Short Wave - A Physics Legend Part Two: Chien-Shiung Wu's Granddaughter Reflects

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

Growing up, Jada Yuan didn't realize how famous her grandmother was in the world of physics. In this episode, we delve into the life of physicist Chien-Shiung Wu from her granddaughter's perspective. Jada talks to host Emily Kwong about writing the article Discovering Dr. Wu for the Washington Post, where she is a reporter covering culture and politics. Check out part one in which Emily talks to Short Wave's scientist-in-residence about how Chien-Shiung Wu altered physics. She made a landmark discovery in 1956 about how our universe operates at the tiniest levels.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Like many children who come from families of immigrants, or from families of scientists, or families who live through war and destruction, I didn't realize how little I knew of her life until it was too late to ask. Jada Yuan was 19 when her grandmother died. To her, Qian Sheng Wu was the person who gave her a polka-dotted party dress and inspected her report card. She was grandma.

To the world, Dr. Wu was so much more. Jada is now a reporter at the Washington Post, and these are excerpts from a piece she wrote all about her grandmother. I am not an expert on nuclear physics, but here's what I understand. An experiment my grandmother conducted in 1956 proved a theory that shattered our fundamental understanding of the physical world. Now, Jada's tackled plenty of complex pieces in her career. About arts, about culture, she even won a contest. few years back to travel to 52 destinations on the dime of the New York Times. But this piece was different. It took months. Jada had to gather data like a scientist and theorized the rest.

The piece, called Discovering Dr. Wu, chronicles her grandmother's life. The pieces Jada knew and the pieces she only discovered after her death in 1997. Sometimes people would come up to me and say, your grandmother should have won the Nobel prize. And I didn't really know what it meant. So I think it was very gradual coming to the realization that she was seen in a different life by other people than she was by me, which was my grandma, who was kind of, you know, tried to overfeed me. In 2012, Jada traveled with her parents to China to her grandmother's birthplace, where the government had organized a centennial Jubilee to celebrate her grandmother's birth. It was a big event. A museum. A museum,

exhibit showcased Dr. Wu's academic papers and the Chi Pao dresses she wore under her lab coats. Local children sang songs about her. You know, there were banquets with communist officials and banners all over the streets in Jongsu province, which is where she's from. And, you know, my uncle told us when I, he was just saying, oh, we're going to go see, we're going to see the statue tomorrow. Jada and her parents had front row seats to this event, unveiling a sculpture of her grandmother. Thousands of people were there. A cloth came down, and there was this statue of my grandmother that was definitely three stories tall, mint green like the statue of liberty.

And with like a countenance that was kind of not, her face was not what I remembered it being. Today on the show, what it was like to have Dr. Qiancheng Wu, nuclear physics royalty and science inspiration to countless women and girls, as your grandma. I'm Emily Kwong and you're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. In 2021, the U.S. Postal Service issued a forever stamp with Dr. Qian Sheng Wu's face and name on it. So she is first-class postage forever. And she looks exactly as Jada remembers her. She describes her in her piece as, quote, wise, discerning.

With her hair in an elaborate updo, its own achievement in physics, she has that mischievous half-smile that always made me wonder what she was thinking. Jada has spent years and the past few months especially piecing together her grandmother's story, which begins in a fishing village. She was born in 1912, which is when the Qing Dynasty fell, and girls were not really educated. And her father and mother founded a school in her tiny Rivertown of Yuha. They founded a school that would educate girls.

And when she was 10, she exceeded their ability to teach her. And so she had to go to a boarding school. And so from the time that she was 10, she really didn't live with her family except for summers and holidays. She got a scholarship to become a teacher. She had somehow discovered physics. You say in the piece she borrowed physics and mathematics books from classmates studying them in secret. Yeah, she studied them in secret.

And, you know, I wish I could ask her what it was about physics that really lit her fire in order for her to go any further in her education, she had to leave and go to America. So she got in an ocean liner. I have this picture in my head of her being on the ocean liner and waving goodbye to her family on the dock, and that just being the last time she ever saw them. The last time she ever saw her parents

was when she was 24 on this ocean liner sailing away. Yeah. She left and a year later, the Japanese invaded, and war broke out. And then after that war, there was the cultural revolution, and it just wasn't safe for her to come back. Jin Sheng Wu enrolled in a PhD program

at the University of California at Berkeley, where she began her life's work, the study of beta decay. She planned to return home after completing her degree. But then in 1937, Japan invaded China. And when the Japanese invaded, two of her Japanese classmates left flowers on her bed. Wow.

Yeah. And so to have, like, this direct assault on your country, my theory is that it threw her really deeply into her studies because she knew that, I mean, I think she was terrified that if she did not do well in school, that she would have nowhere to go. Tian Xiang started pulling long hours in the lab, staying until 4 a.m. some days.

She was very often the only woman and certainly the only Chinese woman in every room she entered. Jada writes in her piece, quote, As the world she knew crumbled around her, she focused on unstable atoms, that in falling apart shed little bits of themselves to become stable again, emitting energy and becoming other elements. After graduation, Jenseng Wu married a fellow student, Jada's grandfather. Jia Lu Yuan, who went by Luke. They moved to the East Coast, and she briefly taught at Princeton.

Then in 1944, her world changed again with a call from Columbia University. She got a call from Columbia to go interview for a secret project they were working on. And she was grilled for a full day. And they said, do you want to know what we're working on? And she said, if you didn't want me to know what you were working on, you should have cleared the blackboard. It was just sort of like a beautiful mind kind of scenario, but that turned out to be the Manhattan Project. She could tell that from the equations on the blackboard? Yeah, I'm assuming.

Does it fit with your recollection of your grandmother? Yeah, completely. Why? I mean, she was just, she was very, she knew how to keep a secret. She knew how to sort of, you know, wryly wait before she said anything. It's a quality that my dad has as well. It's sort of be quiet, let the information play out in front of you and then come up with a singer.

Dr. Wu was hired on the spot. The equations they were working on turned out to be part of the Manhattan Project. The nuclear bombs that came from that work devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of this, Jada says her grandmother, like many who worked on the project, had complex regrets. Decades later during a visit to Taiwan, Dr. Wu advised Chinese nationalist leader Cheng Kai Sheck to never go down the road of building nuclear weapons. And it was there at Columbia University in 1956 that Dr. Wu conducted the experiments that would make her famous one day and change the field forever. It all started when two theoretical physicists, Sungdao Li and

Chenning Yang, approached her with a theory. A theory that went against the thinking of the time that, as Jada writes, quote, a phenomenon in its mirror image were not always the same. We dive into the science of this in part one of this story, but suffice to say, this was a theory no one had ever really tested when it comes to the weak force in particular. And it would shatter what was then a fundamental law of the universe. It is like the equivalent or it is as radical as saying that gravity doesn't work or gravity only works sometimes. I mean, it was this huge event that parody had been shattered. It was on the front page of the New York Times. How would she talk about this experience in the privacy of when you would go visit her and spend time with her?

She never did. She never did? Or at least I didn't know to ask her. You know, it wasn't, I was so young, and I didn't really notice it. Like, Grandma told me what it was like to do this. What happened was that year her collaborators, T.D. Lee and C.N. Young won the Nobel Prize. And my grandmother was acknowledged for her work, but it wasn't until 20 years later that she received the Wolf Prize. And she was the first recipient of it.

she often talked about how in order to be a successful woman in science you needed to have a supportive husband and good child care. Dr. Chin Sheng Wu spent the rest of her career at Columbia University. She became the first tenured woman in the physics department. In her lifetime, she won 16 honorary doctorates of science, the National Medal of Science, and the presidency of the American Physical Society. Her apartment in New York, which Jada visited as a child, was wallpapered with photographs of her grandmother rubbing elbows with politicians and celebrities. But that's not what Jada remembers the most. Who is Dr. Wu to you when you got to spend time with her? Her house was this kind of sanctuary.

It was this warm place filled with sort of grandma smells. I don't know, just, you know, cooking, you know, Chinese cabbage and wantons and dumplings. It was, there were scroll paintings everywhere. Tons of ornate China. The living room coffee table was, you know, black with inlaid mother of pearl. I slept on a fold-out couch in her study. And so every day I would have to fold up the couch so my grandma could go to work in her, in her study. Yes. I'm nodding my head just because sometimes when I've tried to think about my grandmother

after her passing, it's almost like I'm trying to build this relationship after death. After she's gone, still trying to have some kind of connection with her. Oh yeah. I agree with that completely. And it's hard. It is really hard. I mean, I think what kept me working on the piece for so long was that I wanted to be in that process of it. That I was, you know, it allowed me to be in conversation with my grandmother. It allowed me to be in conversation with my dad and our relatives and my mom about their memories of her. It gave me a kind of closeness to her.

But I am always searching for the person who was there, the person who lost her parents, who couldn't go back to her home. who was struggling with trying to change the world through physics, but also be a mother. There's a longing that comes from just the things you couldn't ask and the things we'll never know. Jada, it has been really incredible to talk to you about your grandma. And thank you so much for bringing all this history forward to all of us so we could understand her better and also understand you better as well. It's been really a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Jada Yuan is a writer for the Washington Post for the style section with a focus on national politics. You can find a link to Jada's full piece in the episode notes. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy, edited by Jazele Graysen and fact-checked by Catherine Seifer. The audio engineers for this episode were Josh Newell and Robert Rodriguez. Andrea Kisick runs the science desk. Edith Chapin is the executive editor and vice president of news, and Nancy Barnes is our senior vice president of news. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.