Session S05: Women in Quantum Physics

Laura Chalk and the Stark Effect

Laura M. Chalk (1904-1996) was the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in Physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The results of her doctoral research on the quantum phenomenon called Stark effect were the first published data to confirm the validity of Erwin Schrödinger's wave mechanics. This paper reconstructs her life and work, asking what the quantum revolution looked like from the standpoint of a young woman toiling in a sub-basement lab and striving to be, as she wrote in a later memoir, "just one of the boys". It also seeks to place her in historical perspective, comparing her experience to that of her predecessor at McGill, Harriet Brooks.    

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.      

Lucy Mensing: Forgotten Pioneer of Quantum Mechanics

In 1925 a young postdoc, Lucy Mensing, came to Göttingen to do research with matrix mechanics, which had just been formulated. In the following years she did groundbreaking work. She successfully made the first application of the new theory to diatomic molecules. As a by-product of this work, she was the first who found that from the allowed integer or half-integer quantum numbers of angular momentum, only the integer ones apply for orbital angular momentum. Pauli, being impressed by her clear and masterful treatment of the problem, invited her to work with him on the polarizability of gases. In my contribution I will sketch the pioneering work of Mensing and give a brief account of her life and her career, which ended in 1930 after she married and started a family.