![]() For her contribution, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section was named the Goeppert-Mayer (GM). Instead that had to wait 30 years for the invention of the laser, when in 1961 her predictions would prove to be true. ![]() At the time it was not possible to test the thesis’ theoretical results experimentally. Many years later, Eugene Wigner, yet another Nobel prize for physics winner, would describe it as a “masterpiece of clarity and concreteness”. ![]() It contained a theoretical treatment of two-photon processes. A Masterful Thesisīy 1930, Maria had written her thesis and received her doctorate. Her thesis was a perfect culmination to her education and a foreshadowing of great things to come. It was also an important time for quantum mechanics, and Göttingen was a hotbed for those developments, further shaping her path. As a result of working with Max Born and David Franck her style had a mix of a strong mathematical approach to physics from the former, and a non-mathematical approach from the latter. It was Max Born’s influence that switched her interest from mathematics to physics. Robert Oppenheimer, Wolfgang Pauli, Linus Pauling, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller. Some of those visitors included Enrico Fermi, Paul Dirac, Arthur Holly Compton, Werner Heisenberg, John von Neumann, J. The presence of these giants attracted visitors from all over. Many giants of mathematics were also professors at the university, including Emmy Noether, best known for Noether’s theorem. For starters, Max Born, involved in the development of quantum mechanics and eventual Nobel prize winner for physics, was a family friend, as was David Franck, also an eventual Nobel prize winner for physics.Īs a youth, her interest lay in mathematics and she entered the University of Göttingen in 1924 as a student. Göttingen was the perfect location for putting her on the path to be the scientist she would become. Would Maria continue the tradition for a seventh? Time would tell. There her Father became a professor of pediatrics at the University of Göttingen, making his the sixth generation in a row to have a professor. In 1910, her family moved to Göttingen, a university town and also in Germany. Maria was born in 1906 in what is now Katowice, Poland, but was then Kattowitz in Germany. For a scientist, her story reads like it’s too good to be true, which is what makes it so delightful to read about. She was always on the cutting edge, and all the time working with the leading luminaries of physics. Yet being the other, or plus-one, seemed to give her what every pure scientist desires, the freedom to explore. She followed her husband from university to university, and due to prevailing rules against hiring both husband and wife, often had to take a non-faculty position, sometimes even with no salary. She also worked on the Manhattan Project and spent time during her long career with Enrico Fermi, Max Born, Edward Teller, and many other physics luminaries. And yet her name isn’t anywhere near as well known as Marie Curie’s. The American Physical Society created the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award to honor meritorious young female physicists.Maria Goeppert-Mayer was one of only two women to win the Nobel prize for physics thus far, the other being Marie Curie. Maria Goeppert Mayer was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Heidelberg. Even though she worked for the ‘Manhattan Project’, she was also active in the campaigns against military control of nuclear energy. atomic bomb project and during this time she began her research on how atomic nuclei are built, including the puzzling "magic numbers". At the end of World War II she attended the U.S. Much of her work provides the theoretical foundation for several scientific discoveries in laser physics, laser isotope separation, double-beta decay, and molecular orbital calculation. She is most well-known for her research in nuclear physics, but her vast body of work in the fields of atomic and chemical physics is equally significant. Mayer carried on her work during a time when women were not recognized by the academia and her work was largely accepted because of her husband, Dr. She was the second female Nobel laureate in physics, the first being Marie Curie. Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German-born American theoretical physicist and a joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus.
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