The physicist Chien-Shiung Wu shattered notions about the way the world works. Despite the big bang she made in physics, though, I only recently discovered
her - too little too late for a girl who was excited by science but not the prospect of shuffling around with a bunch of stuffy men in lab coats.
Wu's father was the founder of the first school for girls in China and encouraged his daughter from an early age to pursue her education and her dreams of
becoming a scientist with equal fervor. And she did - despite various obstacles, the largest one being the old boys' club that was her chosen field,
experimental physics.
Wu's most famous experimental epiphany (and she had many; she even worked on the Manhattan Project) was announced in 1957. Working in conjunction with two
male scientists, Wu developed an experiment whose results overturned the fundamental principle of
conservation of parity.
For their work, the two men were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, while Wu's contributions were ignored.
Wu's work was appreciated by her colleagues, however, and during the course of her lifetime she was the first female to be awarded an honorary advanced degree
from Princeton, to win the National Academy of Sciences Comstock Award and to be elected as President of the American Physical Society.
She was also the first living scientist to have an asteroid named after her.
As Clare Boothe Luce has said, "When Dr. Wu knocked out that principle of parity, she established the principle of parity between men and women."
