Robert McNees
Particle physicist Mary Katharine Gaillard was born #OTD in 1939. She and Benjamin Lee predicted the mass of the charm quark in 1974, and she was the first tenured woman on the physics faculty at UC Berkeley.
Image: Emilio Segre Visual Archives/AIP/SPL
seachanged
Robert McNees
In a 1974 paper with Benjamin Lee they predicted a mass of around 1.5 GeV for the charm quark. That's pretty close to the actual value of about 1.3 GeV.
Robert McNees
Gaillard branched out in the 80s, working on grand unified models, SUSY, and strings. She is now emeritus at Berkeley, but has published as recently as August 2019. That paper was on anomaly cancellation in heterotic string models.
Robert McNees
In 1980, Gaillard published a report on gender imbalance at CERN. She recommended that CERN implement changes like maternity leave, promotion equality, and daycare to address the problem.
https://lib-extopc.kek.jp/preprints/PDF/1980/8006/8006143.pdf
Robert McNees
The second page of the report features a French cartoon that illustrates the attitudes she was confronting.
One man is saying “There’s a woman in the academy!” Another responds with something like "She isn’t waiting until the end of the meeting to clean up?"
Robert McNees
The recommendations in her report were sensible and straightforward ways of addressing an obvious problem. They were not implemented.
Robert McNees
Gaillard published the memoir "A Singularly Unfeminine Profession: One Woman's Journey in Physics" in 2015. The review in Nature paints a picture of CERN in the late 70s and early 80s as a remarkably uninviting place for women.
Robert McNees
Despite Gaillard's accomplishments she was denied a senior staff position. So she left for Berkeley –– it was CERN's loss. (Fabiola Gianotti would finally be appointed to a senior staff position at CERN, but not until 1994. She is now in her second term as Director-General.)
Robert McNees
A great example of Gaillard's ability to clearly explain her insights without falling back on too many equations is the Prologue of her 1975 paper with Lee and Rosner. It's a conversation that lays out their reasoning for why a charm quark should exist.
Robert McNees
Now, this is not as well known, but a paper that Mary Katharine Gaillard wrote with Ellis and Chanowitz led to the work that led to the bet that led to Feynman diagrams that look like… penguins.
Brian Dear
@mcnees That does it, my next band name is Charm Quarks
Robert McNees
@brianstorms I’d listen
Chirp! is a social network. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.1-beta0, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Chirp! content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.