On October 31, 1957, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao had won the annual Nobel Prize in Physics. After the news came out, many people congratulated the two young scientists on their deserved names, but also wondered why Wu Jianxiong, who verified the weak interaction between Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao, did not win the award with them.
It all started in 1956.
At that time, scientists all over the world decided that "the behavior of cosmic conservation elementary particles and their mirror images is exactly the same", which is the "cosmic conservation law" that has existed for many years.
However, Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao became suspicious of this law and made bold speculations, and then they jointly published a paper proposing the "cosmological non-conservation theory".
However, scientists believe that the theory proposed by Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao lacks experimental data and can only be regarded as an empty shell theory.
In order to verify their speculations, Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao have sought out many experimental physicists in the hope of cooperating with them in experiments to verify the correctness of the "cosmological non-conservation law" theory.
However, many scientists have decided that Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao's theories cannot be established. In addition, doing this experiment also involves funding and various difficulties of the experiment, so no one is willing to cooperate with them.
At this time, Wu Jianxiong was already a well-known person in the field of nuclear physics. Not only did she contribute greatly to the Manhattan Project, which built the American atomic bomb, but she was also an authoritative scientist on β decay.
So, Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao found Wu Jianxiong with hope.
Speaking of which, Wu Jianxiong, like Yang Zhenning, is a Chinese scientist from China. The difference is that Wu Jianxiong is a beautiful scientist who goes hand in hand with beauty and talent.
Wu Jianxiong is a typical Jiangnan American, born in 1912 in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, to a family of scholars. Her father, Wu Zhongyi, was an open-minded patriotic intellectual, and because he did not have the idea of preferring sons to daughters, Wu Jianxiong was given the same educational opportunities as the children of the clan from an early age.
When Wu Jianxiong was 11 years old, he was admitted to the Second Girls' Normal School in Suzhou. There, she had the privilege of hearing Hu Shi's speeches, which inspired her to make a difference.
Later, Wu Jianxiong also went to the Chinese public school to join Hu Shi's disciples and worked as his student for a while. Because she not only handed in the fastest papers in each exam, but also answered the questions perfectly, she was deeply appreciated by Hu Shi and regarded her as her "most proud protégé".
So, how did Wu Jianxiong enter the field of physics?
It turned out that Wu Jianxiong, due to his excellent grades, was sent to national central university to study mathematics after graduating from the female teacher.
When she was a freshman at National Central University, she read a lot of books on physics. She was also attracted to great scientists such as Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, so she transferred to the department of physics in her sophomore year and studied under Professor Shi Shiyuan, a physicist who had been a student of Marie Curie.
After graduating from university, Wu Jianxiong worked at Zhejiang University and Academia Sinica.
But Wu jianxiong was not satisfied with the physics she learned. In 1936, with the financial support of her family, she went to the United States to study alone and continued her studies in physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
At that time, Berkeley not only had the most advanced scientific laboratories in the world, but also had many of the world's top physics professors.
Under the guidance of scientists, Wu Jianxiong was fully demonstrated in physics, and with excellent results, she successfully obtained a doctorate in physics.
In fact, as early as the study period, Wu Jianxiong made great achievements. At that time, under the guidance of her mentor Segley, she began to experiment with the physics of the atomic bomb.
For her, it was a whole new field, and her main research project at the time was "the product of the splitting of uranium nuclei." Since Professor Segiri was busy lecturing, she did most of the experiments alone. In the course of the experiment, she got some results. This also created conditions for her to join the "Manhattan Project" to build the atomic bomb.
At that time, after the end of the atomic bomb physics experiment, Wu Jianxiong wrote her discovery as a doctoral dissertation and published it in the international journal "Physical Theory", which once caused a sensation in the physics community.
Although Wu Jianxiong has achieved excellent results, when she said that she wanted to stay in the school to teach, she was rejected by the school because of her nationality and gender. So she had to leave Berkeley to work as a lecturer at Smith College and Princeton University on the East Coast of the United States. In fact, according to her conditions, she could completely hold the position of professor, but because there were no female physics professors in the United States at that time, she could only serve as a lecturer.
In the 1940s, in order to compete for world hegemony, the United States began to develop the atomic bomb and designated it as the "Manhattan Project". Although Wu was well researched in the atomic bomb experiment, she was excluded from the program because she did not acquire American citizenship.
However, in the process of developing the atomic bomb, American scientists have also found many thorny problems, especially in terms of technology and engineering requirements. For example, the reactor that scientists built was working normally, but it didn't last long and stopped working. After research, they found that this is because the reactor produced a large amount of radioactive gas xenon in the process of operation. It is these gases that adsorb a large number of neutrons, which causes the reactor to stop working.
Despite finding the cause, scientists have tried their best to solve the problem.
It just so happens that Oppenheimer, the main person in charge of the "Manhattan Project", once served as Wu Jianxiong's mentor, and he knew that Wu Jianxiong had done a lot of atomic bomb physics experiments and had a wealth of experience. So he had Wu Jianxiong found him and made an exception to let Wu Jianxiong participate in this plan.
Wu Jianxiong did not live up to expectations, and she quickly found a solution, successfully recovered the disappeared neutron, and successfully detonated the first atomic bomb. The explosion of the atomic bomb also brought the Second World War to a resounding end.
After World War II, Wu was invited to participate in physics research at Columbia University as a "senior scientist", during which time she mainly studied the decay of β. After Wu Jianxiong repeated many experiments, the difference between the β decay theory and experiment was verified. Experimental data were also used to verify the theories of many scientists about the decay of β.
It can be said that at this time, she seems to be an authoritative scientist in the study of β decay.
Just when Wu Jianxiong's fame was spreading, Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao found her by asking for advice. After listening to the theory of "cosmic non-conservation" said by Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao, Wu Jianxiong was very interested, although her mentor and friend Pauli repeatedly dissuaded her and asked her not to put her precious time on this kind of fruitless experiment, but the pragmatic Wu Jianxiong still shut himself in the laboratory, and finally demonstrated the correctness of the law of "cosmic non-conservation" proposed by Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao with experiments.
Because Wu Jianxiong's argument data is irrefutable, coupled with the "cosmological non-conservation" theory has had a profound impact on the development of physics, it caused a great sensation at that time.
And it is not difficult to understand why after Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao won the Nobel Prize in Physics, many people were upset about Wu Jianxiong.
However, Wu Jianxiong did not feel that there was anything wrong with it. Or rather, she had no interest in these reputational arguments. Because, in the field of physics, there are still too many interesting experiments waiting for her to demonstrate and discover.
(References: "Biography of Wu Jianxiong", "Wu Jianxiong: The First Lady of Physical Sciences", etc.)