Chien Shiung Wu, a trailblazing Chinese American nuclear physicist whose myriad accomplishments earned her the nickname “the First Lady of Physics. Wu made enormous contributions to our understanding of radioactivity and the structure of the universe. Wu was born in China in 1912 and moved to the United States at the age of 24. She received a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Wu is best known for her experiments in the 1950s on a quirky but fundamental property in physics known as parity symmetry. Physicists at the time thought that processes in the real world — basic interactions such as electromagnetism, for instance — should be indistinguishable when those same processes are viewed in a mirror. In other words, while a mirror may interchange left and right, it was thought that nature did not distinguish between the two.
