Maria
Goeppert Mayer won a Nobel Prize in Nuclear Physics in 1963. She developed the
nuclear shell model of atomic nuclei. She is an important woman in physics for
her model of perseverance and her research discoveries. Even during times when universities
would not employ her as a professor or physicist, she continued to learn, conduct research, write textbooks, pursue physics, and persevere, until she met more enlightened colleagues to
collaborate on her research.
Early
Life and Education
Mayer
came from a family of academics. For several generations back, her relatives
were professors. She was born in Germany and spent much of her life in
Gottingen. At the time, this was a prime location for a person interested in
physics. Her father was employed by the university and her parents ensured that
she could pursue her education, even when the local school for girls was
closed. After graduating from high school, she attended university (starting in
1924) intending to study mathematics, but physics sparked her interest. Mayer
was a mathematics student until she attended the physics seminars given by Max Born.
In an interview she recalls the seminars: "It was very nice, because usually after the seminars
we’d go for a walk with Born — the whole seminar — anyone who wanted to come
along, and go somewhere in the hills and have a rustic supper in one of the
village inns.” Later, she changed her major to physics.
This
was a time when the place to be for studying physics was Germany, and she was
near the center of cutting edge ideas in nuclear physics and quantum mechanics.
While at University, she spent a term in
Cambridge, England, where she learned English—this would serve her well later,
when she immigrated to the United States. In 1930, she earned her Ph.D. in
theoretical physics.
During
her time at university in Gottingen, she was mentored by other Nobel Laureates,
including James Franck and Adolf Windaus.
Her
Career
During
the Great Depression, Mayer immigrated to America with her husband, chemist
Joseph E. Mayer, who became a professor at Johns Hopkins University. James
Franck was also at JHU at the time. During this time, the university would not consider
employing her. Mayer gave birth to a son and a daughter during their time in
Baltimore. However, later her husband transferred to Columbia University and she
worked at Sarah Lawrence College as a professor and researcher; her work there
focused on the separation of isotopes of uranium with Harold Urey, a Nobel
Prize winner in Chemistry. Through her interests and colleagues, she became a “chemical physicist” and
worked on the study of the color of organic molecules.
Her
career really took off when she moved to Chicago with her husband in 1946. There,
she was tmore accepted (although she was still not paid and employed as a full professor) and became a professor of physics and researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Studies. She had a lot to learn about Nuclear Physics, but supportive and stimulating
colleagues like Enrico Fermi worked with her.
Fermi and Mayer
(image credit
Nobel-Worthy Discoveries
In
1948, Mayer began to work with the study of magic numbers; over the next
several years, she developed an explanation and began to understand the
ramifications of her ideas. Meanwhile, other scientists, Wigner and Jensen, were
working on these ideas as well and arrived at similar conclusions as Mayer.
They
decided to write a book together and were later awarded the Nobel Prize
jointly. Mayer and Jensen officially shared half the prize for their “discoveries
concerning nuclear shell structure.”
Women
in Physics
When
she won the Nobel Prize, a local newspaper in San Diego ran the following headline “S.D.
Mother Wins Nobel Prize.” At the time, she was a paid professor of physics at
the University of California in San Diego/La Jolla. However, it is interesting
(and perhaps representative of the times and the very real professional and
social obstacles she had to overcome to be taken seriously as a professional
physicist) that the newspaper characterized her as a mother and not a physicist
in the headline.
Our previous selection of an important woman in physics, C.S. Wu, was not honored with
the Nobel Prize with her colleagues in 1957. The fact that Mayer was honored
for her work in 1963, only a few years later, was definitely a step in the right direction for the
progress of women in science.
Resources
Read
more about Mayer here
Read
the official Nobel Prize biography, which was consulted for this blog, here
Download
a PDF of the Nobel Lecture
Read
an interview with Mayer at the American Institute of Physics website.
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