A Double Dose of Physics with Dr. Betty Jensen and Dr. Mary Lou West

What was it like forging a career in physics as a woman in the 1970s? To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome the “Dynamic Duo of Physics” – physicist Dr. Betty Jensen and astrophysicist Dr. Mary Lou West.

As always, though, we start off with the day’s joyfully cool cosmic thing, a potential new revelation about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. It seems that the current spot may be only 190 years old rather than 400 years old, and that the first spot described by Cassini in the 1600s may have actually disappeared in the early 1700s. Mary Lou points out that the older spot may not even have been red and gives us a primer on the storms of Jupiter.

Next, Betty talks about her love of math and science, her research in fusion energy, and how she forged her own path to becoming the physicist she always knew she would be. Both scientists talk about how “the two body problem” led each of them to stay in the New York area. Mary Lou talks about how she also studied math and physics, but how she ended up becoming an astrophysicist.

Then it’s time for an audience question for Dr. Jensen and Dr. West: “What kinds of mentoring opportunities were available during your PhD years?” Betty says that while as the lone woman in her area she didn’t feel very supported, she did have some really good experiences with professors at Columbia University, including Nobel prize winner in physics Dr. Isadore Isaac Rabi.

Mary Lou, who was also at Columbia, tells the story of how she had to do a second thesis after someone published on the subject she’d been working on. She also recounts the wild story of how she used a children’s chalkboard to save her PhD thesis defense after student protests disrupted it.

Charles brings up the story of Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, one of the most famous woman physics professors of the period and a member of the Manhattan Project, with whom Betty took a class. In a perhaps unsurprising turn of events, Dr. Wu and the other women on her team who conducted the “Wu Experiment” were ignored by the Nobel Prize committee in favor of the male scientists who predicted the results of her experiment.

Throughout the episode, Betty and Mary Lou share some of their most interesting experiences, from riding in the back of a car with Edward Teller, the father of the H-Bomb, to the nearly catastrophic installation of a large telescope at the Harriman Observatory.

Chuck talks with Betty and Mary Lou about what it was like to use computers in the punch card era. It turns out, both Betty’s dissertation and Mary Lou’s thesis were on punch cards!

Finally, after the two scientists brag about their families, Chuck asks them for some parting words of advice for future scientists. But we wouldn’t dream of speaking for them, so please tune in to the episode for words of wisdom from these two inspirational physicists.

 

We hope you enjoy this episode of The LIUniverse, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon.

 

Credits for Images Used in this Episode:

• Great Red Spot seen by the Juno probe – Kevin Gill, CC BY 2.0
• Cassini’s drawing of Jupiter’s “permanent spot” – Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Public Domain
• Great Red Spot in the 1880s – Thomas Gwyn Elger
• Magnetic plasma storms on the Sun – Courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams, Public Domain
• Dr. Isadore Isaac Rabi – Nobel Foundation
• Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu at work – Smithsonian Institution, no known copyright restrictions
• Dr. Edward Teller – UC Davis, CC BY 2.0

 

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