Wu Experiment Apparatus
notes: label: Description
content: Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) was a Chinese-American physicist who earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and then joined the faculty at Columbia University. Among her achievements was imagining a way to determine if the conservation of parity could be violated (P-violation) by weak interactions. That is, to operationally define left and right, and thus distinguish between the world and the mirror image of it. Led by Ernest Ambler (1923-2017), a British-American physicist, the Low Temperature Group of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards tested and verified Mme. Wu’s theory in early 1957. This is part of their experimental apparatus.
label: Description
content: Ref: C. S. Wu, E, Ambler, R. W, Hayward, D. D. Hoppes, and R. P. Hudson, "Experimental Test of Parity Conservation in Beta Decay" Physical Review 105 (1957): 1413–1415.
label: Description
content: “Text of Columbia University Report on Physics Experiments,” New York Times (Jan. 16, 1957), p. 24.
label: Description
content: “Chien-Shiung Wu, 84, Dies, Top Experimental Physicist,” New York Times (Feb. 18, 1997), p. B7.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Modern Physics
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: EM.N-07646
label: catalog number
content: N-07646
label: accession number
content: 217062
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Apparatus, Wu-Ambler
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: crate: 97 in x 105 in x 44 in; 246.38 cm x 266.7 cm x 111.76 cm