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Chien-Shiung Wu
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Chien-Shiung Wu designed and ran the 1956 experiment that tested a theoretical prediction by Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang that conservation of parity, long assumed to hold universally, fails in the weak nuclear interaction. Her result confirmed the prediction and overturned an assumption physicists had treated as secure. The 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Lee and Yang for the theory alone; Wu's experimental confirmation went unrecognized by the Nobel committee, though she received the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978, an award created for work judged deserving of a Nobel.
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Yang and Lee proposed the cobalt-60 experiment Wu carried out to confirm parity violation; Yang later said Wu's experiment was Nobel-class work and that she should have shared the 1957 prize.
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Associated With: Chen-Ning Yang
Yang himself later told a Nobel Committee chair that Chien-Shiung Wu's cobalt-60 experiment was Nobel-class work in its own right and that she should have been a corecipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was awarded only to Yang and Lee for the theoretical prediction her experiment confirmed.
A dissenting reading, from Chen-Ning YangChien-Shiung Wu's Trailblazing Experiments in Particle Physics (Physics Today), American Institute of Physics
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