Maria Goeppert Mayer, the Nobel Prize winner in physics who explained “magic numbers” while doing research without getting paid

“Volunteer”, “comrade”, “associate researcher”: these are some of the titles that Maria Goeppert Mayer received during 30 years of leading scientific research which won her the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

In other words, German physicists spent most of his career at various American universities without receiving a salary. He was doing research “just for the sake of doing physics”, indicates his biography published by the Nobel Prize winners.

Although anti-nepotism rules were in effect in the United States at the time, the truth is that “No university would have thought of hiring a professor’s wife”explains the Swedish academy. It was her husband, the American chemist Joseph Mayer, who obtained the posts of full-time professor and researcher, while she received the remains. Literally.

One of the universities the couple worked at, the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, said, “She saw an empty office and asked if she could use it; they denied it and instead gave it a living room in the attic. “

Her story, told as part of The Women of Hopkins project, “It is an example of determination in the presence of obstacles”, recognizes the university. When Goeppert Mayer finally became a full professor, she was 54 years old.

Goeppert Mayer was born on June 28, 1906 in Katowice, a city that was then part of Germany, but now belongs to Poland. Her father was the sixth generation of academics, so he always assumed that his only daughter would go to college and follow the family legacy. “My father used to say to me:” When you grow up, don’t become a woman “, in the sense of a housewife”, said Goeppert Mayer quoted by the Nobel.

Although initially his intention was to obtain a degree in mathematics, he decided to study physics after attending a seminar on quantum mechanics given by Max Born, one of the fathers of what was then a nascent branch of science. Born would eventually become Goeppert Mayer’s mentor throughout his years of study at the University of Göttingen in Germany.

But after completing her doctorate, the young woman married and moved to the United States, partly in search of better academic opportunities, and partly to move away from the political movement that would result in the rise to power of ‘Adolf Hitler. In reality, During WWII, Goeppert Mayer would end up working on the Manhattan Project, the secret program of the US government that developed the atomic bomb.

“The urgency of World War II led the United States government to treat Goeppert Mayer’s ability with more respect than that of its most important universities,” say the Nobel laureates.

She even went so far as to say that thanks to the Manhattan Project, for the first time in her career, she managed to “stand” alone as a scientist, without “holding” her husband.

Her biographers agree that while she appreciated the respect she received from her colleagues and the responsibilities they placed on her during those three years of work, she I was hoping the project would fail. According to the Nobel, Goeppert Mayer was “fiercely anti-Hitler, but aware that the weapon I helped create could be used against friends and family living in Germany. “

And although the bomb was developed and used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of people, its investigations were unsuccessful. “We did not find anything and we were lucky … We escaped the stinging guilt that those responsible for the bomb still feel today”, would recognize later, according to the Nobel.

It was after the war that Goeppert Mayer began working on nuclear physics, the line of work that would lead her to define the structure of the atomic nucleus and win the Nobel Prize.

Without going into much technicality, what the scientist has managed to demonstrate time and time again is that the most stable nuclei always have a certain number of neutrons or protons. The “magic numbers” were 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 or 126. But he wasn’t satisfied with it: now that he knew they were special numbers, he wanted to know why. It was so began to develop what is now the famous nuclear layer model.

According to a 2008 American Physical Society (APS) article, “the fact that nuclei with a certain number of nucleons (neutrons and protons) are particularly stable had already been noticed, but physicists were sure that a model in diapers could not be correct. “.

It is that at that time another model prevailed created by none other than Niels Bohr, who had won the Nobel Prize for his research on the structure of atoms. According to APS, Goeppert Mayer “had less formal training in nuclear physics, [entonces] it was less biased ”.

His colleague and friend Edward Teller would sum it up more eloquently: “He had the absurd idea of ​​opposing Bohr’s model of the atomic nucleus. I echoed in my critiques. But It turned out that Maria was right and rightly received the Nobel Prize“.

Goeppert Mayer was not the only one able to think outside the box concerning the structure of the atomic nucleus. When he was about to send his research to the magazine Physical examination discovered that another team led by a certain Hans Jensen had reached the same conclusion in his native Germany.

“She requested that her article be delayed for publication in the same issue as theirs, but hers ended up being published in the issue after theirs, in June 1949,” states the aforementioned APS article.

Later, Goeppert Mayer and Jensen met, becoming friends and collaborators. Together they published a book on the nuclear layer model and in 1963 they shared the Nobel. Back then, just a woman in history, he had received the Nobel Prize in physics: Marie Curie, 60 years earlier.

It would take another 55 years for another woman, Donna Strickland, won it again in 2018. The fourth and final physique to achieve it was Andrea Ghez Last year.

In 1960, shortly after arriving in San Diego to begin his first job as a full professor at the University of California, Goeppert Mayer had a heart attack. His health would continue to be delicate until his death in 1972, but despite this, he did not stop researching and teaching.

“She is one of those women who fought for their goals when society demanded that they stay at home”Physicist Louise Giansante, lead author of the article “Women in physics: pioneers who inspire us”, published in 2018 in the magazine of the International Organization of Medical Physics, tells BBC Mundo.

“She has faced a number of challenges in her professional and personal life,” she continues, “which included wars and deaths, but also simply raising children and being a wife while trying to continue her investigations. “

“His findings and exceptional contribution are widely used to this day.. I think her story needs to be told and can be an inspiration especially for women young women, who still have to face many challenges ”, Giansante concludes with the legacy of German physics.

BBC Mundo