Physics

Content type
Collection
Studio portrait of actress Mirra Eitingon standing in a black dress

Mirra Burovsky-Eitingon

Mirra Burovsky was the first Jewish actress to star in the mainstream Russian theater. Her stormy life and career brought her to center stage of Jewish cultural, intellectual, and social ferment in Tsarist and revolutionary Russia, Weimar Germany, and mandatory Palestine. Her third marriage, to psychoanalytist Max Eitingon, and the career of her son Yuli Khariton, “the father of the Soviet atomic bomb,” created the background for a continuing espionage controversy.

Miriam Rykles in her office, 1968
October 17, 2019

Knocking on Harvard's Glass Ceiling

Elana Spivack

In 1962, Miriam Rykles applied to work in Harvard University’s physics department. This is her story.

Topics: Education, Physics
2016-2017 Rising Voices Fellow Maya Jodidio Pipetting DNA into a Gel
September 6, 2017

To Girls Taking Their First STEM Classes

Caroline Kubzansky and
Maya Jodidio
If you’re a female-identifying teen and you attend high school, chances are good that you take, or will take, a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) class. Physics, biology, and chemistry are the usual suspects. We’re writing to share some collective wisdom with you from our own high-school experience.
Topics: Feminism, Schools, Engineering, Inventors, Natural Science, Physics

Eileen Pollack

Discouraged from a promising career in science, Eileen Pollack published her 2015 memoir The Only Woman in the Room to unravel the many instances of sexism, large and small, which push women like her out of STEM fields.
Hertha Ayrton, 1926

Hertha Ayrton

The first woman proposed for membership in the Royal Society, Hertha Ayrton created inventions from tools architects used for enlarging and reducing drawings to fans that could clear poison gas from mine shafts.
Tikvah Alper

Tikvah Alper

Radiobiologist Tikvah Alper, who spent a lifetime questioning accepted theories and the established order, discovered that diseases like scrapie and mad cow replicated without DNA.
Joan Feynman

Joan Feynman

Astrophysicist Joan Feynman shaped our understanding of solar winds, auroras, and sunspots, and her battle to open scientific bastions to women transformed the field for those who followed.
Vera Rubin

Vera Cooper Rubin

Far ahead of her time, Vera Cooper Rubin theorized that galaxies clustered and moved in ways that defied the Big Bang Theory, and helped prove the existence of dark matter.

Emmy Noether

Praised by many, including Albert Einstein, as the most important woman in the history of mathematics, Emmy Noether helped develop abstract algebra and crafted a theorem explaining the connection between symmetry and conservation laws in physics.
Joyce Kaufman

Joyce Jacobson Kaufman

Joyce Jacobson Kaufman’s groundbreaking work in chemistry and physics led to major advancements for the designs of compounds ranging from pharmacological drugs to rocket fuel.
Hedwig Kohn circa 1950

Hedwig Kohn

One of only three women physicists certified to teach at the university level before WWII, Hedwig Kohn did research on measuring the intensity of light which was still cited by physicists over a decade after her death.
Sulamith Goldhaber, October 18, 1963

Sulamith Goldhaber

Sulamith Löw Goldhaber’s pioneering work with particle accelerators put her at the forefront of a seismic shift in the research of particle physics.
Gertrude Goldhaber

Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber

During a career limited time and again by her gender, her religion, and her marital status, physicist Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber helped ensure other women scientists would not face the same hurdles.
Marietta Blau at the Institute for Radium Research in Vienna, circa 1925

Marietta Blau

Marietta Blau’s innovations in photographic emulsion allowed scientists to track particles that they had previously only guessed existed.
Fay Ajzenberg-Selove

Fay Ajzenberg-Selove

Fay Ajzenberg-Selove not only made significant contributions to physics, she made huge strides for women by demanding she be judged on her merits, not her gender.
Rosalyn Yalow

Rosalyn Yalow

Rosalyn Yalow won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for her work in discovering the radioimmunoassay, which uses radioactive isotopes to detect levels of biological and chemical compounds in the human body.
Elsa Neumann at Her Graduation from the University of Berlin, 1899

Elsa Neumann

Elsa Neumann earned a doctorate in physics from the University of Berlin in 1899, nine years before women were officially allowed to study there, becoming the university’s first woman graduate.
November 6, 2013

Women in Science: Reflecting with Dr. Joan Feynman

Jordyn Rozensky

Dr. Feynman fought an uphill battle—she had the smarts and the ability, but she was living in a world that wasn’t able to support or encourage a woman in science. Realizing the realities of the academic culture, she relegated her ambitions to being an assistant to a male physicist. Luckily for all of us—and for the field of theoretical physics—the support of her brother helped her set her goals at being a “high-medium physicist.”

Topics: Feminism, Science, Physics
Steve Benson on the Death of Elsa Neumann Thumbnail

Death of Elsa Neumann, first female doctoral graduate of University of Berlin

July 23, 1902

Death of Elsa Neumann, first female doctoral graduate of University of Berlin

Kepler's Supernova Remnant
July 18, 2012

Women as Wave, Women as Particle: The gender-racial politics of the male-female gaze

Gabrielle Orcha

Who are you?

I mean really . . .

Who are you . . . when you are alone and no one is watching?

What is your wave state?

Topics: Feminism, Politics and Government, Physics
Rosalyn Yalow, 1977

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, 1921 - 2011

Ultimately, RIA created “an explosion of knowledge” in every aspect of medicine and was used in thousands of laboratories in the United States and abroad.

Mattie Levi Rotenberg

Mattie Levi Rotenberg, 1897 - 1989

One <em>Erev Pesach</em> my grandmother demonstrated physics at the University of Toronto for three hours, went to the radio studio to tape a live broadcast, taped two more broadcasts for the upcoming days of <em>Yom Tov</em>, and came home to make <em>seder</em>.

Dr. Rosalyn S. Yalow

Dr. Rosalyn S. Yalow becomes first American-born woman to receive Nobel Prize in science

December 8, 1977

On December 8, 1977, Rosalyn Yalow became the first American-born and American-trained woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science when she accepted

Rosalyn Yalow

Rosalyn Yalow

Rosalyn Yalow was the first woman born and educated in the United States to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. She won in 1977 for her work in discovering the radioimmunoassay.

Science in Israel

In Israel, awareness has grown recently that only through proactive effort can gender equality in scientific fields can be realized. Thorough investigations of inequalities have taken place, and actions are being taken to catalyze policy and systematic action to further women in science and technology.

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