A very interesting article in today's WashPost on Madame Wu:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/12/13/chien-shiung-wu-biography-physics-grandmother/
I've known Vincent Yuan (Vinnie if you're from NYC) for over 20 yrs. He has quite a nice wine collection and would often show up
at the Kokomans Sat afternoon wine tastings w/ a btl from his cellar to share with us. Usually something very special he deemed
worth sharing with people that cared for great wine. Often he had his daughter, Jada, along in tow. Vinnie was a very highly
regarded experimental physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (LAMPF), though we never had any professional
interactions. He was, after all....pfffttt... an experimenalist rather than a theoretician. But I knew of him from his stellar reputation.
Several yrs ago, his daughter Jada, a journalist, was commissioned by the WashPost to travel the World and write frequently
about some of the special places she visited as a travel writer. The articles were always very interested and frequently brought
in the subject of wine.
It was only about 4-5 yrs ago that I found out Vinnie was the son of Madame Wu, a legendary figure in the world of Physics.
She was a Chinese Physicist who should have won the Nobel Prize in Physics everyone acknowledges...but she never did.
Madame Wu immigrated from a small village North of Shanghai in 1937 because she wanted to study Physics in college and there
were no opportunities for females to do so in China. She got her PhD at UC/Berkeley under J.Robert Oppenheimer, who regarded her
as the World's expert on Beta Decay. She eventually ended up at Columbia Univ in NYC where she contributed to the Manhattan Project.
When they interviewed her at Columbia in their Div of War Research, they refused to tell her what she would be working on. I particularly
liked her retort: “I’m sorry, but if you wanted me not to know what you’re doing, you should have cleaned the blackboards,”
I knew of Madame Wu from when I first started reading Physics back in high school (I was a weird kid...who went on to become
an even weirder adult). She became known as the "Chinese Madame Curie" from her experiment in 1956 that demonstrated the theory
that conservation of parity (the world of physics couldn't tell the left hand from the right) of parity was not preserved in weak interactions
as found in beta decay..for which she sould have received the NobelPrize.
Madame Wu was not a very good Mother for Vinnie. She was totally devoted to her experimental work in the laboratory. One night when she
was working late, a co-worker relayed to her a message from Vinnie at home that he was getting hungry. I loved her response:
“Oh, he knows where the can opener is,” !!
The article relates that Madame Wu's team celebrated the overthrow of parity with a toast over a btl of rare Chateau Lafite-Rothschild '49.
So now I know where Vinnie's love for wine came from.
Madame Wu was commemerated on one of the Forever postage stamps that was issued in Feb 2021.
After reading this extremely well-written article, I feel I know Vinnie a whole lot better. I just never knew he came from such a famous background.
Towards the end of the article, Jada laments that she didn't take the time to know her Grandmother better and draw out the stories from her
before Madame Wu died in 1996. There's a lesson there for a lot of us.
Anyway, the article, about a 20 min read, is very much worth reading. You might even learn a little Physics along the way. Worse things could happen to you!!
Tom