In recent years, because of the Internet and some film and television works, many people are very interested in the history of the Republic of China, like the list of the four beautiful men of the Republic of China and the four talented women of the Republic of China.
The character of the Republic of China period today is a bit special, she is a real talented woman, although she is not prominent in the field of literature and art, but it is a first-class existence in science and technology.
Her many titles, known as the "Mother of the Atomic Bomb", "Queen of Nuclear Physics", "First Lady of Physics", etc., are very famous all over the world, and even on a certain level, she can be regarded as a promoter of world history.
Such a super powerful figure, in China, her name appears far less frequently than Lin Huiyin, Zhang Ailing and others, and many Chinese people have a deep misunderstanding of her, why is this?
The legendary woman's name is Wu Jianxiong, which is somewhat unusual from the name.
Wu Jianxiong was born in 1912 in Taicang, Jiangsu Province, a scholarly monk, her breast name is Wei Wei, but she is not so arrogant, the reason why the big name is Jianxiong, because of her father's expectations.
Her father, Wu Zhongyi, was also a revolutionary, joining the Patriotic Society led by Cai Yuanpei and the League led by Sun Yat-sen. After the failure of the second revolution against Yuan, Wu Zhongyi understood that his generation might not be able to see the day when the revolution succeeded, so he returned to his hometown to establish the Mingde Girls' Tuition School, hoping to broaden the wisdom of the people and let more people open their eyes to the world.
At the same time, Wu Zhongyi also hopes that his children can be different and can revitalize the motherland in the future, so he gave his daughter Wei Wei the masculine name of "Jianxiong" according to the word "Jian", hoping that her daughter would not let her eyebrows be raised.
Jianxiong is the accumulation of Jian as Xiong, from the Tang Dynasty's "Twenty-Four Poems", which means to enrich themselves through accumulation, lay a solid foundation with a steady pace, and achieve the desired results.
From the perspective of later generations, the meaning of his father's name has finally been realized!
Because of her father's enlightenment, Wu Jianxiong also received a good education from an early age, she began to study at the age of 7 and graduated from a normal school at the age of 15.
Originally, Wu Jianxiong had become a teacher, but her father saw that her future was by no means more than that, so he repeatedly advised her to continue her studies. Wu Jianxiong himself did not want to spend his life in peace, so he picked up books and studied, and at the age of 18, he entered the Department of Mathematics of National Central University.
She is gifted, learns the knowledge in class very quickly, and goes to the library whenever she has time after class. In addition to mathematics, her favorite books on electronics, radioactivity, and relativity are often reluctant to put them down as soon as they are picked up.
Soon Wu Jianxiong became an admirer of Marie Curie, Einstein and other scientific giants, and she also found that her real interest was in physics, so she applied for a transfer in the second academic year.
Interest is the best teacher This sentence is indeed true, although Wu Jianxiong is a transfer student, but the performance is better than most people, the tutors are all amazed by her, Shi Shiyuan, the head of the Physics Department of Central University, saw her talent, and carefully taught her what he had learned.
Shi Shiyuan was a student of Marie Curie in his early years and one of the earliest scholars in China to engage in nuclear spectroscopy, and under his guidance, Wu Jianxiong wrote an excellent graduation thesis entitled "Proving Brugger's Law" in 1934 and received a bachelor's degree in physics from National Central University.
The more she learned, the more Wu Jianxiong felt that she was cognitively inadequate, so even though she was assigned to the Academia Sinica and had a stable and high income, she was still not satisfied with the status quo.
In 1936, Wu Jianxiong set foot on the territory of the United States with a curious heart, and during her studies at the University of California, Berkeley, she studied with Ernest Lawrence, Segerry, Oppenheimer and other physics giants.
All three had won Nobel Prizes and were all key figures in the Manhattan Project for the U.S. atomic bomb, and under the influence of these big men, Wu Jianxiong received a doctorate in physics and began experimenting with nuclear physics.
Although her abilities were outstanding, she had no American citizenship, so the Manhattan Project did not include her in the first place.
However, the Americans in the process of studying the atomic bomb was stuck by a key problem, they spent several months without a smooth breakthrough, when the Germans were actually studying this kind of killer, time is life, the main person in charge of the Manhattan Project Oppenheimer could not care so much, resisted the pressure of the state to pull Wu Jianxiong into the team.
In this way, Wu Jianxiong became the only American scientist in the Manhattan Project. As soon as she arrived, she was responsible for the most important points, and developed a device for isolating the radioactive isotope Xenon-135 produced in nuclear fission, which made a breakthrough in the overall program.
Without Wu Jianxiong's participation, the US atomic bomb may not be developed a few years later, and without the atomic bomb, Japan may be dead for a while, then history will be rewritten. Therefore, it is no problem to say that she has promoted the history of the world.
Unfortunately, the social discrimination in the United States was very serious, not only discriminating against women, but also discriminating against scientists who were not American nationals, Wu Jianxiong just accounted for both, so the American propaganda mouth deliberately downplayed her contribution, and almost did not get publicity.
It was not until 1992 that Columbia University officially unveiled the woman behind the Manhattan Project, so Wu Jianxiong also won the titles of "Midwifery Nurse of the World's First Atomic Bomb" and "Mother of the Atomic Bomb".
In 1956, Wu Jianxiong was going to return to the motherland with her husband Yuan Jiaqiu after a 20-year absence, but at this time Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao found her with the theory of "cosmic non-conservation". At that time, almost all scientists believed that "conservation of the universe" was the truth, so no one was willing to help these two young Chinese.
Wu Jianxiong has been different since childhood, and this time is also the same, she has seen Yang and Li's theories and agreed with it very much, and found it very challenging. Her husband saw this and expressed his support, so in the end only Yuan Jiaqiu returned to China.
After a period of time, Wu Jianxiong devoted himself to this experiment, resting for no more than 4 hours a day, and eating a few pieces of bread to fill his hunger when he was hungry.
With her unremitting efforts, she successfully obtained the conclusion that "the asymmetry of β rays is very obvious", which proved the theory of Yang and Li, thus winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for these two young Chinese scientists.
Without Wu Jianxiong's experiment, the erroneous theory of the conservation of the universe might have been popular for decades, and Steinberg, the 1988 Nobel Laureate in Physics, commented: If there were no Wu Jianxiong's experimental results, the theory of Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning would only be an idea, and Wu Jianxiong's experiment changed all this.
Unfortunately, due to various reasons, Wu Jianxiong has not won the Nobel Prize in his life, which is a very regrettable thing, but not winning the Nobel Prize does not mean that her achievements are not high.
In 1975, Wu was elected president of the American Physics Institute, she was the first woman to be elected, and U.S. President Ford awarded her the National Medal of Science at the White House, the highest honor in the American scientific community.
In 1978, Wu jianxiong won the Wolf Prize in Physics, which is considered one of the most important awards in physics outside the Nobel Prize in Physics, and she was the first scientist to receive this award and the only Chinese winner to date.
Anyway, in addition to the Nobel Prize, she basically took all the other awards, and she also said about this matter: Although this matter has a certain blow to me, but think about it, I did not experiment at first for honor, and there are more awards that recognize me.
So her mentality is still very good.
Wu Jianxiong's great contribution to the physics community, known as "China's Curie", such a scientist who won glory for the Chinese, why is not very famous in China?
The main thing is that she has these two points that are really misleading.
First, Wu Jianxiong and Hu Shi are not ordinary teacher-student relationships
Wu Jianxiong is a student of Hu Shi, is there suddenly a feeling of stringing drama? In 1923, when Wu Jianxiong was studying at the Second Women's Normal School in Suzhou, the school often invited some famous scholars to give lectures, including Hu Shi.
In fact, Wu Jianxiong had long read Hu Shi's articles in progressive magazines such as New Youth and admired his writing. This is the first time to meet a real person, Hu Shi gave a speech on the stage "Modern Women", encouraging women's liberation and making Wu Jianxiong, who has received a new education since childhood, feel good.
Objectively speaking, Hu Shi's appearance when he was young was handsome, and he read a lot of books and was very temperamental. A gentle and erudite knowledgeable man is quite lethal to a young girl who has just opened her heart. The next day, Wu Jianxiong chased after Soochow University to listen to Hu Shi's speech again.
Most dramatically, in 1929, Wu Jianxiong was admitted to the National Central University, but she first went to the Chinese public school where Hu Shi taught for a year.
Hu Shi did not know Wu Jianxiong's thoughts at first, and only heard that there was a very smart student in the school, until there was a history exam, which was supposed to take three hours, but Wu Jianxiong only took more than an hour to complete all the questions and turn in the papers in advance.
Hu Shi curiously picked up the scroll and reviewed it, and was particularly surprised that the first time he saw a student who could analyze the three hundred years of the Qing Dynasty's ideological history so thoroughly, the key was that it took a short time, after which Hu Shi began to really pay attention to this student.
Hu Shi often encouraged Wu Jianxiong to play to her strengths and be sure to study abroad. Although the teacher-student friendship between the two was only one year, the correspondence was almost uninterrupted since then, and Hu Shi would often buy books for Wu Jianxiong.
In 1936, Hu Shi was invited to give a lecture at Harvard University, and he also took time to find Wu Jianxiong for a long talk. In a letter to Hu Shi, Wu Jianxiong said: In my life, I have been most influenced by my father and you.
Wu Jianxiong's admiration for Hu Shi and Hu Shi's appreciation of Wu Jianxiong are all well-known things, and the fame of the two is very large, so many people thought that they had different feelings.
In fact, this is really a misunderstanding, Wu Jianxiong, such a legendary woman, knows that the other party is a husband with a wife, even if she admires it in her heart, it will be well controlled, and she also made this clear in her letter to Hu Shi:
Just said goodbye to you on the phone, I thought to myself that you will have to go tomorrow at 'dawn', if I can drive alone to the airport in the morning light to see you off, but I know that I can't do that, I can only wish you a safe journey. But on the other hand, I am afraid that you will think that I have misunderstood your meaning and made you feel uneasy, in fact, with the depth of my reverence and love for you, there is no possibility of misunderstanding you, please be absolutely assured.
It can be seen that Wu Jianxiong still knows how to avoid suspicion, and her feelings for Hu Shi are only limited to admiration, and she loves her husband more.
On February 24, 1962, Hu Shi presided over the fifth meeting of academicians at the "Cai Yuanpei Hall of the Academia Sinica" in Taipei, and during the cocktail party to welcome the new "academicians" in the evening, he suddenly died of a heart attack and collapsed in front of Wu Jianxiong and his wife.
Wu Jianxiong could not cry when she saw this scene, and when she went to the funeral home the next day to see Hu Shi's remains, she was still trembling and worried. But no matter what, Hu Shi left, and this teacher-student friendship reached the end.
Second, Wu Jianxiong did not return when the motherland was in difficulty
The strength of New China is inseparable from the older generation of scientists who returned to China at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, and it is the efforts of these people that allow us to have a strong national defense force, which can have a stable development environment.
Therefore, we all revere Qian Xuesen, Deng Jiaxian, Qian Sanqiang and others, on the contrary, there will be some misunderstandings about those scientists who have not returned to China, including mr. Yang Zhenning, who is very famous.
In fact, these scientists do not return to China also have their own difficulties, Mr. Yang Zhenning is a theorist, he did not return to China can not immediately put the knowledge learned into the construction.
Wu Jianxiong also has a real reason, to know that she participated in the "Manhattan Project" in 1944, for the atomic bomb she has first-hand information in her head, such a scientist, the United States will let her go?
We can refer to Qian Xuesen, who also experienced various difficulties and negotiated for 5 years before he was able to return to China. If Wu Jianxiong wants to return to China, it is definitely not easier than Qian Xuesen, and perhaps the Americans will still lay a black hand after knowing that they can't keep her, and such a thing is not impossible for the United States to do. So also understand her difficulties.
Is Wu Jianxiong unpatriotic? No, she later did a lot for the country as well.
In 1973, sino-US relations had eased somewhat, and Wu Jianxiong and her husband immediately applied to return to China and were received by Premier Zhou, who has been running for relations between the two countries ever since.
At that time, China's scientific research was very scarce, so she paid for it to help the motherland, and in 1984 she used her life savings to establish the Wu Zhong Foundation, which specifically funded Chinese students. Many of today's Chinese physics bulls have been guided by her. In honor of Wu Jianxiong's contribution, the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences also named the asteroid with the international number 2752 "Wu Jianxiong Star"
In 1994, Wu Jianxiong was elected as a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, 3 years after receiving this honor, Wu Jianxiong died of illness in New York, USA.
According to her last wishes, her husband brought her ashes back to her hometown for burial, and the fallen leaves eventually returned to their roots.
In fact, her husband Yuan Jiaqiu is also a very powerful figure, also a big bull in the field of physics, and one of the first physicists to apply electronics to the detection of high-energy particles. And the ancestor is very famous, he is the grandson of Yuan Shikai.
The two married in 1942, life has been very happy after marriage, someone once asked Wu Jianxiong whether he would regret not winning the Nobel Prize, she replied: I love my career, not the Nobel Prize; besides, Mr. Nobel is not my husband, what do I love him? My husband's name is Yuan Jialuo.
Look, scientists talk about love to be called moving!
In any case, Wu Jianxiong's contribution to the world is still obvious to all, she is also a very outstanding representative of the Chinese, and Chinese can be proud of such an excellent talent!