A graduate of theUniversity of Göttingen, Goeppert Mayer wrote her doctoral thesis on the theory of possibletwo-photon absorption by atoms. At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of thelaser in the 1960s later permitted this. Today, the unit for the two-photonabsorption cross section is called the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit.
After the war, Goeppert Mayer became a voluntary Associate Professor of Physics at theUniversity of Chicago (where her husband and Teller worked) and a senior physicist at the university-runArgonne National Laboratory. She developeda mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. In 1960, she was appointed Full Professor of Physics at theUniversity of California, San Diego.[2][3]
Maria Göppert was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz (nowKatowice, Poland), then located in theKingdom of Prussia, the only child of paediatricianFriedrich Göppert and Maria Wolff.[4] In 1910, she moved with her family toGöttingen, where her father,[5] a sixth-generation university professor,[6] was appointed Professor of Pediatrics at theUniversity of Göttingen.[4] She was closer to her father than to her mother; "Well, my father was more interesting", she later explained; "He was after all a scientist".[7]
Göppert was educated at theHöhere Technische in Göttingen, a school for middle-class girls who aspired to higher education.[8] In 1921, she entered theFrauenstudium, a private high school run bysuffragettes that aimed to prepare girls for university. She took theabitur, the university entrance examination, at age 17, a year early, with three or four girls from her school and thirty boys. All the girls passed, but only one of the boys did.[9]
In the spring of 1924, Göppert entered the University of Göttingen, where she studied mathematics.[10] She spent one year at theUniversity of Cambridge in England, before returning to Göttingen. A purported shortage of women mathematics teachers for schools for girls led to an upsurge of women studying mathematics at a time of high unemployment, and there was even a female professor of mathematics at Göttingen,Emmy Noether, but most were only interested in qualifying for their teaching certificates.[11]
Göppert became interested in physics, and chose to pursue aPh.D. instead. In her 1931 thesis,[12][13] she worked out the theory of possibletwo-photon absorption by atoms.[10]Eugene Wigner later described the thesis as "a masterpiece of clarity and concreteness".[14] At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of thelaser permitted the first experimental verification in 1961, when two-photon-excitedfluorescence was detected in aeuropium-doped crystal.[15] To honor her fundamental contribution to this area, the unit for the two-photonabsorption cross-section is named the "GM". One GM is 10−50 cm4 s photon−1.[16] Her examiners were three Nobel Prize winners:Max Born,James Franck, andAdolf Otto Reinhold Windaus (in 1954, 1925, and 1928, respectively).[17]
On January 19, 1930, Göppert marriedJoseph Edward Mayer, an AmericanRockefeller fellow who was one of James Franck's assistants.[18][19] The two had met when Mayer had boarded with the Göppert family.[20] The couple moved to Mayer's home country of the United States, where he had been offered a position as Associate Professor of Chemistry atJohns Hopkins University in Maryland.[21] They had two children; Maria Ann, who later marriedDonat Wentzel, and Peter Conrad.[18]
Strict rules againstnepotism prevented Johns Hopkins University from hiring Goeppert-Mayer as a faculty member.[22] These rules, created at many universities to prevent patronage, had by this time lost their original purpose and were primarily used to prevent the employment of women married to faculty members.[23] She was given a job as an assistant in the physics department working with German correspondence, for which she received a very small salary, a place to work and access to the facilities. She taught some courses,[18][24] and published an important paper ondouble beta decay in 1935.[25]
Some [schools] even condescended to give her work, though they refused to pay her, and the topics were typically 'feminine', such as figuring out what causes colors … the University of Chicago finally took her seriously enough to make her a professor of physics. Although she got her own office, the department still didn't pay her … When the Swedish academy announced in 1963 that she had won her profession's highest honor, the San Diego newspaper greeted her big day with the headline "S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize".[26][27]
There was little interest inquantum mechanics at Johns Hopkins, but Goeppert-Mayer worked withKarl Herzfeld in this area. They collaborated on a number of papers, including a paper with Herzfeld's student A. L. Sklar on the spectrum ofbenzene.[28][29] She also returned to Göttingen in the summers of 1931, 1932 and 1933 to work with her former examiner Born, writing an article with him for theHandbuch der Physik. This ended when theNazi Party came to power in 1933, and many academics, including Born and Franck, lost their jobs. Concerned by the1933 anti-Jewish laws that ousted professors of Jewish descent, Goeppert-Mayer as well as Herzfeld became involved in refugee relief efforts.[18][24]
Joe Mayer was fired in 1937. He attributed this to the hatred of women on the part of the dean of physical sciences, which he thought was provoked by Goeppert-Mayer's presence in the laboratory.[30] Herzfeld agreed and added that, with Goeppert-Mayer, Franck and Herzfeld all at Johns Hopkins, some thought that there were too many German scientists there. There were also complaints from some students that Mayer's chemistry lectures contained too much modern physics.[31] Mayer took up a position atColumbia University, where the chairman of the physics department,George B. Pegram, arranged for her to have an office, but she received no salary. She soon made good friends withHarold Urey andEnrico Fermi, who arrived at Columbia in 1939,[32] with the three of them and their families living in nearbyLeonia, New Jersey.[33] Fermi asked her to investigate thevalence shell of the undiscoveredtransuranic elements. Using theThomas–Fermi model, she predicted that they would form a new series similar to therare earth elements. This proved to be correct.[32] In 1941, she was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Physical Society.[34]
In December 1941, Goeppert-Mayer took up her first paid professional position, teaching science part-time atSarah Lawrence College in New York. In the spring of 1942, with the United States embroiled inWorld War II, she joined theManhattan Project. She accepted a part-time research post from Urey withColumbia University's Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratories. The objective of this project was to find a means of separating thefissileuranium-235 isotope in natural uranium; she researched the chemical and thermodynamic properties ofuranium hexafluoride and investigated the possibility of separating isotopes by photochemical reactions. This method proved impractical at the time, but the development of lasers would later open the possibility ofseparation of isotopes by laser excitation.[35]
Through her friendEdward Teller, Goeppert Mayer was given a position at Columbia with the Opacity Project, which researched the properties of matter and radiation at extremely high temperatures with an eye to the development of theTeller's "Super" bomb, the wartime program for the development ofthermonuclear weapons.[35] In February 1945, Joe was sent to thePacific War, and she decided to leave her children in New York and join Teller's group at theLos Alamos Laboratory. Joe came back from the Pacific earlier than expected, and they returned to New York together in July 1945.[35][36]
During her time at Chicago and Argonne in the late 1940s, Goeppert-Mayer developed a mathematical model for thestructure of nuclear shells, which she published in 1950.[40][41] Her model explained why certain numbers ofnucleons in anatomic nucleus result in particularly stable configurations. These numbers are what Eugene Wigner calledmagic numbers: 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. In an account relayed by Joe Mayer, she attained a critical insight while speaking with Enrico Fermi.
Fermi and Maria were talking in her office when Enrico was called out of the office to answer the telephone on a long distance call. At the door he turned and asked his question about spin-orbit coupling. He returned less than ten minutes laterand Maria started to 'snow' him with the detailed explanation. You may remember that Maria, when excited, had a rapid fire oral delivery, whereas Enrico always wanted a slow detailed and methodical explanation. Enrico smiled and left: 'Tomorrow, when you are less excited, you can explain it to me.'[42]
She had realised that the nucleus is a series of closed shells and pairs of neutrons and protons tend to couple together.[43] She described the idea as follows:
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 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.[44]
German scientistsOtto Haxel,J. Hans D. Jensen, andHans Suess were also working on solving the same problem, and arrived at the same conclusion independently. While their results were announced in an issue of thePhysical Review before Goeppert-Mayer in June 1949, her work was received for review in February 1949, while the work of the German authors was received later in April 1949.[45][46] Afterwards, she collaborated with them. Jensen co-authored a book with her in 1950 titledElementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure.[47] She was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences in 1956.[48] In 1963, Goeppert-Mayer and Jensen shared one half of theNobel Prize in Physics "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure".[49][50][51] The other half of that year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded toEugene Wigner. She was the second female Nobel laureate in physics, afterMarie Curie,[52] and would be the last for over half a century, untilDonna Strickland was awarded the prize in 2018.[27]
After her death, theMaria Goeppert-Mayer Award was created by theAmerican Physical Society (APS) to honor young female physicists at the beginning of their careers. Open to all female physicists who hold PhDs, the winner receives money and the opportunity to give guest lectures about her research at four major institutions.[60] In December 2018, the APS named Argonne National Laboratory an APS Historic Site in recognition of her work.[61] Argonne National Laboratory also honors her by presenting an award each year to an outstanding young woman scientist or engineer,[62] while the University of California, San Diego hosts an annual Maria Goeppert-Mayer symposium, bringing together female researchers to discuss current science.[63] In 1996, she was inducted into theNational Women's Hall of Fame.[64] In 2011, she was included in the third issuance of theAmerican Scientists collection of US postage stamps, along withMelvin Calvin,Asa Gray, andSevero Ochoa.[65] Her papers are inGeisel Library at the University of California, San Diego,[66] and the university's physics department is housed in Mayer Hall, which is named after her and her husband.[67]Goeppert-Mayer crater onVenus, which has a diameter of about 35 km, is also named after her.[68]
^McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch (1998).Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries (Second ed.). Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. pp. 190–193. Excerpt can also be seen asthis attachment to a Report to the Historical Resources Board of the City of San Diego, August 18, 2016.
Simon, Rita James; Clark, Shirley Merritt; Tifft, Larry L. (Autumn 1966). "Of Nepotism, Marriage, and the Pursuit of an Academic Career".Sociology of Education.39 (4):344–358.doi:10.2307/2111918.ISSN0038-0407.JSTOR2111918.
Wilson, Scott (2016).Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons (3rd ed.). Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company.ISBN978-0-7864-7992-4.OCLC948561021.
Wuensch, Daniela (2013).Der letzte Physiknobelpreis für eine Frau? Maria Goeppert Mayer: Eine Göttingerin erobert die Atomkerne. Nobelpreis 1963. Zum 50. Jubiläum. Göttingen, Germany: Termessos Verlag. pp. 148, 44 photos, 2 diagrams.ISBN978-3-938016-15-2.
Zierdt-Warshaw, Linda; Winkler, Alan; Bernstein, Leonard (2000).American Women in Technology: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio.ISBN1-57607-072-7.
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