You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Okay, short waivers, we have a story in two X for you about a discovery that changed

the world and all went down in a particle physics lab in the 1950s.

That's where one scientist ran a painstakingly difficult experiment that shattered fundamental

ideas about how our universe works at the tiniest levels.

We'll talk more about her backstory in part two, which you can listen to tomorrow.

For part one, we're going to decipher the science of her accomplishment.

With our very own scientist and residents, Dr. Regina Barber, who is an astrophysicist

by trade, though her PhD is in physics.

Physics was an accident.

Astronomy was what I loved.

And it was at some point in Regina's physics career in some hallway that she saw a face

that made her do a double take.

A face that looked like her own.

There are these posters that are on many physics department's walls.

They go through each decade of what was happening in physics.

So it's like 1910, 1920s.

And in the 1950s panel, there was this Asian woman.

The woman on that poster was Dr. Qin Shanggu.

Widely considered the queen of nuclear physics for an experiment that upended a decade

of old assumption in her field.

Today on the show, Regina Barber and I dig into the Wu experiment.

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