![]() Why did nature “like” these configurations so much? The few people who had studied this phenomenon before had found two such magic numbers, 50 and 82, scratched their head, and more or less let the matter lie, but Goeppert-Mayer wouldn’t let the problem go. She was interested in the peculiar stability of certain isotopes and, upon investigation, found that certain numbers kept popping up, what Eugene Wigner called “magic numbers.” If a nucleus possessed a “magic” number of protons or neutrons, it tended not to decay, and was found in greater abundance than previous models could explain. Even after doing important work on isotope separation and the effect of extreme temperatures on radiation, the best she could manage for years after the war was an unsalaried “volunteer associate professor” position at the University of Chicago, where Fermi had set up a group of nuclear experts and invited Joe Mayer to become a theoretical chemistry professor.Īnd yet, in spite of having been treated as essentially a Faculty Wife for the better part of two decades, she was at last within striking range of the work that would put her in the ranks of the quantum pantheon. It was a psychologically difficult time, her hatred of Hitler warring with her realization that the ultimate weapon she was helping to create might well be dropped on friends and family left behind. In the meantime, she kept on top of quantum developments by talking with family friends Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, and taking side work in physics as it offered itself, including writing a book on statistical mechanics with her husband that became a standard classic, and a stint doing top secret work for the atomic bomb project. She arrived in America in 1930, and didn’t have an official, salaried, full-time university professorship to call her own until 1960, three years before winning the Nobel Prize, and ten years after having published her ground-breaking work on the Nuclear Shell Model. For Maria, however, the best that could be found was a small space to think and a pittance of a couple hundred dollars for doing it. Joe and Maria married, and moved to America, where Joe had a position at Johns Hopkins waiting for him. Her PhD work, hypothesizing the ability of an atom to absorb two photons at once, especially when exposed to high intensity light, could not be proven experimentally (laser experiments wouldn’t confirm it for another three decades), but her argumentation was a model of precision, and it was Joe Mayer who kept at her to finish the writing and take her deserved degree. Whether through an excess of rigor or modesty, at critical moments in her life she sat on important research, giving others the chance to snatch her discoveries from her. Maria was brilliant, but she also had a tendency to drag her heels when it came time to write up her work. He fell in love with her, as many did, but had the good fortune to be loved by her in return, beginning a partnership in science that would push them both into territory they might not otherwise have braved. She came under the patient and devoted tutelage of Max Born, and met an argumentative American named Joe Mayer who had come to Göttingen to learn the new physics at its source. She attended the University of Göttingen in the mid-Twenties, just in time for the Quantum Revolution to explode all around her, the momentum of that general excitement pushing her from a chosen career in mathematics to one in physics. Her father actively encouraged her scientific curiosity, and the two had a tight relationship based on a spirit of intellectual adventure that sustained them as they traipsed over mountains and through forests seeking the riddles of nature. Maria was an only child in a family that boasted, on her father’s side, six generations of university professors, and it was therefore expected, in spite of all social considerations, that she would become an academic herself. Her childhood was spent in a Germany that, while still maintaining a certain Prussian reluctance to let women into the sciences, had at least the example of Emmy Noether to light the way for those who would try. For most of her life, she worked without salary or a title commensurate with her abilities, doing brilliant things when given the chance and then promptly being forgotten about for decades at a time. Goeppert-Mayer’s life is a tale of inertia overcome, both institutional and personal.
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