Beyond Beta: Unpacking the "Personal and Political" in the Life of Chien-Shiung Wu*

The Chinese characters for the name Chien-Shiung mean “Strong Hero.” True to her name, Chien-Shiung Wu crossed the ocean as a young woman to pursue a physics PhD in the 1930s when relatively few of her gender and generation did so. Then, Wu conducted some of the most startling and historically important experiments of the twentieth century. The most well-known was her 1956 cobalt-60 experiment disproving parity conservation in beta decay.

Turn-of-the-century Chinese intellectualism, international politics, and American social constructions of gender and identity all influenced the public’s perception of Wu and of her accomplishments. Today, lively debate continues about whether she was improperly passed over for the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics. The broader question, though, is how cultural and gender expectations of the post-WWII era, and beyond, continue to obscure the story of Wu’s extraordinary contributions.