a biography of the day-Maria Göppert Mayer (nobel prize winner, physicist, mathematician)

[niyad]

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Dates: June 18, 1906 - February 20, 1972 (other bios list her birthday as 28 june)

Occupation: mathematician, physicist

Known for: Nobel Prize winner

Also known as: Maria Goeppert Mayer, Maria Göppert Mayer, Maria Göppert

A mathematician and physicist, Maria Goeppert Mayer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for her work on the nuclear shell structure.

Maria Göppert was born in 1906 in Kattowitz, then in Germany (now Katowice, Poland). Her father became a professor of pediatrics at the University at Göttingen, and her mother was a former music teacher known for her entertaining parties for faculty members.
With her parents support, Maria Göppert studied mathematics and science, preparing for a university education. But there were no public schools for girls to prepare for this venture, so she enrolled in a private school. The disruption of World War I and the post-war years made study difficult and closed the private school. A year short of finishing, Göppert nevertheless passed her entrance exams and entered in 1924. The only woman teaching at the university did so without a salary -- a situation with which Göppert would become familiar in her own career.

She began by studying mathematics, but the lively atmosphere as a new center of quantum mathematics, and exposure to the ideas of such greats as Niels Bohrs and Max Born, led Göppert to switch to physics as her course in study. She continued her study, even on the death of her father, and received her doctorate in 1930.
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Joe Mayer next received an appointment at Columbia University. Goeppert-Mayer and her husband wrote a book together there, Statistical Mechanics. As at Johns Hopkins, she could not hold a paying job at Columbia, but worked informally and gave some lectures. She met Enrico Fermi, and became part of his research team -- still without pay.
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At Argonne, Goeppert-Mayer worked with Edward Teller to develop a "little bang" theory of cosmic origin. From that work, she began working on the question of why elements that had 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126 protons or neutrons were notably stable. The model of the atom already posited that electrons moved around in "shells" orbiting the nucleus. Maria Goeppert-Mayer established mathematically that if the nuclear particles were spinning on their axes and orbiting within the nucleus in predictable paths that can be described as shells, these numbers would be when the shells were full -- and more stable than half-empty shells.

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http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_goeppert_mayer.htm


Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Born June 28, 1906
Kattowitz, German Empire
Died February 20, 1972 (aged 65)
San Diego, California, United States
Citizenship United States
Nationality German/United States
Fields Physics
Institutions Los Alamos Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory
University of California, San Diego
Alma mater University of Göttingen
Doctoral advisor Max Born
Known for Nuclear Shell Structure
Notable awards Nobel Prize for Physics (1963)
Maria Goeppert-Mayer, walking into the Nobel ceremony with King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden

Maria Goeppert-Mayer (June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She is the second female laureate in physics, after Marie Curie.
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In 1924, Goeppert passed the abitur, which made her eligible to enroll in university. She enrolled at Göttingen in the fall. Her professors at Göttingen included three future Nobel prize winners: Max Born, James Franck and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus. Goeppert completed her Ph.D. in 1930. That same year, she wed Dr. Joseph Edward Mayer, one of James Franck's assistants. The couple later moved to Mayer's home country of the United States.

Goeppert-Mayer worked for several years at volunteer positions at the various universities where her husband was a professor, including Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. During this time, Goeppert-Mayer was unable to gain a professional appointment at Mayer's universities due in part to both sexism[1] and strict rules against nepotism. However, she was able to find other opportunities, including a teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College, a research position with Columbia University's Substitute Alloy Materials Project and with the Opacity Project (an investigation of matter and radiation at high temperature, part of the development of the hydrogen bomb),[2] and she also spent some time at the Los Alamos Laboratory.

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In 1960, Goeppert-Mayer was appointed to a position as a full Professor of Physics at the University of California at San Diego. Although she suffered from a stroke shortly after arriving there, she continued to teach and conduct research for a number of years.
Goeppert-Mayer's model explained why certain numbers of nucleons in an atomic nucleus result in particularly stable configurations. These numbers are called magic numbers. She postulated that the nucleus is a series of closed shells, and pairs of neutrons and protons tend to couple together in what is called spin orbit coupling. An analogy is the way the Earth turns on its axis while it simultaneously revolves around the Sun. Goeppert-Mayer described the idea as follows:
Think of a room full of waltzers. Suppose they go round the room in circles, each circle enclosed within another. Then imagine that in each circle, you can fit twice as many dancers by having one pair go anti-clockwise and another pair go counterclockwise. Then add one more variation; all the dancers are spinning twirling round and round like tops as they circle the room, each pair both twirling and circling. But only some of those that go counterclockwise are twirling counterclockwise. The others are twirling clockwise while circling counterclockwise. The same is true of those that are dancing around clockwise: some twirl clockwise, others twirl counterclockwise.
—Maria Goeppert-Mayer, [citation needed]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer

[DreamGypsy]

1. A great story. A great woman.

Because of the ubiquity the Rutherford model of the atom in common symbols, our basic conception of atoms is inaccurate. After all, shouldn't the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission know what an atom looks like??? - little planetary electrons orbiting a sun-like nucleus...



Thanks to brilliant scientists like Maria Göppert Mayer we now know that the more correct images of electron orbitals are like these:



From Wikipedia, Atomic orbitals:

With the development of quantum mechanics, it was found that the orbiting electrons around a nucleus could not be fully described as particles, but needed to be explained by the wave-particle duality. In this sense, the electrons have the following properties:

Wave-like properties:

The electrons do not orbit the nucleus in the sense of a planet orbiting the sun, but instead exist as standing waves. The lowest possible energy an electron can take is therefore analogous to the fundamental frequency of a wave on a string. Higher energy states are then similar to harmonics of the fundamental frequency.
The electrons are never in a single point location, although the probability of interacting with the electron at a single point can be found from the wave function of the electron.

Particle-like properties:

There is always an integer number of electrons orbiting the nucleus.
Electrons jump between orbitals in a particle-like fashion. For example, if a single photon strikes the electrons, only a single electron changes states in response to the photon.
The electrons retain particle like-properties such as: each wave state has the same electrical charge as the electron particle. Each wave state has a single discrete spin (spin up or spin down).

Thus, despite the obvious analogy to planets revolving around the Sun, electrons cannot be described simply as solid particles. In addition, atomic orbitals do not closely resemble a planet's elliptical path in ordinary atoms. A more accurate analogy might be that of a large and often oddly shaped "atmosphere" (the electron), distributed around a relatively tiny planet (the atomic nucleus). Atomic orbitals exactly describe the shape of this "atmosphere" only when a single electron is present in an atom. When more electrons are added to a single atom, the additional electrons tend to more evenly fill in a volume of space around the nucleus so that the resulting collection (sometimes termed the atom’s “electron cloud”[6]) tends toward a generally spherical zone of probability describing where the atom’s electrons will be found.

Thanks to Maria Göppert Mayer for her part in the discoveries!

My father worked at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago from ~1947 to 1953. I wonder if he ever met Maria or heard her lecture.

Thanks for the post, Niyad.

[niyad]

2. you are most welcome--and thank YOU for the additional information.

[JimDandy]

3. Some people get off on gardening, knitting, woodworking etc...

I get off on learning anything new to me in science, like this. Thanks.

[niyad]

4. it is my pleasure to post these things