1. Chien-Shiung Wu: Broke A 30-Year-Old Scientific Law
First things first, Chien-Shiung Wu is awesome. Right, secondly, in science we talk about theories and we talk about laws. Theories are basically the workable, malleable way of explaining laws, they can often change and evolve. Laws, however, are supposed to be immutable. Back in the day, one of these laws was the Principle of Conservation of Parity. Put very simply, this was basically the law that the wave functions of two similar particles called isomers would always be the mirror image of one another. Anyway, Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese immigrant to America in the 1950s, and quickly became known for her fierce intelligence and beautifully elegant experiments. Two other Chinese physicists working in America at the time, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee, approached her to help them disprove the parity law. She obliged and promptly set up a series of experiments that did indeed prove that particles were not necessarily symmetrical. This was ground-breaking at the time, overturning a law that had been held for 30 years, and was a massive contribution to both particle physics and the development of the Standard Model. Oh yeah, and Lee and Yang were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery. Wu was left out. Snub or no snub, Wu was a force to be reckoned with and was highly disappointed by the lack of women in science in the West, saying, "it is shameful that there are so few women in science... There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments --- yet she retains eternally feminine." Go girl. Want to write for WhatCulture Science? Click here to find out how you could get paid to write about what you love.There's plenty more science where that came from. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for more all the latest.