01
How hard is it for a woman?
In 2018, the Nobel Prize was awarded in the historical record:
Both the Physics Prize and the Chemistry Prize are awarded to female scientists. The difficulty of women winning the Nobel Prize in Science is actually very large.
In 2015, China's Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in Physiology. However, in China, it is difficult for men, not to mention women, but also men to win the Nobel Prize.
But you may not know that sixty years ago, a Chinese woman almost won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Her name is Wu Jianxiong.
02
How hard was it to be a woman sixty years ago?
In 1957, the year was boiling all over China:
Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao won the Nobel Prize in Physics. At that time, the two had not yet become American citizens and were still Chinese citizens.
This year Chinese although it was a big hit, it could have been more popular.
The work of Yang and Li is mainly theoretical. If theoretical work is to win awards, it must be tested by experiments.
Who is doing this experiment? It is Wu Jianxiong.
Even today, it is very difficult for women to get ahead in the fields they are engaged in, let alone in the field of physics dominated by men.
Wu Jianxiong was treated unfairly in terms of treatment similar to women today.
But the career achievements she has achieved are far higher than the women who are now talking about guns and complaining about others.
03
Born as a master
The name "Wu Jianxiong" sounds very domineering.
When Wu Jianxiong was born, the family named her "Jianxiong" according to the ranking of "Hero Haojie".
The Wu family is full of heroic spirit, especially Wu Jianxiong's father, Wu Zhongyi.
He did two things that had a profound impact on Wu Jianxiong's life:
The first thing is to suppress bandits.
In 1912, Wu Jianxiong was born in Taicang, Jiangsu Province. Taicang is a place where the people are fierce, Wu Jianxiong's childhood, bandits are in turmoil, the people are not happy.
His father, Wu Zhongyi, had participated in the Shanghai merchant group, studied military theory, practiced martial arts, and participated in the second revolution against Yuan Shikai.
After returning to his hometown, he was not accustomed to the arrogance of the bandits, so he organized an armed force of his own, went up the mountain to directly pound the bandits' lairs, and personally shot and killed the bandit leader.
The bandit plague in Taicang, Jiangsu Province, was bulldozed by him in one fell swoop.
Wu Zhongyi often recited Li Qingzhao's poems in front of Wu Jianxiong: "Born as a master, dead as a ghost." "He himself is a hero that everyone admires.
Wu Jianxiong's life did not have the twisting attitude of ordinary girls, but was cheerful and lively, and her courage was extremely large, and her father had the greatest influence on the cultivation of her character.
The second thing is to create a girls' school.
At that time, it was a big mistake for women to read.
Wu Zhongyi was influenced by Western ideas and insisted that there was no way out for those who did not read, so he demolished the idols in the temple and transformed the broken temple into a girls' school.
However, due to the feudal and closed thinking of the villagers, no one came after the school opened.
Wu Zhongyi took Wu Jianxiong, his mother and aunt, and the whole family to persuade the villagers to send girls to study.
Slowly, the sound of reading in the school boiled up, which was a faint and persistent sound in the dark night of the Republic of China.
Wu Jianxiong also fell in love with reading and learning in his father's words and deeds.
A woman, as long as she loves to read and learn, and learns not to dwell on the private feelings of her children, her life is almost immeasurable.
04
Death also loves Hu Shi
Wu Jianxiong said that the person who had the greatest influence on her, in addition to her father Wu Zhongyi, there was another man, that is, Hu Shi.
In middle school, Wu Jianxiong was admitted to Suzhou Second Women's Normal College. Among the tens of thousands of students who applied for the exam, she took the ninth place.
Although Wu Jianxiong's name is very domineering, he actually looks very temperamental. Some people once said that the most beautiful woman in the Republic of China is not Lin Huiyin, but Wu Jianxiong.
But Wu Jianxiong did not "bully and commit crimes" (Cantonese, that is, to use beauty to commit crimes), she did not have the heart to fall in love, nor did she care about the things that ordinary girls care about, such as makeup and dressing up, hooking up with boys.
She just wants to read. In his spare time, Wu Jianxiong's favorite magazine is "New Youth". The most beautiful articles in "New Youth" are all written by Hu Shi.
The object of the average girl's favorite is the boy in the next class, and the idol in Wu Jianxiong's heart is Hu Shi.
Once, the school invited Hu Shi to give a speech. The principal knew that Wu Jianxiong liked Hu Shi very much and asked her to record the speech.
Wu Jianxiong's girlish heart fluttered and jumped violently all night.
After graduating from Suzhou Women's Normal College, Wu Jianxiong was admitted to Central University, but she had a year of free time.
She decided to go to China Public School in Shanghai to attend classes. Because Hu Shi was there as the principal.
Hu Shi originally did not know this little girl. Once in an exam, he found this little girl sitting in the front row, and the content of the original three-hour exam had been completed in two hours.
Hu Shi looked at her examination papers and was ecstatic: he had never seen a student so familiar with the three-hundred-year intellectual history of the Qing Dynasty, and immediately gave a hundred points.
Later, Hu Shi found that Wu Jianxiong often scored one hundred points in other classes, not only studying hard, but also mastering both arts and sciences, and all of them were excellent in literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
Hu Shi sighed: "No wonder she can submit a report to CUHK." ”
Since then, Hu Shi has looked at Wu Jianxiong differently and taken extra care.
Wu Jianxiong entered the mathematics department of CUHK, and Hu Shi often came to see her. In fact, Hu Shi came to see the woman he was in love with at that time, Cao Chengying.
Hu Shi and Cao Chengying are in love, but there is a "tigress" Jiang Dongxiu at home, and the date does not dare to be blatant.
Cao Chengying and Wu Jianxiong are very familiar, and Hu Shi also knows Wu Jianxiong, so every time Hu Shi and Cao Chengying date, he looks for Wu Jianxiong to come out to make a "light bulb".
Over time, Hu Shi also began to correspond with Wu Jianxiong, and his relationship became better and better.
After Wu Jianxiong worked in Shanghai, Hu Shi once visited her, separated all the people around him, and talked to her alone for a long time. Wu Jianxiong went to the United States, and Hu Shi also visited her when he visited.
Hu Shi traveled and saw the collection of letters by the British physicist Rutherford, and knew that Wu Jianxiong definitely liked it, and specially bought it to send it to the United States for her.
Being so good to his own students, it is inevitable that there will be gossip. Wu Jianxiong was afraid that Hu Shi would not be happy, and specially wrote to Hu Shi to explain:
"Why do many people love to fly short and long? Thinking of the great responsibility you are now shouldering, I dare not even think of admiration, I hope you can forgive me, as long as you know that I sincerely admire you, I am happy enough. ”
She deliberately explained that her feelings for him were respect, admiration, not admiration, and she was really afraid of losing this humble gentleman-like teacher.
In fact, she underestimated Hu Shi too much. With Hu Shi's character, the gentleman is frank and frank, and he will not mind these statements at all.
Hu Shi once wrote to her: "I have sprinkled flowers and seeds everywhere in my life, most of which have been sprinkled on stones, and one of them has been sprinkled in the anointed land, and a Wu Jianxiong has grown, and I can also be extremely pleased." ”
In the 1960s, Wu Jianxiong and Hu Shi attended a cocktail party in Taiwan, and that night Hu Shi fell to the ground and died suddenly, and Wu Jianxiong was "so sad that he couldn't cry."
At the memorial service, Wu Jianxiong did not tell the story of Hu Shi's exploits like others, but bluntly said that Hu Shi's personal life was unfortunate: his marriage was not free, his feelings were not respected as they deserved, and he was always bound by Confucian ethics and morality, and did not dare to pursue his heart.
Wu Jianxiong's feelings for Hu Shi are clear-headed and deep into the bone marrow, she knows Hu Shi's greatness, and she also knows Hu Shi's loneliness.
Knowing that he sinned against him was because he loved him too much.
05
Wear a cheongsam for experiments
Wu Jianxiong, who was deeply inspired by Hu Shi, knew that to pursue his career bravely, he must go to the United States.
In 1936, at the age of 24, Wu Jianxiong came to the United States and entered the University of California, Berkeley, to study for a doctorate, under the supervision of nuclear physicist Sergray.
Many people who come from poor and backward China to the advanced and free United States will quickly embrace new things and become "fake foreign devils" in the United States.
But Wu Jianxiong has always insisted on two things: eating, she only eats Chinese food; wearing clothes, she only wears a cheongsam.
Let's start with eating. On her first day in the United States, Wu Jianxiong found that American food was not at all what she could eat. So she ran out of the campus and looked for Chinese restaurants everywhere.
After painstaking efforts to find a Chinese restaurant, she grinds hard and hard, and convinces the boss to allow her to eat here every day at half the normal price.
Then there's the cheongsam. Whether at home or abroad, Wu Jianxiong always has only one kind of dress, that is, the qipao.
On the grass of Berkeley, you can see such a scene every day: Wu Jianxiong, wearing a split-edge fork and an elderly plain cheongsam, slowly walked through and walked into the experimental building and teaching building.
For experiments, she also wore a cheongsam; in class, she still wore a cheongsam.
Imagine a Chinese beauty in a cheongsam, speaking the most difficult physics in fluent English, and must be captivating american college students.
During World War II, Song Meiling also wore a cheongsam and conquered American politics; today, Wu Jianxiong is still a cheongsam and conquered the American scientific community.
And her influence is destined to be deeper and farther than Song Meiling.
The only time Wu Jianxiong did not wear a cheongsam was when he got married. She wore a white veil and married the true son of her life.
06
Love is a dream that two people share
Did Wu Jianxiong ever love Hu Shi? Maybe there is. But the two never took a substantive step.
And Wu Jianxiong took a substantial step forward was Yuan Shikai's grandson and a physicist who was also studying in the United States at the time- Yuan Jialuo.
At that time, Wu Jianxiong's father also participated in the war against Yuan Shikai, and now Wu Jianxiong is married to Yuan Shikai's grandson, perhaps this is Providence.
Although Yuan Jiaxiao came from a family, he later fell into the middle of the family, and when he studied in the United States, he even had only $40 left on his body. Therefore, Yuan Jiaxiao did not have the bad habits of the general gongzi brothers, but was industrious and simple, down-to-earth.
Both husband and wife are physicists, and their highest dreams are certainly science.
But objectively speaking, in terms of talent and strength, Wu Jianxiong is much higher than Yuan Jialuo, and what is rare is that Yuan Jiaxiao does not feel uncomfortable at all.
After marrying Wu Jianxiong, Yuan Jiaqiu took the initiative to take on the responsibility of washing clothes, cooking, cleaning the room, and taking the children, and resolutely did not let his wife do housework, just to let Wu Jianxiong enjoy the joy of science more.
Yuan Jiaxiao once said: "Husband and wife are like an organ, they need to cooperate, they must have commitments before marriage, and they must have responsibilities after marriage." ”
What is love? Probably my dream is your dream, your strength is enough to realize your dream, and incidentally my dream has also come true.
And my responsibility is to make sure you can achieve your dreams.
This is what Wu Jianxiong calls "fanatical love."
07
The most powerful woman on the surface
With Yuan Jialuo's efforts, Wu Jianxiong can run through his career.
Wu Jianxiong's most powerful performance is two, each of which is enough to change history.
The first is to build the atomic bomb.
In 1944, Columbia University was involved in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, and they summoned Wu Jianxiong to take charge of the gamma-ray detector.
The Manhattan Project was a U.S.-led program, and there was only one non-American among all the key figures, and that was Wu Jianxiong.
Wu Jianxiong has very high requirements for her experiments, often working all night, and her experiments, which have never made a mistake, are praised by Oppenheimer, the big boss of the Manhattan Project.
After the reactor of the atomic bomb was built, a serious problem arose, that is, the chain reaction in the atomic furnace began to stop a few hours later.
This means that the atomic bomb is muted.
Many geniuses couldn't figure this out, and in the end they had to go to Wu Jianxiong and take her doctoral dissertation as a reference.
Because Wu Jianxiong's doctoral thesis was a study of the noble gas produced when the uranium nucleus splits.
Comparing her doctoral dissertation with her experiments, physicists immediately discovered that the suspension of the chain reaction of the atomic furnace was the ghost of the noble gas discovered by Wu Jianxiong.
The cause was found, the problem was immediately solved, the atomic furnace was started again, and the first atomic bomb of mankind was successfully detonated.
Without Wu Jianxiong, the atomic bomb might have been delayed by a decade before it could be invented. Therefore, it is quite possible to say that the power of the atomic bomb was released from Wu Jianxiong's hands.
For this reason, she is also known as the "mother of the atomic bomb".
08
The woman who overturned the laws of the universe
Wu Jianxiong's second epoch-making contribution was to overturn a cosmic law, that is, the cosmology of weak interaction proposed by Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao.
Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao made theoretical analysis, believing that this universally accepted law was unreliable, so they looked for people everywhere to do experiments, but no important physicists responded.
Everyone thinks that the conservation of cosmology is obviously the iron law of the universe, who is so bored to overthrow it?
Wu Jianxiong did not believe in evil. "Bold assumptions, careful verification", Mr. Hu Shi taught her long ago.
When she received Lee's request, the physicist's instincts suggested that the experiment would be important.
On that day, she was about to take a steamship trip to Europe with her husband, so she had to refund her ticket, turn the front of the car and run to the laboratory.
The experiment began in the summer of 1956 and was completely completed in January 1957, and was done for more than half a year, which completely verified that Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao were right.
In 1957, Yang and Li won the Nobel Prize in Physics, from the time their theory was proposed to the award, the interval was less than two years, and the speed of the Nobel Prize was unprecedented, which shows how important this achievement is.
However, many people are questioning: why did Mr. Wu Jianxiong not win the award? Without Wu Jianxiong's experiment, the law of conservation of cosmology would certainly have been in control of the physics community for a long time.
This is completely unfair.
Wu Jianxiong did not pay attention to it at all:
"I love my career, not the Nobel Prize. Besides, Mr. Nobel is not my husband, what do I love him for? My husband's name is Yuan Jialuo. ”
Many people say that Wu Jianxiong did not win the Nobel Prize because her experiments were not original, inefficient, and so on, but I think there is actually only one reason: because she is a woman.
09
What about women?
In fact, in addition to the Nobel Prize, female identity brings wu jianxiong more obstacles.
For example, although Wu Jianxiong had just graduated with a Ph.D., none of the top 20 colleges and universities in the United States offered her a position for one reason: she was a woman.
Princeton gave her the status of a lecturer, and the salary was particularly low.
After participating in the "Manhattan Project", her talent could not be ignored, And Columbia University provided her with the status of an experimenter, not even a teacher, and her laboratory was arranged at the bottom of the floor, and the environment was very harsh.
Wu Jianxiong endured, so many years of unfair treatment, she only said one sentence and passed: "I want to experiment, I want to study." ”
After all, fame and fortune are not as interesting as the high-energy particles in the experiment.
When you don't chase fame and fortune, fame and fortune come after you.
At Columbia University, Mr. Lee Jeong-do, a colleague of Wu Jianxiong, was blind and advocated at the professors' meeting to promote Wu Jianxiong to full professor, but everyone opposed it.
Li Zhengdao said: "Well, if you oppose it, you will give reasons one by one, and if you can't say it, you are not allowed to leave!" ”
As a result, the meeting began from two o'clock to five o'clock, and Li Zhengdao's tongue and foolishness finally contributed to Wu Jianxiong's promotion, becoming the first female professor in the two hundred years since the founding of Columbia University.
In the same year, Princeton University awarded Wu Anthuri an honorary doctorate, the first female honorary doctorate in Princeton's two-hundred-year history;
Seven years later, at the annual meeting of American physicists, Wu Jianxiong was elected president of the American Physical Society, leading the world's second largest group of physicists.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Wu Jianxiong has won almost all the honors that a physicist can get.
You should remember that Mr. Qian Xuesen has a famous "Qian Xuesen's Question": Why do our schools always fail to cultivate outstanding talents?
On the contrary, Japan next door proposed a plan to "win 25 Nobel Prizes in 50 years" at the beginning of the 21st century, and now 18 years later, it has won 18 Nobel Prizes, basically one every year.
Is there not enough money and experimental conditions? No. In 2017, China's scientific research investment reached 1.76 trillion yuan, second only to the United States, and the investment intensity reached the level of medium-developed countries.
As far as the level of scientific research instruments is concerned, China is also absolutely at the forefront of the world.
Where are we? Perhaps some clues can be seen in the case of Mr. Wu Jianxiong.
In a patriarchal society like the United States, it is much more difficult for Mr. Wu to carry out his career than that of Chinese scholars today.
But Mr. Wu still made a world-class historic contribution. The key lies in her love of research and her ability to endure loneliness.
A hundred years ago, Mr. Mei Yiqi, president of Tsinghua University, once famously said: "The so-called university is not only a building, but also a master." ”
The so-called master is to be able to endure loneliness in the field he loves and expand his territory.
In 1990, the International Minor Planet Center approved an asteroid numbered 2752 as "Wu Jianxiong Star".
What are stars? You have to endure the bitter cold of the universe before you can cultivate an eternal star that continues to shine and rotate.
Only those who can withstand loneliness can achieve great things. This is true for both men and women.