Two years ago today, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating Chien-Shiung Wu, who proved, essentially, that the universe knows its right hand from its left. WomenInScience February11
, the service announced this week. In 1956, Wu proved, essentially, that the universe knows its right hand from its left.
The universe can be thought of as a huge assemblage of fundamental particles interacting through four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force that binds the atomic nucleus, and the weak force that produces a type of nuclear decay called beta decay. Physicists once assumed that if you inverted all the particles' positions—swapping left and right, up and down, forward and back—and reverse all their momenta, the universe should work just the same.
The trick was to study a nucleus that both spins and undergoes beta decay, in which it spits out an electron and a nearly undetectable neutrino. If parity holds, the electron should emerge with equal probability in all directions. If parity is violated, electrons would be more likely to emerge in one direction relative to the nucleus' spin than in the other.
The Nobel controversy aside, the discovery of parity violation had a tremendous impact on particle theory. Particle physicists' whole standard model of elementary particles and forces derives from various abstract symmetries and how interactions among the particles sometimes obscure or break those symmetries. The discovery of parity violation set the conceptual stage for that development, Kaiser says.
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