She’s Called The First Lady Of Physics, And She Was Invited To Work On The Manhattan Project

Did you know that there was a woman who was considered to be the ‘First Lady of Physics?’

Her name was Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, and she was a remarkable physicist who worked on developing the atomic bomb and changed our understanding of physics through her research on the law of conservation of parity.

Chien-Shiung was born in 1912 in Liuhe, China. Her father was an engineer who encouraged her to pursue a higher education which wasn’t very common for women in China at the time.

After graduating from National Central University with a degree in physics in 1934, Chien-Shiung moved to the United States to get her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.

There, she met her husband, physicist Luke Chia-Lu Yuan, and they got married in 1942 after she received her Ph.D. in 1940. They moved to the East Coast to begin their careers, and Chien-Shiung started experiencing the racial discrimination that arose during World War II.

She eventually got a job teaching physics at Smith College and then became one of the first female professors in the physics department at Princeton University. In 1944, she was invited to work on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University, where scientists were developing the atomic bomb.

Chien-Shiung’s contributions to the Manhattan Project were enormous, as her work with gaseous diffusion helped produce the large uranium quantities needed to build the atomic bomb.

When the war ended, Chien-Shiung began receiving recognition for her work and became the first woman to become a tenured faculty member in Columbia University’s physics department.

After becoming a United States citizen in 1954, Chien-Shiung was approached by theoretical physicists Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang to assist them in their research on the law of conservation. She made a fundamental discovery through research and experiments, which proved there was no evidence of the law of conservation and changed the way physicists work today.

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