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November 10, 1963: Maria Geoppert-Mayer is the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics. She proposed the nuclear shell model (remember that from 11th grade chemistry?) of the atomic nucleus.
From Wikipedia:
During her husband's time at the University of Chicago, Goeppert-Mayer was able to become a voluntary Associate Professor of Physics at the school. In addition, when the nearby Argonne National Laboratory was founded on July 1, 1946, Goeppert-Mayer was offered a part-time job there as a Senior Physicist in the Theoretical Physics Division. It was during her time at Chicago and Argonne that she developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, the work for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Paul Wigner.
Goeppert-Mayer's model explained "why certain numbers of nucleons in the nucleus of an atom cause an atom to be extremely stable". This had been baffling scientists for some time. These numbers are called "magic numbers". She postulated, against the received wisdom of the time, that the nucleus is like a series of closed shells and pairs of neutrons and protons like to couple together in what is called spin orbit coupling. This is like the Earth spinning on its axis as the Earth itself is spinning around the Sun. Goeppert-Mayer described the idea elegantly:
"Think of a room full of waltzers. Suppose they go round the room in circles, each circle enclosed within another. Then imagine that in each circle, you can fit twice as many dancers by having one pair go anti-clockwise and another pair go counterclockwise. Then add one more variation; all the dancers are spinning twirling round and round like tops as they circle the room, each pair both twirling and circling. But only some of those that go counterclockwise are twirling counterclockwise. The others are twirling clockwise while circling counterclockwise. The same is true of those that are dancing around clockwise: some twirl clockwise, others twirl counterclockwise."
To read more about Maria Goeppert-Mayer, visit Wikipedia's entry.
From the article:
We're down to the final stretch of women who have won Nobel Prizes in science. These five women are the most recent Laureates in Physiology or Medicine and have made astounding contributions to our knowledge of embryonic development, our sense of smell, HIV, and chromosome replication.
Read more at Persephone Magazine.
