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Building a Place to Learn: Spectroscopist Gladys Amelia Anslow’s Five Decades at Smith College
In the middle of the Twentieth Century, if you wanted to know about the bleeding edge of modern chemical spectroscopy, Gladys Anslow...
Dale DeBakcsy
Feb 11
53 views


Probing the Ultraviolet: The Spectroscopic Marvels of Emma Perry Carr
In its externals the life of Emma Carr (1880-1972) bears many similarities to that of fellow physicist Margaret Maltby (1860-1944). Both...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 11, 2024
190 views


Against the Current: Margaret Eliza Maltby and the Fight for Women in Physics.
An American woman hoping to make her way in science in the 19th century carried with her the knowledge that, as soon as she had a child...
Dale DeBakcsy
May 29, 2024
155 views


She Sang the Arc Electric: Hertha Marks Ayrton
Sometimes, simplicity dooms. In World War I, chlorine gas hailed down upon the British soldiers trudging through their semi-lives in the...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 28, 2024
201 views


From Wartime Radar to W-Bosons: The Experimental Physics of Joan Freeman.
In 1983, one of the great pillars of modern physics was cemented in place when CERN announced the discovery of a group of particles that...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 7, 2024
361 views


Casualty of Genius: The Sacrifice of Mileva Marić-Einstein.
Content Note: By the end of this article, you are not going to like Albert Einstein much. If this is a problem for you, if part of your...
Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 19, 2023
1,255 views


Letting the Light Through: Katharine Burr Blodgett and the Physics of Non-Reflective Coating.
Every day, we subject our eyes to a nearly ceaseless barrage of screen-mediated experiences - phones, computers, televisions, tablets,...
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 18, 2023
180 views


Gone, Fission: How Lise Meitner was Written Out of the Nuclear Age
To fully appreciate Lise Meitner, you have to first forget everything you learned about the atom in high school. Forget that the nucleus...
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
471 views


The Unstoppable Marie Curie
You want to see tough? Take a look at this picture of Marie Curie near life’s end. It’s not an image you see a lot, but there is no...
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
325 views


Water, Fire, and Lightning: The Life of Laura Bassi, the First Woman Professor of Science.
It's April of 1732, and the hot ticket in Bologna is not an opera, a play, or a beheading, but rather that most mundane of things: a...
Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 29, 2023
544 views


How a Kitchen Experiment Spawned a New Science: The Surface Physics of Agnes Pockels.
In 1932, Irving Langmuir won the Nobel Prize for his life of work investigating the physics of how surfaces interact with their...
Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 16, 2023
954 views


Leona Marshall Libby and the American Atomic Bomb.
Leona Woods (1919-1986) was only 23 years old, fresh from wrapping up her PhD work in spectroscopy in the basement of the University of...
Dale DeBakcsy
Aug 10, 2023
218 views


Wither: The Many Triumphs and Long Fall of Nuclear Physicist Harriet Brooks.
Reading the life of Harriet Brooks is like watching the gradual, inevitable unfolding of a horror movie. There's that same idyllic,...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jul 2, 2023
899 views


Corralling the Light Elements: The Nuclear Spectroscopy of Fay Ajzenberg-Selove
In the opening days of the Nazi attack on France, a Jewish engineer took his family aside and instructed them on how to commit suicide by...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 1, 2023
704 views


ATLAS Soared: Fabiola Gianotti and the Discovery of a Higgs Particle
In a corner of a room, tucked unostentatiously away from the notice of the raving hordes of just barely contained school children using...
Dale DeBakcsy
May 8, 2023
7 views


Parity Can Be Deceiving: The Experimental Physics of Chien-Shiung Wu
How does a neutrino sign its paycheck? Sometimes it’s the absurd questions that break physics from its well-worn grooves and force it to...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 30, 2023
145 views


Spectral Lines from a Dying Nation: The Molecular Spectrometry of Hertha Sponer.
It is hard to imagine a time and place outside of Charles Dickens’s Revolutionary France that more embodies the spirit of the Best of...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
62 views
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