Question 1

Who was Chien-Shiung Wu?

Accepted Answer

An experimental physicist whose 1956 experiment **overturned a law of physics that had been assumed universal** — and whose collaborators received the Nobel Prize for the theory her work confirmed, while she did not.

**The problem she solved.** Physicists had long assumed **conservation of parity**: that the laws of physics are indifferent to left and right, so any process and its mirror image should behave identically. Two theorists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, proposed that this might **not hold for the weak nuclear force**, but had no way to test it.

**They approached Wu**, who was among the foremost experimentalists working on beta decay.

**What the experiment required.** Cooling cobalt-60 to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, aligning the nuclear spins with a magnetic field, and measuring the direction in which electrons were emitted. It was technically formidable, and she cancelled a planned trip to carry it out.

**The result.** Electrons were emitted **preferentially in one direction** relative to the nuclear spin. The mirror image of the process did not occur equally. **Parity was violated**, which meant the universe distinguishes left from right at a fundamental level — a genuinely shocking finding that overturned a deeply held assumption.

**The prize.** The 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics went to **Lee and Yang**. Wu, whose experiment had demonstrated the effect, was not included. The omission has been criticised extensively since, and she later spoke about the treatment of women in science directly.

**Her other work:** she confirmed an important prediction of quantum electrodynamics, contributed to the Manhattan Project — including work on uranium enrichment and solving a problem that stalled a reactor — and conducted significant research on sickle cell disease.

**She was the first woman to preside** over the American Physical Society, and among the first to receive several major honours in the field.

**She was known as "the First Lady of Physics"** and, in her own laboratory, for exacting standards.

Question 2

Who was Jocelyn Bell Burnell?

Accepted Answer

The astrophysicist who discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student, and who was excluded from the Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery — a case that became a reference point in debates about

Question 3

Who was Lise Meitner?

Accepted Answer

The physicist who, with Otto Frisch, worked out the theoretical explanation for nuclear fission and gave it its name — and who was then excluded from the Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery, in

Question 4

Who was Emmy Noether?

Accepted Answer

A German mathematician whose work underpins both modern abstract algebra and theoretical physics — and who spent much of her career barred from the positions her work merited. Noether's theorem,

Question 5

Did Marie Curie really carry radium around in her pocket?

Accepted Answer

Yes. By her own account she kept tubes of radium and polonium in her pocket and in her desk drawer, and enjoyed looking at them glowing faintly in the dark laboratory at night. The dangers of

Question 6

Who was Dorothy Hodgkin?

Accepted Answer

A British chemist who used X-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional structures of biologically critical molecules — including penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin — and who remains the

Question 7

Who was Eunice Foote?

Accepted Answer

An American scientist and campaigner who, in 1856, demonstrated experimentally that carbon dioxide traps heat — three years before the work usually credited with founding climate science, and then

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