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February 11, 2021 08:45 pm

New Postage Stamp Honors Pioneering Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu

The U.S. Postal Service on Thursday unveiled a new postage stamp honoring Chien-Shiung Wu, a trailblazing Chinese American nuclear physicist whose myriad accomplishments earned her the nickname "the First Lady of Physics." From a report: The stamp's release was timed to coincide with the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, an annual event that was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 to celebrate female scientists and promote equal access for women and girls in science and technology. Kristin Seaver, executive vice president of the Postal Service, called Wu "one of the most influential nuclear physicists of the 20th century." Wu "made enormous contributions to our understanding of radioactivity and the structure of the universe," Seaver said Thursday in a taped virtual ceremony to mark the stamp's first day of issue. 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.

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