GSU Physics and Astronomy

May is also Jewish American Heritage month! #JAHM Dr. Vera Rubin is the pioneering woman behind the discovery of dark matter: invisible material that makes up about 85% of the total matter in the Universe! Her work studying galaxy rotation curves was able to show that there is much more matter than what we can directly observe. In so doing, she permanently changed the way all of us view the Universe. She was active in the Jewish community her entire life, and her belief and work in social reform echoed her belief in Judaism. When she began her career in the 1960s, she faced numerous obstacles simply because she was a woman (and Jewish) and hence she also advocated for women in science for the rest of her life. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory located on Cerro Pachón in Chile is named in her honor. Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/4nukwYM Image credit: https://t.gsu.edu/4wvrS2u

Yoichiro Nambu was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1921. He attended the University of Tokyo and earned a master's degree in physics in 1942, but his education was interrupted by WWII. He served in the Japanese army working on radar technology, and he survived the US firebombing of Tokyo. After the war ended, he returned to his studies, focusing on nuclear and particle physics and earning his PhD in 1952. That same year, Nambu was invited to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton by J. Robert Oppenheimer. And in 1954 he was invited to the University of Chicago where he spent the rest of his career (more than half a century) and where he carried out his Nobel Prize-winning research. Nambu was awarded one half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics". The other half was awarded jointly to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature." Nambu's contributions also include proposing color charge in quantum chromodynamics and being one of the co-inventors of string theory. Even among the brightest physics minds, Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study once said of Nambu: “People don't understand him, because he is so far-sighted.” (https://t.gsu.edu/3UkxCd8) When he won the Nobel Prize in 2008, Nambu was asked what advice he had for students interested in science: “Think independently and think all the time,” he said. “I like to tackle a problem first by myself, and then look up somebody’s answer, if there is one.” In 2015, Nambu died at the age of 94. Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/3LeaGru #APAHM #AAPIHeritageMonth

Join us for Astronomy on Tap Atlanta's next event on Thursday, May 21st from 8:00-9:30pm at the Decatur location of 3 Taverns, featuring astro PhD student Mahir Patel! Mahir will be following up his AoT debut, where he took us from the Big Bang to our present-day breakfast meal, with his sequel which will take us from our breakfast meal to the theorized end of our Universe. As usual, star and planet-gazing to follow. #AstroOnTap #astronomyontap #aot_atl

"Nergis Mavalvala... can check off a whole lot of boxes on the diversity form. She isn't just a woman in physics, which is rare enough. She is an immigrant from Pakistan and a self-described 'out, queer person of color.' 'I don’t mind being on the fringes of any social group,' she says." "With a toothy grin, the gregarious mother of a 4-year-old child explains why she likes her outsider status: 'You are less constrained by the rules.' She may still be an outsider, but she's no longer obscure; her 2010 MacArthur Fellowship saw to that. In addition to the cash and the honor, the award came with opportunities to speak to an interested public about her somewhat esoteric research." Mavalvala is a leading member of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which made the first detection of gravitational waves in 2016 from the collision of two black holes. She is the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2020 she became the first woman to serve as Dean of the MIT School of Science. Her goals for her new position are ambitious: "We administrators and leaders have also been given a gift: the demand for change on racial and social justice issues, on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Near-term, we can examine our practices and policies for hiring and making sure that every person we bring into our community can thrive. Long-term, we also have to build pipelines, to make sure that from a young age, opportunity is distributed to everyone who wishes to take it, both by building up the infrastructure of support and by looking outside MIT at the society at large. A tremendous amount of work lies ahead, but I call it a gift because at no other time have I felt so palpably that we must do it and that we will get it done." Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/4a8YZg2 #APAHM #AAPIHeritageMonth

Samuel Chao Chung Ting was supposed to be born in China, but his mother went into labor early while she and his father were visiting Ann Arbor, MI in 1936. He grew up in China during the Japanese Invasion and the Chinese Civil War, which caused instability in his education and his family's living situation. He returned to the US at the age of 20 to study at Univ. of Michigan, and despite the fact that he spoke little English upon arrival, he earned degrees in both math and physics in only three years, and a PhD in physics three years later. Ting worked for a short while at CERN, taught at Columbia, and worked at DESY in Germany before taking a faculty position at MIT in 1969. In 1976, Ting shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Burton Richter "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind", the J/ψ meson which they both discovered independently. Ting, the first US-born Asian Nobel Prize recipient, delivered his acceptance speech in Mandarin. In his banquet speech, Ting noted "in reality, a theory in natural science cannot be without experimental foundations; physics, in particular, comes from experimental work. I hope that awarding the Nobel Prize to me will awaken the interest of students from the developing nations so that they will realize the importance of experimental work." Ting is the principal investigator of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a space-borne cosmic-ray detector. The prototype, AMS-01 was flown and tested on Space Shuttle mission STS-91 in 1998, and the main experiment AMS-02 has been installed and functioning on the International Space Station since 2011. Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/44q9lH7 #APAHM #AAPIHeritageMonth

Jane Luu is a defense systems engineer and award-winning planetary astronomer. "Early in her career, Luu scoped the cosmos, studying the dark void beyond Neptune. With her Ph.D. adviser David Jewitt, she discovered the Kuiper belt, vastly increasing the number of known objects in the solar system. At the same time, her research helped reduce the number of planets in our solar system to eight." "Luu, who is Vietnamese-American, was not to the observatory born. 'As a child I had little science education,' she says. 'I did not grow up building telescopes like Dave [Jewitt] did growing up in England. I did not even look through a telescope until I got to graduate school.' In 1975, when she was 12, her family fled Saigon in an American military plane. Before settling in Southern California, the family of six stayed in a refugee camp, cheap motels, and, briefly, someone’s garage. 'We discovered American fast food early. Our hosts didn’t feed us nearly enough,' she recalls." "In graduate school at MIT, the search for KBOs became an obsession for Luu and her adviser... Jewitt and Luu were named co-recipients of the 2012 Kavli Prize in astrophysics for detecting the first KBO 6 years after their search began. Since then, astronomers have found thousands. Jewitt and Luu shared the award with Michael Brown, whose discovery of Eris, the largest known KBO, was the final nail in Pluto's planetary coffin. Jewitt and Luu also shared the Shaw Prize in astronomy, dubbed the 'Nobel of the East.' Each award carries a cash prize of $1 million, which the recipients share. Luu plans to use her portion to pay off her mortgage, save for her daughter’s college education, and 'boring things like that,' she says." Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/3TtgEIT #APAHM #AAPIHeritageMonth

Stephen Chu was born in St. Louis, Missouri, into an academic family of Chinese heritage. While Dr. Chu is described as "excelling at school", he remembers his childhood a bit differently: "In this family of accomplished scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I performed adequately at school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre. I studied, but not in a particularly efficient manner. Occasionally, I would focus on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother, to be trivial details instead of apportioning the time I spent on school work in a more efficient way." Nevertheless, he developed an interest in math and science and building models. He studied physics at the University of Rochester and then attended graduate school and earned his PhD at UC Berkeley in experimental physics. After Berkeley, he moved to Bell Labs where his research would eventually earn him a share of a Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1997 was awarded jointly to Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips 'for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.'" Chu went on to serve as United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013. Chu is the first person appointed to the U.S. Cabinet after having won a Nobel Prize, and he is only the second Chinese American to be a member of the U.S. Cabinet. Chu is a vocal advocate for research into renewable energy and nuclear power and the need to shift away from fossil fuels due to the damaging effects of climate change. Today he serves on the board of directors of Xyleco, a research and manufacturing company focused on developing biomass waste into sustainable resources. Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/4dlbMyN #APAHM #AAPIHeritageMonth

"No other scientist of Sri Lankan origin was internationally known and respected as he was"-Arthur C. Clarke (on Professor Cyril Ponnamperuma) Cyril Andrew Ponnamperuma was born in Sri Lanka in 1923. He studied in India and the UK before moving to the US and earning his PhD in chemistry in 1962 from Berkeley. His research focused on the origin of life, and in 1963 he joined NASA's Exobiology Division to lead the Chemical Evolution Division. From 1967-1971, Ponnamperuma held positions in Sri Lanka, but in 1971 he moved to University of Maryland as a professor. He maintained his connections with NASA, and was involved with both the Viking and Voyager programs, as well as joining NASA's Space Science Advisory Council and its Life Sciences Advisory Council. His work on the analysis of lunar soil samples returned by the Apollo astronauts, slightly off topic from his usual research, brought him international recognition. In the 1980s, Ponnamperuma began to take an active and visible role in promoting science in Sri Lanka, becoming Science Advisor to President J.R.Jayawardene and shortly thereafter being appointed Director of the Institute of Fundamental Studies, which he shepherded through political turmoil in the late 1980s. Prof. Ponnamperuma continued his work at U Maryland and in Sri Lanka until his death in 1994 at the age of 71. Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/3LFozQR #APAHM #AAPIHeritageMonth

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar's name is well-known to astronomers and astronomy students worldwide. The Chandrasekhar limit determines whether a star will leave behind a white dwarf or neutron star when it dies, and whether a white dwarf may later explode as a supernova. NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory was named in his honor. Born in India, Chandrasekhar completed his PhD in England at Cambridge University in 1933 and then joined the faculty at Univ. of Chicago in 1937 where he remained for the rest of his career. He was awarded one half of the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars". Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/44y6Xyk #APAHM #AAPIHeritageMonth

May is also Jewish American Heritage month! #JAHM Albert Einstein's name is synonymous with “genius” and his reputation has made him a household name the world over. Born to a Jewish but secular family, over the years Einstein grew closer and closer to Judaism and its shared heritage, tradition, and culture. Einstein and his family fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in the United States. His contributions to both science and humanity are of such importance that many awards and prizes are named in his honor, including the American Physical Society’s Einstein Prize and the Albert Einstein Peace Prize. His theories of special and general relativity have made their way into the vernacular and are commonly referenced in movies, television, literature, and of course science where they play important roles in many aspects of astrophysics and particle physics, as well as everyday technology like GPS. Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/4tYl8Zk and https://t.gsu.edu/42OQyFt

Chien-Shiung Wu was born and raised in a small village just north of Shanghai, China. In 1936, she traveled by ship to San Francisco and enrolled at Berkeley, earning her PhD in 1940. In 1944, Wu joined the Manhattan Project, and after WWII she stayed on as faculty at Columbia University. In 1956, she was asked by Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang to devise and conduct an experiment to test their ideas on parity laws. She did, conclusively proving their ideas correct. As a result, Lee and Yang were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. Wu, however, was not acknowledged. Wu remained at Columbia until her retirement. In 1975 she served the American Physical Society as its first female president (serving as Vice President elect and then Vice President from 1973-1974). Near the end of her career, Wu became an outspoken advocate for women in science and for human rights. Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/41qQYQw #APAHM #AAPIHeritageMonth

Tsung-Dao Lee became the second youngest scientist ever to win a Nobel Prize when he and colleague Chen Ning Yang were awarded the Physics prize in 1957. Born in Shanghai, Lee moved to the US in 1946 to study at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Enrico Fermi. He earned his PhD in 1950 based on his dissertation, Hydrogen Content of White Dwarf Stars. In 1953, he became an assistant professor at Columbia University, and by 1956 Lee had been promoted to full professor, the youngest (age 29) ever in faculty history at Columbia. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1957 was awarded jointly to Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao (T.D.) Lee "for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles." Lee remained at Columbia until his retirement, and also served as director of the Brookhaven National Lab RIKEN research center from 1997-2003. Read more: https://t.gsu.edu/3WlST8L #APAHM #AAPIHeritageMonth