Before we get into the main article, I must admit that I don’t understand physics and I definitely skipped over most of the technical, sciency stuff when I was researching. Sorry. What I did understand, however, was that Chien-Shiung Wu was a genius who contributed enormously to our knowledge of physics, and that she truly lived up to the name given to her.

In Chinese script, the characters for Chien-Shiung mean ‘mighty hero’. Both halves were traditionally masculine names, and while part of the reason why she was named this way does likely fall to traditions, it is also likely that the break with gender norms was deliberate on her parents’ parts. Her father was a revolutionary who actively participated in the 1911 and 1913 revolutions, and her mother changed her name to give it a revolutionary meaning — she was Fu Hua, meaning ‘Rebuild China’. So it would have been a natural decision for them when their daughter was born in 1912 that she would have a fighting name just like her brothers.

Both of Wu’s parents believed in gender equality and education for girls. The latter was sparse in China at the time, with girls mostly being educated at home, so her father took it upon himself to found a small girls’ school. Wu attended for a time before leaving at the age of ten to attend a prestigious boarding school — this is where her love for science began.

Wu was an excellent pupil and received praise from teachers and classmates alike. Her father supported her in all her ambitions; when she entered university, she began a teacher-training program, which she quickly found to be a mistake. Seeing where his daughter’s true interests lay, her father brought home books on algebra, chemistry, and physics: an act which Wu herself said defined the trajectory of her life:

“Imagine what a near miss it had been. If it hadn’t been for my father’s encouragement, I wouldn’t have had the courage to select physics as a major field and I would be teaching grade school somewhere in China now.”

After her graduation summa cum laude, Wu undertook graduate-level study and was supervised by Gu Jing-Wei, who became an important role model for Wu. She had earned her PhD at the University of Michigan and encouraged Wu to do the same; she embarked for the US in August 1936. Her parents were extremely sad to see her go — tragically, though none of them knew it, it would be the last time they saw each other.

Wu was disappointed by Michigan. The university was segregated by gender and women could only enter the men’s building — which was much larger — whilst being accompanied by a man, plus they had to use a side door. As a daughter of revolutionaries, this behaviour repelled her, and she instead chose to study at the much more liberal University of California, Berkeley, where they also had advanced equipment in the laboratories. It was at Berkeley that Wu would meet her husband, fellow Chinese-American physicist, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan.

As she had done everywhere she went, Wu impressed at Berkeley, even winning over Raymond Birge, who was known to be prejudiced towards foreigners — especially the Chinese — women, and people who spoke with an accent. All of these applied to Wu, but apparently the man was still capable of recognising talent and he offered her immediate entry to the graduate programme.

Wu’s career grew from there, and she was well-liked by many around her. She completed her PhD in 1940 and was recommended by her supervisors for positions at numerous universities, though she didn’t manage to secure one. Instead, she remained a fellow at Berkeley and was reportedly preparing to return to China before the Pacific War, and later World War II, forced her to change her plans.

Wu and Yuan married in 1942, neither of their families able to attend due to the conflict. She became a professor at Smith College, but was unhappy there, as her role was exclusively teaching. Two years after her marriage, she joined the Manhattan Project and her contributions proved invaluable, though in later years she would distance herself from the project due to the destructive outcome.

When communications were restored with China, she again planned to return home, before being stopped once more by the Chinese Civil War. Her father would later tell her not to travel to Communist China, and around this time her Republic of China passport was invalidated in many countries. As such, Wu became a US citizen in 1954, and she would not make it back to China until 1962, by which point her parents and her older brother had all died. She did meet her uncle and younger brother, but they would both soon perish, tortured to death in the Cultural Revolution, during which her parents’ tombs were also destroyed.

Despite the personal tragedy, it was in the years after the war that Wu’s work truly took off. She remained in the US as a research professor at Columbia and she eventually became the ‘the undisputed leading experimentalist in beta decay and weak interaction physics’. Her son, Vincent, was born in 1947; as both husband and wife were at the height of their careers, Vincent lived with his father under the care of a nanny during the week, and the whole family reunited on weekends. It was also Wu’s husband who took charge of most of the housework for the remainder of their lives.

In the mid-1950s, two of Wu’s colleagues, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, raised questions about the previously self-evident law of parity conservation. Wu aided them in the development of their theory, and the proof was to come from her own experiment, known as the ‘Wu experiment’.

No-one knew just how important this experiment would turn out to be.

It was considered almost impossible that parity would not be conserved, so most did not pay too much attention, even some of the researchers. Not Wu: she once again cancelled a trip back to China to work on it, leaving her husband to go alone.

The results were groundbreaking for science and Wu practically wrote the whole paper herself. Even so, despite this, and despite the fact that they’d have no results if it weren’t for her, she had to fight to be named first, though her colleagues never denied that it was the right decision.

It seems incredible, therefore, that it was Lee and Yang who won the Nobel Prize. It was undoubtedly deserved, but Nobel Prizes allow for three recipients, so it is baffling why Wu did not also share in the honour.

Still, she did not go unlauded for her work. Her role in the discovery was finally publicly acknowledged in 1978, when she won the first ever Wolf Prize, now considered the second most prestigious prize in physics after the Novel. She was also appointed vice-president elect of the American Physical Society, which led to her becoming president in 1975 — all other presidents had been white men.

The years preceding her death in 1997 were dedicated to encouraging more women and girls to enter STEM fields, saying: “The world would be a happier and safer place to live in if we had more women in science.”

Sources:

• Calvin, Scott, Beyond Curie : Four Women in Physics and Their Remarkable Discoveries, 1903 to 1963 (San Rafael [California]: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2017)
• Indumathi, D, ‘Chien-Shiung Wu: The First Lady of Physics’, Resonance, 25.3 (2020), 333–52
• Lee, T. D, ‘Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-97) Experimental Physicist, Co-Discoverer of Parity Violation’, Nature (London), 386.6623 (1997), 334–334
• https://daily.jstor.org/chien-shiung-wu-the-first-lady-of-physics/
• https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/dr-chien-shiung-wu
• https://www.nps.gov/people/dr-chien-shiung-wu-the-first-lady-of-physics.htm