing was still a baby, her father established a militia to help deal with that problem. Once that was handled, though, he started turning his attention to his daughter's education. When and where they were living, it wasn't common for girls to be educated, especially highly educated, but Wuzani thought that educating girls would not only benefit the girls themselves, but would also help dispel prejudice against women, so he established the ming Do Women's Vocational School specifically to provide an education for girls and young women in the area. The first students at this school were relatives and friends of the Wu family. It eventually went on to have more than fifty female students from Leah and neighboring towns. The girls learned practical skills that they were likely to need in their later lives, including things like sewing and gardening, along with academic subjects like language, classical Chinese literature, science, and math. Wuchi and Seong, of course, started her education at this school and was described as a thoughtful, quiet child, but by the time she turned eleven, she had really gotten to the end of the school's curriculum. So in ninety three, she applied for admission into a boarding school that was the Studio Women's Normal School Number two. This school had two tracks. There was a regular high school and a teacher training program. The teacher training program was considered to be more prestigious, so that's the one that we applied for, and she placed ninth among ten thousand applicants to the school. Once she started attending, though, she learned that the regular school program had more in depth instruction in English, math, chemistry, and physics, so she started borrowing textbooks from her classmates to teach herself these subjects in her off hours. She graduated at the top of her class in nineteen nine, and she basically completed two different tracks at the school, one of them being studied that she was doing on her own. Because Wu had chosen the teacher training program, she normally would have been expected to spend a year teaching after she graduated, but she was a truly exceptional student. She was described as just brilliant, but also not arrogant and extremely devoted to her studies. So instead of teaching, she was recommended as a student at the National Central University which is now Southeast University in Nanjing, China. She started out as a math major, but in nineteen thirty, she switched to physics. She was partially inspired by a biography of Marie Cury that she had read as a team. But aside from that, there was a lot of groundbreaking work happening in physics at the time. Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in nineteen eleven, with Neil's Boors model of the atom following. A few years later. Einstein published his theory of general relativity in nineteen sixteen. These and other discoveries were still very new, and physics just seemed like an exciting, dynamic, and rapidly evolving field, so that is where Wu wanted to be. We studied at the university until nineteen thirty four, and during these years she was also called on by her classmates to act as a leader during student demonstrations. The social, political, and military climate of China was still really turbulent, especially in the context of escalating tensions between China and Japan. Japan invaded Manchuria on September eighteenth of nineteen thirty one while we were still a student at the university, and that led to students in China demanding that the nation declare war on Japan. Wood did not really think of herself as an activist or a revolutionary. Her classmates looked to her for leadership because several factors made it seem less likely that she'd be punished or penalized for what she was doing. She was a truly exceptional student, and people thought that the university was going to be less likely to penalize one of its best and brightest for their political involvement. Her father's own background in political views also made it seem like her family might be more supportive of her actions than other students families might. She was also very careful about how she planned these demonstrations, one of which was a peaceful sit in outside the presidential Palace. She intentionally chose locations where they were less likely to encounter police or the press. She also liked to choose dates that were just before holidays, reasoning that people would be eager to get home and so the protest would break up before things got too heated or do too much attention from law enforcement or the university. She really seems to have been trying to strike a balance between the expectations of her fellow students on her and her more pragmatic side. After graduating, in nineteen thirty four. She spent some time as a teaching assistant at a university before becoming a research assistant at Academia Seneca, which is a research academy in Taiwan. Her mentor there was another woman, goujing Wai, who had returned to China after earning her PhD in the United States, and she strongly encouraged Wou to pursue a similar course for herself. So in August of nine thirty six, Wo left China for the United States. Since there was not any passenger air service between China and the US yet, she and a friend planned to travel by boat, but they ran into a problem. They only had enough money to pay a second class fair, but the second class cabins were all sold out. Their only option was the one remaining first class cabin, which they really couldn't afford. Woo couldn't wait for a later sailing, so she negotiated for the two of them to be allowed to share the first class cabin while paying only the second class fair, as long as they only ate in the second class dining room, and this was fine with them. The first class cabin required formal dress for dinner, which they didn't really want to do. Woo dressed very elegantly her whole life, but dressing up for dinner every night was just too much. On this boat trip, Yeah, they were not. They were like, that's it, that's fine, it's fine if we do that. When we got to the US, though, things didn't go exactly as she had planned before leaving, and we will get to why after a sponsor break. When she left China, she planned to pursue a pH d at the University of Michigan and then to go back to China once she had finished her studies. She had secured financial support from the university, as well as some help from an uncle to make this happen, but first she planned to spend a week visiting a former classmate who lived in San Francisco. The classmate's husband worked at the University of California at Berkeley, so while she was in San Francisco, Wo got a tour of the campus, including the Chinese Students Association. One of the students there heard about her plans to study physics and introduced her to Luke Yuan, who was also from China and was studying physics at Berkeley. You once showed Wu through the university's physics research facilities, and Wu was very impressed. Berkeley had a radiation lab and a cyclotron and other new, cutting edge facilities that would offer a just incredible opportunity for research. Berkeley's physics faculty was also extremely impressive and included theoretical physicist Jay Robert Oppenheimer, as well as Ernest Lawrence, who would go on to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in nine. There was also Emilio Sega, who would later be awarded a Nobel Prize and had also studied under Enrico Fermi. Ernest Lawrence was extremely impressed with Wu, so much so that he encouraged her to stay at Berkeley rather than going on to Michigan as planned, and this was definitely a special case. Berkeley's academic calendar was ahead of Michigan's and classes had already been going on for a couple of weeks, but even so Wu decided that she would stay. In addition to her opinion of the facilities and the faculty, Will also realized that Berkeley was much more liberal than Michigan was likely to be, and she thought she might face less discrimination there. The university for her a comparable financial assistance package to the one that she'd had in Michigan. While she was at u C. Berkeley, who was described as kind, brilliant, thoughtful, and just really devoted to her studies, she immersed herself in the English language and American culture, but she also stuck to parts of her Chinese roots. She mostly ate Chinese food. She made arrangements with a local Chinese restaurant for her and three other students to eat there for twenty five cents a meal apiece. As part of this deal, they weren't ordering their own food, they were being served whatever the restaurant had extra of that day, plus as much rice as they wanted. She also mainly wore cepaw, which is a fitted high necked gown that was introduced in Shanghai in the nineties. That's also called h hansm. We made her own when she couldn't get them from China. For her entire academic career to this point, we had really focused on her studies, refusing to allow herself to be distracted by romantic relationships, and that changed at Berkeley. She dated a few and fairly steadily, eventually becoming more serious about Lukuan, who she had met during that earlier tour. By nine they were exclusive, although by that point he had transferred to another university because he had been receiving less financial aid than his peers, something that he attributed to discrimination. During her pH d work, Wo developed a reputation for just relentless accuracy and precision, something that she put into play for the entirety of her career and experimental physics. If she needed different materials to get more precise results, she used to them, and if she needed different or better equipment to get consistent enough measurements to answer the question she was trying to answer, she got them, sometimes figuring out for herself what specifically needed to be adjusted to get a fine enough level of accuracy. She proved herself to be truly masterful at designing the right experiment to test a particular theory and to get results that weren't muddied by inaccuracy or unclear data. Whose PhD research focused on the products of uranium fission, and she identified to xenon isotopes that were part of the process in uranium decay. She finished her PhD in nineteen forty. Her published thesis was regarded as way ahead of other PhD work. As a side note, previous podcast subject Luis Alvarez was at Berkeley for postdoctoral work while she was there, and he was on her thesis defense committee. Although she had planned to return to China after finishing her pH d work, when the time came, she couldn't. The Second Sino Japanese War had started in July of nineteen thirty seven, and that made returning home just impossible. By the time she finished her PhD, a lot of Europe was also at war with Germany, so she stayed in Berkeley for a while, but the university wouldn't offer her a faculty position. At the time, there were not any women on the physics faculty in the top twenty research universities in the United States, and in general, universities were reluctant to hire women, as well as racial, ethnic, or religious minorities wose Chinese nationality was a particular issue with this. The United States had banned immigration from China completely in the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two, and by nineteen forty, when she was graduating with her PhD, there were still strict quotas on immigration from China, with Chinese immigrants also banned from becoming US citizens. Eventually, though she was hired at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Lukewan had finished a PhD from the California Institute of Technology and was offered a job at r c A near Princeton, New Jersey. They married on May ninety two and moved east. Who was not really happy at Smith though she really missed Berkeley and her friends and the California weather. There's a lot of snow on the ground in Massachusetts right now, is a recording this, So I understand that she also missed doing research. This was a teaching position and not a research position, and she missed her husband. Northampton and Princeton are just hours apart by car. Eventually, Ernest Lawrence was at this point a Nobel laureate, wrote letters of recommendation to several universities on her behalf, and after that she was offered multiple jobs, including one at Princeton, which she took so that she could join her husband. She was the first female physics instructor at Princeton. In ninety four, Wu became part of the Manhattan Project at the Columbia University Substitute Alloy Materials lab. Her work there was primarily related to the development of radiation detectors, as well as the separation of uranium two thirty five and to thirty eight from uranium, or in other words, enriching uranium into a usable fuel. This and her earlier work on nuclear fission folded into the development of the atomic bomb. Wood didn't talk much about how she felt about this aspect of her work. I mean, scientists who were part of the Manhattan Project and the development of the bomb all had their own opinions and feelings on this. On the one hand, having grown up in China, she was acutely aware of Japan's wartime atrocities towards China and the need to bring World War Two to a swift end. On the other hand, she also thought the power of the atomic bomb was just too immensely destructive, and she hoped that one day the world could live together peacefully rather than needing that kind of weaponry. During these same years, WU helped troubleshoot an issue with the nuclear reactor at the Hanford site in Washington, which was part of the Manhattan Project as well. After being shut down, it took the reactor much longer than expected to restart, and it was not clear why this was happening. Wu helped pinpoint the problem as zenon one thirty five, which was one of the fission products of the reactor's uranium, and that was poisoning the process. That circled back to some of her pH d work. In March of ninety four, We started working as a senior scientist at Columbia University. This made her the first woman to hold a tenured faculty position in Columbia's physics department. This was also her return to academic research after spending time teaching at Smith and Princeton. She started studying beta decay, becoming one of the world's leading authorities on that subject, including experimentally proving Enrico Fermi's beita decay theories. In addition to her research work, she also taught, and she was described as having extremely high expectations of her students. She was also described as having a deeply loving and sweet relationship with her husband, one that did not follow the stereotypes of the time. Wu was extremely dedicated to her career and she was sometimes in the lab at all hours, so her husband did a lot of the cooking and housework, although Woo would cook if she had time or if they were having company. Yeah, they were both physicists, both working as physicists in their careers, and uh, he was maybe even doing more of the share of the household labor than she was. On February fifteenth, seven, they had a son, who they named Vincent, who's labor was really long and difficult, and she finally delivered via C section. In the process of all this, she lost a lot of blood and had to stay in the hospital for three weeks after. While she was there, Albert Einstein visited her. His sister was actually being treated in the same hospital. Wu and her husband were still hoping to return to China someday, but after the Communist Party came to power in nineteen nine, they decided to stay in the US. They did not want their son to be raised in a communist country, and soon the Korean War and increasing anti communist sentiment in the US made it impossible to even visit China. At some points, they hadn't even been able to send or receive mail from home. During the Sino Japanese War, for example, mail service was completely disrupted at this point, they had both come to the US to go to graduate school, and neither had been able to go back. By the nineteen fifties, though, they both needed to travel for their jobs, and they were having difficulty getting the necessary visas. Because of all the governmental changes and upheaval that China had gone through, their passports were no longer recognized as valid, so they went through a long immigration process. By this point, Chinese people could become US citizens, but there were still really tight quotas in place. We was naturalized as a US citizen in nineteen fifty four. Her most famous accomplishment was still to come, though, and we'll talk more about that. After we first paused for a little sponsor break. In nineteen fifty six, to scientists both born in China and working in the US came to chen Chung Wu for help. They were named Sung Down Lee and chen Ning Yang. They had noticed that no one had tested whether parody was conserved in beta decay, and they thought that it might not be. They wanted Wu to design an experiment to prove whether or not it was okay. So beta decay is a type of radioactive decay, which is when one of the sub atomic particles in an Adams nucleus breaks down, specifically, in beta decay, a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and an anti neutrino, or a proton decays into a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino. The electrons and positrons that are part of this are known as beta particles, and this type of decay is possible thanks to the weak nuclear force, which is one of the four fundamental forces in physics and parity in an extremely basic sense, is about the mathematical depiction of a sub atomic system as in a graph. Essentially, the universe does not really care whether one of these systems is spacing to the left or to the right. Everything going on in that system should still work the same way, and there should be no detectable difference in the graphs representing the left hand in the right hand version. The graph of each should just be a mirror image of the other. If you're thinking about this and it's making your mind hurt a little, please don't feel bad. Uh. Folks have probably heard about things like the law of conservation of mass and the law of conservation of energy. Basically, the idea that you cannot create or destroy mass or energy by normal chemical or physical means. Similarly, the conservation of parity was a fundamental understanding and quantum mechanics, just like the laws of conservation of mass and energy, are an accepted and fundamental part of basic physics. So the idea that maybe parody wasn't conserved in beta decay was potentially earth shattering. It was also hotly discussed among physicists, with some of them placing bets that nobody would ever prove that parity was not conserved. One even said that he would eat his hat if anyone ever did. Wu was so eager to study this question that she canceled a vacation with her husband to work on the project. At the time, the National Bureau of Standards in Washington was doing some work related to the polarization of nuclear systems, and Wu teamed up with the NBS to study beta decay using radioactive cobalt sixty. In this experiment, they cooled the cobalt down to an extremely cold temperature, as in barely above absolute zero, so that the atoms were moving as slowly as possible, and then they polarized to those atoms so that all of their nuclei were spinning in the same direction. Then they observed which way the beta particles went when they were admitted from the nuclei of the cobalt atoms. If the beta particles had symmetrical distribution, regardless of the polarity, parody was conserved. It turned out that they didn't. Most of the beta particles went in the opposite direction of the nuclear spin, and that means if you graph these results, you would see an obvious difference between the experiment and its mirror image. In other words, parody was not conserved. I'm gonna say again, if your mind still hurts my mind as too, it's okay. Louse experiment was the first to prove that parody was not conserved during beta decay, and she did this definitively. I mean, it was an unquestionable result. At the same time, though, there were people who were absolutely sure that parody was always conserved, and they were convinced that she had just made an error. Soon afterward, though, other experiments took place and they had the same results. We published a paper called Experimental Test of parity conservation in Beta decay in nineteen fifty seven, and that described what came to be known as the Wu experiment, and this was a huge development. It was regarded as the decade's biggest achievement in the world of physics. Lee and Yang were awarded the nineteen fifty seven Nobel Prize in Physics as a consequence. Sometimes this comes up as an instance of men getting credit for women's work undeservedly, but that's not exactly what happened. Wu created the first experiment that proved definitively Lee and Yang's theoretical work. That experiment and the theory were two different parts of the same discovery. And there were also some frustrations around the paper that she wrote. We wrote it herself without input from the four scientists of the National Bureau of Standards who had been part of this work. They had all thought they were equal partners with her in this experiment, but when Wu wrote the paper herself without consulting them, she they real eyes that she had been considering them as sort of her support team with her as the lead. That said, there were absolutely people who believed that Wu should have been included in that nineteen fifty seven Nobel Prize for Physics, including Jay Robert Oppenheimer, who said in a speech that Woo, Lee, and Yang should have all been recognized rather than just Lie and Yang. Yeah, they were all doing different but related work about the same question. It was not that Woo did something that Lie and Yang claimed that they had done, like, which is sort of how it's presented sometimes in articles on the internet about times that women did work that man got credit for. Right. They had figured this out, but they needed proof, and she was like the mechanism that provided the proof, right, right. So yeah, there's totally an argument about how the Nobel could have included all three of them, but they like, they were doing two different aspects of the same thing. Wu continued on with their teaching and her experimental work after this, including becoming a full professor or at Columbia. She applied her nuclear physics research to the study of sickle cell anemia at the atomic level, and she contributed to medical understanding of how that condition works in nineteen fifty eight. In nineteen sixty two, she and her husband made their first trip back to Asia, visiting Taiwan to deliver lectures, attend receptions, except awards, and just tour the region. By this point, both Wu's parents and her elder brother had all died. She had never seen them again after leaving for graduate school, and she had not been able to attend their funerals. In nineteen sixty six, her book Beta Decay was published, which she co authored with Stephen Masnowski of u c l A. This continues to be a fundamental text on that subject. As US diplomatic relationships with China improved, Wu made her first of several visits back there. In nineteen seventy three. She learned that her parents tombs had been desecrated during the Cultural Revolution, something that she received an official apology for. In nineteen seventy five, who became the first woman to serve as President of the American Physical Society. Although she was still doing research and teaching, she started spending more time working on social issues in the seventies as well, specifically on educational opportunities for women and on getting women into physics and other scientific fields. She was very critical of the fact that women still had so many fewer educational opportunities in a lot of the world than men did, and at one point she said quote, the world would be a happier and safer place to live if we had more women in science. She had applied this focus to her own work as well. She always insisted on equal pay with her male colleagues, and she corrected people when they called her by her husband's name. In ninety eight, who became the first person to be awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics, which is an international award by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. During her career, she was also awarded the National Medal of Science, the Comstock Prize, and many many other awards. She became the first woman to be a at an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. She was also the first Chinese American person in the United States National Academy of Science. During her career, she had also worked at some of the most notable research facilities in Europe and Asia, including it CERN. In night, Wu made a trip to China for what would have been her father's one hundredth birthday, and while there she established a memorial foundation to help fund scholarships and the library. She also campaigned for human rights and improved opportunities for girls in China. Chin Chung Wu died on February sixteenth, nine seven, at the age of eighty four at her request. Her cremated remains were scattered at the school that her father had founded. Today, asteroid two seven five to Woo Chien Shung is named after her. The citation at the I A U Minor Planet Center reads quote named in honor of Woo Chiang Shun. Born in China and currently pupin Professor Emerita at Columbia University. She is renowned for her work in nuclear physics, particularly in the experimental study of the beta decay of radioactive atomic nuclei. The precision and elegance of her experiments have earned her the title of greatest living woman physicist with co workers, she made her most famous contribution in ninety six with a critical experiment on polarized cobalt sixty beta decay. The result of this work, which substantiated the theory of Lee and Yang, shocked the world of physics and overthrew the concept of parody conservation in weak interactions. There's also a Chance Hung Wu Memorial Hall at her alma mater in Southeast University, and in she was inducted into the American National Women's Hall of Fame. In the words of Sun Dao Le Quote c. S. Wu was one of the giants of physics in the field of beta decay. She had no equal. I find her to be really incredible. Yeah, she's fantastic. Um, do you have a little bit of listener mail to go with this? I do. This is from Stacy and Stacy. He says, Happy Thanksgiving, Holly and Tracy. This came in on Thanksgiving Day. I wanted to share how excited I was to see your episodes on the occupation of Alcatraz pop up on my feed. I worked as a teacher at a tribal school in the Pacific Northwest for a year, and several of my colleagues from our culture department traveled to Alcatraz with our school canoe to participate in a paddle to Alcatraz to commemorate the anniversary. There was a pow wow and they got as many of the original occupiers as they could manage to get there. Once on Alcatraz, they gathered at the prison and sang a blessing song. The video is so deeply moving. The tribes in the Puget Sound area do a major canoe paddle in the Sound every summer, and I believe some of the tribes around the Bay area want to start something similar in the future. It was so amazing to see the photos and stories my colleagues brought back from that weekend. Another movement that definitely helped to fuel the occupation was the fishing wars here in the Pacific Northwest, which started early mid sixties. It was a movement of tribes in the area to finally access their treaty right. It's to fish, and they're accustomed places. There's a member of the tribe that I worked with who tells a powerful story about fishing with her family when she was four or five and having to be quickly taken away from the river by her grandma who tried to shield her eyes because the game wardens were there and arresting everyone who was fishing, her parents included. The area tribes won a landmark case in nineteen seventy four that finally granted them their treaty fishing rights. Uh. Stacy's email continues on on a more personal note, So I'm just gonna end what we're reading today there. Thank you so much, Stacy for this note. Um. I wanted to read it for a couple of reasons. One, I'm glad that somebody wrote in with a connection to some of the folks that went out to Alcatraz for the anniversary this year. And also, uh, if all goes according to plan, the Fishing Wars and the Fishing Movement UM is going to be part of an episode after the first of the year. So fingers crossed that my plan does come to fruition UM folks will get to hear about that a little later on. So you so much, Stacy. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast where History podcasts at I heart radio dot com. That's a new email address that we have started getting some email from, So thanks, folks for updating your your address books if we're in there. We are also all over social media at missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can come to our website, which is missed in History dot com and find show notes for all the episodes Holly and I have worked on together and a searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can subscribe to our show in Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and anywhere else you get podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radios. How Stuff works for more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.