Welcome back to Asia in Science! This week, Young4STEM and the world celebrate Women in STEM! Today, we talk about science’s overlooked ‘law-breaker’, Chein-Shiung Wu.
The Wu Chein Crater
"Scientists Prove Law of Nature Broken" hegemonized The New York Times on April 9, 1957. Contradicting the long-held notion, the Wu Experiment took Quantum Physics by storm.
Chein-Shiung Wu was born in 1912 Suzhou, at a time when girls were rarely educated. Fortunately, her father, Wu Zhong-Yi, believed otherwise. He founded a school to ensure that his daughter’s intellect would never be stifled by society’s contorted expectations.
Soon after, with nothing but a suitcase and an insatiable hunger for knowledge, Wu left China for the University of California, Berkeley. Her recurrent obstacles were not limited to nuclear physics, they sprawled to the infinite complexities of racism and misogyny. Wu had to make her name in a world reluctant to acknowledge her genius.
While the Allied and the Axis powers garishly aggrandized the power of the atomic bomb, she focused on the essentials —quietly solving problems that others deemed impossible.
Until the late 1950s, physics had long believed in the sacredness of symmetry. The revolutionary Wu experiment decisively demonstrated the violation of parity symmetry in weak nuclear interactions. By observing the beta decay of cobalt-60 nuclei in a magnetic field, she showed that the emitted electrons preferred one direction over the opposite, thus disproving the notion that physical laws are symmetric.
It was not a breakthrough; something was reborn, as it often is, through a woman's hands. Her discovery was indisputably the greatest of the time, more than worthy to win the Nobel Prize. Patriarchy triumphed over justice; the award went only to her male colleagues.
Though uncredited by the Nobel Committee, her contributions could not be erased. Chein-Shiung Wu did not dwell on injustices; instead, she continued her work unrecognised, making strides in experimental physics that shaped the field for decades. Consequently, she became the first woman to serve as president of the American Physical Society and received the National Medal of Science.
The First Lady of Physics may not have been awarded the Nobel Prize, but she earned something greater—immortality in the laws of physics themselves. Today, her name is written in the cosmos—literally. A crater on the moon bears her name, a fitting tribute to a woman who sought the stars.
Wu once asked, ‘Do atoms have a gender?’ reminding the world that science belongs to everyone. Her story is not just about one woman—it is about the countless women whose brilliance has been ignored, their names etched with sympathetic ink in the margins of history.
I hope you learnt something new. Thank you for reading!
-Mihika Singhania
Credits/Sources:
Cover page by @motley.desginco
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