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Women in Physics and Their Scientific Contributions

http://www.physics.utah.edu/~jui/women_in_physics.pdf

Physics Dept. Undergraduate SeminarC. Jui, Jan 19, 2017

Based on previous version given in 2005

A Historical Review

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Women in Physics Faculty Positions• Graph shows % of

women faculty in physics by country

• Any Patterns?

~1985

• Communist countries?

• Catholic countries seem to have higher % of women in physics than predominantly Protestant Countries???

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10 years hence• Things had improved

and are continuing to improve, but the U.S. still has a long way to go:Only about 10% faculty members are womenCompared to Spain where that fraction is closer to 25% (but only 3% are full professors!)

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Explanation?• Some explanations were offered by

Prof. Giulia Pancheri of INFN-Frascati during a conference in Helsinki, 2003.http://www.lnf.infn.it/theory/pancheri/helsinki_w.pdf

• At the start of the Age of Enlightenment when science and technology were advancing rapidly, most research work was done or sponsored by royalty/aristocracy, performed in the private laboratories.

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Early Women Physicists/Astronomers• In this private/court setting,

women participated along side their male siblings and spouses:

• Sophie and Tycho Brahe (Astronomical data from which Kepler developed his three Laws of Planetary Motion)

• Caroline and William Herschel (discovered Uranus and many comets)

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Research Shifts to Universities• During the 17th

Century, research activities shifted from private laboratories to universities.

• Universities did not admit women: The elite women became excluded!

• Examples of U.K. and U.S.A. provided by Prof. Pancheri

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The Reformation• The Reformation

brought about the dissolution of convent schools: these were in many instances the only educational resource available to women

• King Henry VIII ordered convent schools destroyed: established “public” schools (male only!) Martin LutherKing Henry VIII

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Laura Bassi: Prodigy of Bologna• Received a Ph.D. and was appointed faculty

member at University of Bologna in 1732 (she was 21 years old!)

• University of Bologna was the first University in the world (established 1189)

• Laura Bassi, an experimental physicist, was the first female college instructor of any kind in Europe!

• She was also the second woman ever to receive a doctorate degree of any discipline.

• In addition to being a professor and a researcher, she was also a prominent social hostess and mother of 8 (some claim 12).

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Progressive Leadership• How is it that the University which could not

protect its scholars from the Inquisition became so progressive?– a 70-year old Galileo Galilei, professor at University

of Bologna was tried for heresy and tortured in 1633 for advocating Copernicus’ Heliocentric Model

• The genius of Laura Bassi was recognized by Cardinal Prospero Lambertini (later Pope Benedict IVX), a progressive leader and a prodigy himself( received Doctorate in Law and Theology at age 19).

• In addition to Bassi, he also appointed Maria Agnesi (famous mathematician and nun) to the University of Bologna in 1750*.

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Bassi’s Work• As a “reader”, Laura Bassi lectured at the University.

• Bassi had to be chaperoned (by older ladies) while lecturing in the Amphitheater (students and other faculty were all male).

• Bassi had her own laboratory in which she conducted various experiments in Newtonian mechanics – she was a leading experimentalist

• She was the ONLY woman to experiment in electro-magnetism before Hertha Ayrton (~1890).

Hertha Marks Ayrton: First woman elected to the Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1898.

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Bassi’s Science• Married fellow faculty member (physician) Giovanni Veratti: they collaborated on medical applications of electricity

• Bassi repeated many of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments, She and Veratti installed the first lightning rod in Bologna

• Bassi’s work in electro-magnetism was continued by Luigi Galvani at Bologna and Alessandro Volta (inventor of the battery) at University of Pavia: both went on to become household names.

Luigi Galvani: Discovered the electro-chemical basis for nerve action

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ChallengesIn Italy today:• 23% of physics professors

in Italy are women• There are more female

physics students (both undergraduate and graduate) than male.

• All graduate candidates take the same competitive exam for placement.

• Even now, however, the “glass-ceiling” at the top positions persists.

Bassi’s Legacy• Her marriage was decried

by the Bolognese public -who wanted her to be their “learned virgin” married to the University

• She was criticized for relatively low number of papers because of interference from family duties.

• She did not become a full professor until age 65 in 1776.

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Maria Sklowdowka Curie• Born in Warsaw• Arrived in Paris in 1891 for

university studies at the Sorbonne.

• Received degree in physics in 1893, another in mathematics in 1894, and a teacher’s diploma in 1896

• 1895: married Pierre Curie: who had already discovered “Piezoelectric Effect” and was to submit his Ph.D. thesis on magnetism (“Curie’s Law”: M=CB/T) the same year.

Maria Sklowdowka in 1891 before departing for Paris

Pierre Curie

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Radiation• In 1897 Mme. Curie started her Ph.D. thesis research on a systematic investigation of “radiation” discovered by Röntgen and Becquerel.

• Becquerel’s discovery of ionizing radiation from uranium was not met with excitement. He reported it at l’Académie des sciences on a routine Monday meeting where his colleagues listened politely and then moved on to the next item on the agenda

Wilhelm Röntgen Henri Becquerel

Mme. Curie had at her disposal the piezoelectric electrometer, invented by spouse Pierre and his brother Jacques, for the measurement of very weak currents

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Surprising Results• Very early in her work, Mme. Curie discovered that thorium gives off the same radiation as uranium

• She also observed that the amount of radiation depended only on the amount of U or Th atoms present, independent of the chemical compound !!!.

• Pierre abandoned his own research and joined her in radiation research

• She went on to look at ores with U and Th. In pitchblende, they found evidence of much more radioactive components.

Source: Lecture by Nanny Fröman to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, February 28, 1996

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Discovery!• They soon isolated what

appear to be two previously unknown elements

• One is a metal chemically similar to bismuth: they named it polonium in honor of her homeland

• The second was an alkali metal with properties almost identical to barium: named radium.

• The Curies were a true partnership: evidence by the intertwined entries in their lab notebook.

• These discoveries were submitted as Mme. Curie’s Ph.D. thesis in 1903.

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Nobel Prize and Honor!• In the same year (1903) in

which Mme. Curie presented her Ph.D. thesis, the Curies were jointly awarded ½ the Nobel Prize in Physics.

• Mme. Curie went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

• In 1995 the French government honored the Curies by disinterring their bodies and reburying them at the Panthéon in Paris (near the Sorbonne).

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Lise Meitner• Lise Meitner was born to a

Jewish family in Vienna, Austria.

• Austria had prohibitions against women attending universities. This was lifted in 1901 and she entered University of Vienna and studied with Ludwig Boltzmann

• “Boltzmann (who committed suicide in 1906) gave her the vision of physics as a battle for ultimate truth, a vision she never lost.“ (Otto Frisch, nephew)

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Work on radioactive substances• Meitner received her

Ph.D. in 1907. And went to work with Max Planck at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.

• She collaborated for 30 years with Otto Hahn on radioactive substances.

• Hahn and Meitner were both headed separate sections: Meitner worked on the physics and Hahn on the chemistry.

Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in their Laboratory in

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Nuclear Fission!• Meitner moved to Sweden in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria.

• After the discovery of neutrons by James Chadwick in 1932, researchers were bombarding radioactive elements with neutrons

• Hahn found evidence of barium in the debris from neutron bombardment of uranium

• Meitner and nephew Frisch used Bohr’s liquid drop model and suggested giant resonancefrom neutron bombardment leading to fission.

Otto HahnJames Chadwick

Lise Meitner’s laboratory table

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No Nobel Prize for Meitner!

• In 1944, Otto Hahn received the Nobel prize in chemistry, which astonished him when he heard About it after the end of WWII.

• He was also shocked that a nuclear weapon had been constructed based on their discovery

• Meitner did not received the Nobel Prize (why?)!!!

• Neither Hahn nor Meitner worked on the bomb.

• Ironically Meitner is often referred to as the Mother of the Nuclear Bomb.

Recommended Reading:

“Lise Meitner, A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime

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Rosalind Franklin• Rosalind Franklin went to one of the few girls’ schools in London that taught physics and chemistry

• She received a chemistry degree from Newham College, Cambridge in 1941.

• Awarded Ph.D. in chemistry in 1945 from Cambridge for work on carbon and graphite microstructures.

• Worked in Paris (1947-1950) and began working with X-ray diffraction techniques.

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Franklin and DNA Work• Franklin returned to England in 1951 to work

at King’s College, London.• She was given a lab of her own by director

John Randall and assigned the task of working on DNA structure

• Maurice Wilkins, who had previously worked on DNA but was not active, was on leave. On his return he thought she was a lab assistant.

• Many authors mistakenly identify Wilkins as Franklin’s supervisor

• In fact the two were equals at Randall’s lab.

Maurice Wilkins

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X-ray Diffraction of DNA

• Famous diffraction photograph #51 (of B-DNA) that Wilkins showed Watson and Crick

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Scientific Misconduct?• Franklin made by far the best

X-ray diffraction photos• During 1951-1953 she almost

solved the DNA structure: she had already measured the unit cell dimensions

• She was scooped by Watson and Crick: they were shown one of her diffraction photographs along with unit cell dimensions by Wilkins.

• Watson and crick published in Nature in 1953. Franklin’s own article appeared in the same issue as supporting evidence

James Watson and Francis Crick:

Crick was known to have been giving seminars claiming that using X-ray crystallography to study DNA structure was a futile “mad pursuit”

Watson reduced Franklin to a insignificant caricature in his 1968 book “The Double Helix”

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No Nobel Prize for Franklin• Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian

cancer in 1958.• James Watson, Francis Crick, and

Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1962.

• Neither Watson nor Crick mentioned Franklin in their Nobel addresses.

• Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.

• To her death, Franklin never knew that Wilkins had shown Watson and Crick her diffraction photo.

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I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. But this was not the case. Her dedicated austere life could not be thus explained — she was the daughter of a solidly comfortable, erudite banking family.

Excerpt from “The Double Helix” by James Watson (Scribner, 1968)

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Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA. Not that at times he'd didn't see some reason for her complaints — King's had two combination rooms, one for men, the other for women, certainly a thing of the past. But he was not responsible, and it was no pleasure to bear the cross for the added barb that the women's combination room remained dingily pokey whereas money had been spent to make life agreeable for him and his friends when they had their morning coffee.Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot. To start with, she had been given to think that she had a position for several years. Also there was no denying that she had a good brain. If she could keep her emotions under control, there was a good chance she could really help him. But merely wishing for relations to improve was taking something of a gamble, for Cal Tech's fabulous chemist Linus Pauling was not subject to the confines of British fair play. Sooner or later Linus, who had just turned fifty, was bound to try for the most important of all scientific prizes. There was no doubt he was interested. … The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.

Excerpt from “The Double Helix” by James Watson (Scribner, 1968)

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Chien-Shiung (Madame) Wu• From Shanghai, China• Received her Ph.D. from UC

Berkeley in 1940• Worked on the Manhattan Project

(development of the first nuclear bomb in Los Alamos) during WWII

• Taught at Smith College and at Princeton

• Joined Columbia University in 1944 and remained there for the next 37 years

• Mme. Wu died in 1997.

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No Nobel for Wu!• In 1956, Mme. Wu’s Columbia colleagues T.D. Lee and C. N. Yang proposed the idea of parity-violation.

• Mme. Wu performed a milestone experiment to demonstrate this effect

• Lee and Yang won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957.

• Mme. Wu did not share the prize. She did later receive a Wolf Prize.

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Mileva Marić• Born in Hungary to

Serbian parents• Was one of very few

women ever accepted in the same program at Zurich (now ETH) that Albert Einstein was in

• Took the same classes as Albert Einstein

• According to biographer Andrea Gabor, was a better student than Albert

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Mileva Marić• In 1986, previously unknown

documents, including “love letters” were found.

• Discovery of a “love child” named Liserl given up for adoption

• In some of these letters (~1901-1903) references were made of “our work” and “our theory of relative motion”

• Some, including Gabor, claim that Marić did all of Einstein’s mathematical work (allegedly witnessed by a boarder)

• Supporting evidence from linguistic analysis.

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Mileva Marić• Soviet Academician Abram Joffe, working as Rontgen’s post-

doc ~1905, claimed to have seen the original manuscript of the Paper on Special Relativity (Electrodyamics) with the name “Einstein-Marity” (Hungarian form of Marić)

• Marić was known to have used that form of name (customary in Switzerland)

• Albert was not known to have used that name…although some men in Switzerland do adopt such hyphenations…it is not required nor is it common (State department document attests to this convention to this day).

• Evidence is inconclusive and controversial.• One hour documentary film “Einstein’s Wife” aired by PBS

http://www.pbs.org/opb/einsteinswife/

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Katherine Johnson, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015