Chien-Shiung Wu

This month's issue of Physics Today features Chinese-American nuclear physicist Chien-Shiung Wu on its cover:

I was delighted to see this cover.  The article by Kam, Zhang, and Feng inside discusses Wu's "trailblazing experiments in particle physics".  Best known is her experiment confirming parity violation, which earned the theorists who proposed it, C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee, a Nobel Prize in 1957.  Many (including Yang himself) have commented that Wu should have been a co-recipient of that prize.

The authors go on to make the case that Wu's late 1949 experiment, which they say was "the first conclusive verification of photon entanglement", may also have been Nobel-worthy, given the 2022 Nobel Prize awarded to Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger for their work on photon entanglement and the violation of Bell's inequalities".  However, during Wu's lifetime (and well beyond, until quantum information science emerged as a viable discipline in the last decade or two) this field of physics was considered peripheral.  It is only now, in retrospect, that the importance of the work of Wu and others is being fully acknowledged.  Perhaps most unjust of all, John Stuart Bell himself should be recognized as a physicist who should have (but didn't) receive a Nobel Prize.

Earlier this year, I read a biography of Wu by Chiang Tsai-Chien, Madame Wu Chien-Shiung:  The First Lady of Physics Research (World Scientific, 2014), so Wu has been on my mind recently.  I previously blogged about her when the US Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor in 2021, and more recently in my post about the APS March Meeting in Las Vegas last year, where I attended a talk by Michelle Frank about Wu.  Frank has called attention to Wu's work on quantum entanglement in a Scientific American article in April of that year.  Wu's granddaughter, Jada Yuan, published a lovely article about her grandma in the Washington Post in 2021.  The online biographies of Frank and Yuan suggest that they are both at work on biographies of C.-S. Wu.  I think both books would be most welcome.  The Chiang biography, despite its many strengths, leaves much to be desired, and Wu deserves a more substantial biography.  She should be considered one of the titans of 20th century experimental physics.