Donna Strickland was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Arthur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou. It was the first time in 55 years that a woman had won this famous prize, but why did it take so long? We look at five other pioneering female physicists—past and present—who actually deserve the prize.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Perhaps the most famous snub (冷落): then—student Bell discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967, when she was a PhD student at Cambridge. The Nobel Prize that recognized this landmark discovery in 1974, however, went to her male supervisor, Antony Hewish. Recently awarded a £2.3 million Breakthrough Prize, which she gave away to help under-represented students, she joked to The Guardian, "I feel I've done very well out of not getting a Nobel Prize."
Lene Hau
Hau is best-known for leading the research team at Harvard University in 1999 that managed to slow a beam of light, before managing to stop it completely in 2001. Often topping Nobel Prize prediction lists, could 2023 be Hau's year?
Vera Rubin
Rubin discovered dark matter in the 1980s, opening up a new field of astronomy. She died in 2016, without recognition from the committee.
Chien-Shiung Wu
Wu's "Wu experiment" helped disprove the "law of conservation of parity". Her experimental work was helpful but never honored, and instead, her male colleagues won the 1957 Nobel Prize behind the study.
Lise Meitner
Meitner led groundbreaking work on the discovery of nuclear fission. However, the discovery was acknowledged by the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was won by her male co-worker, Otto Hahn.
