New USPS Stamp Celebrates Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, The ‘First Lady’ Of Physics
Of all the injustices in Nobel Prize history, her 1957 Nobel snub is the most egregious.
One of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century was the discovery of quantum physics. At the smallest scales, nature didn’t behave like the classical laws of gravity and electromagnetism predicted, but rather started to display bizarre phenomena that clearly obeyed a new set of rules. As we dove deeper into the structure of matter, we discovered the atomic nucleus, made up of protons and neutrons, and a whole plethora of other particles — known today as the baryons and mesons — that are made of the same types of subatomic particles that make up protons and neutrons: quarks and gluons.
But it wasn’t just the structure of matter and the rules that are different between the quantum and classical worlds, but also the nature of symmetries. Classically, we see that matter and light obey the same laws of physics whether you flip directions the same way a mirror does, whether you replace particles with antiparticles (and vice versa), or whether you run the clock forwards or backwards. But in the quantum world, under the right conditions, these can all be violated. On February 11, 2021, the USPS honors the first physicist to…
