Lost and Wanted(30)
Although I tend not to speak publicly on the subject, I have sometimes written about physics institutions and their problem with women. Recently I wrote a short blog post about hearing Chien-Shiung Wu speak soon after I arrived at Harvard in 1989. At the time I didn’t know who she was; I was a freshman studying in the Cabot Science Library when I ran into one of my teaching fellows, who excitedly informed me that I had the chance to hear one of the three greatest women in twentieth-century physics speak right that moment, and that I would regret it forever if I didn’t go.
The lecture took place in a small auditorium in the Chinese Department, where there was standing room only. Wu began her talk not with physics, but with the story of her life. She was seventy-seven years old at the time, wearing a gray silk jacket with a high collar. She said that she’d left China at twenty-four to pursue a PhD at the University of Michigan, but had chosen Berkeley over Michigan upon arrival, after hearing that women weren’t allowed to use that university’s front entrance. She described her struggles to secure an academic position as an Asian woman in America, followed by her recruitment onto the Manhattan Project by John Archibald Wheeler and Emilio Segrè. Segrè had remembered Wu’s thesis on the decay of radioactive uranium isotopes just in time to avert a crisis at the new B reactor at Hanford, Washington (where one of the LIGO interferometers is today). Her sensitive work during the war, as well as political events in China, prevented her return home in the fifties; her parents and her brothers were killed in the political convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, and she never saw them again. As we sat listening to the thin but still strong voice of the brilliant woman on the stage, my teaching fellow leaned over and whispered: “She gave up everything for science.”
As I write this, Wu has been dead twenty years. Had she won the physics Nobel in 1957, she would have been only its second female recipient. Her very difficult experiment undermined the physical law of conservation of parity: the idea, according to one biographer, that “the world reflected in the mirror appeared no less possible than the world in front of it.” Wu conducted her famous experiment using cobalt; when a radioactive cobalt nucleus decayed, conservation of parity dictated that it should shed electrons both with and against the nucleus’s spin. In fact, the electrons showed a marked preference for moving against the direction of spin. The idea that nature did indeed have a left and right preference—called “non-conservation of parity”—earned Wu’s theoretical collaborators, Chen Ning Yang and T. D. Lee, the Nobel in 1957; in spite of the fact that the Nobel can be given to three scientists at once, Wu wasn’t included.
When I was pregnant with Jack, I swam at MIT’s Z Center. As I grew larger and more unwieldy, I no longer had to compete for lane space; I was given a wide berth, almost as if I were contagious. But I’ve rarely felt more productive and alive than I did pulling the two of us through the water, thinking about the rippling pattern in the images then being collected by the WMAP satellite. Those ripples were left over from the shivering movement of the very first light in the universe, like tiny footprints in spacetime. I swam my twenty laps, trying to imagine the moment when that remnant heat was released, the journey it had traveled to reach our satellite today. I didn’t experience pregnancy brain (whatever that is) but published my second-most-cited paper with two collaborators near the end of month six.
After my sister and I hung up, I looked at the email again. The Swedish flag couldn’t be an accident. It made too much sense. And so, breaking that down:
= Charlie’s favorite flower, or: an example of the kind of luxury most people don’t bother with, which to Charlie was essential.
= Don’t worry.
= The medications she had been taking, or perhaps, the last one of which she’d availed herself.
= The Nobel Prize in Physics.
= Remember: it is a race and you don’t get points for anything but performance. Or in other words, do it for me.
I didn’t actually write those explanations down, but that was the way I thought of them. I thought for a good amount of time, with the cursor hovering impotently around “reply.” But once I decided, I wrote and quickly sent:
I know you’re there.
Ghost or thief or explicable internal glitch, how much damage could I do with a single sentence?
16.
Exit Charlie, she used to say sometimes, when she was going out. When she was in The Tempest our sophomore year, she would say Exeunt omnes, which she explained was Latin for when everyone—including the freshmen pressed into service as Reapers, Nymphs, and “strange Shapes”—left the stage together.
I have enough colleagues at Harvard that I’m there at least once a month. One afternoon in early September, I went to see Arty at his office on Oxford Street; it was a meeting we’d scheduled knowing that each of us would soon be swamped with a semester’s worth of work.
Normally I wouldn’t have gone through the Yard, but I had a little time before our meeting, and I’d promised to buy Jack a certain type of eraser, popular among his classmates. I parked in front of Arty’s office in Jefferson and crossed the old quadrangle, where I hadn’t been since the memorial service. It didn’t occur to me until I was right outside Thayer Hall that I’d done it because I wanted to look up at the first room Charlie and I had shared. The two blank third-floor windows produced no reaction in me, but when I jogged left around the southern edge of the building, avoiding a knot of tourists in front of the John Harvard statue, I heard her voice in my head, very clearly: Lough Derg.