Andrea Ghez and Donna Strickland: Frontiers of Knowledge

What It Takes®

Academy of Achievement

Film, Politics, Arts, Self-help, Sports, Society & Culture, Success, Literature, Humanitarian, Military, Social Justice, Technology, Podcast, Achievement, Music, Science

4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2022

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Only four women have ever received the Nobel Prize in Physics. This episode features two of them! Andrea Ghez unlocked a secret of the universe when she figured out how to prove the existence of a super-massive black hole in the center of our galaxy. Donna Strickland devised a way of producing far more intense and precise lasers. Those lasers have changed manufacturing, cancer treatments, and eye surgeries, and promise to offer insights into the fundamental principles of physics. Both Ghez and Strickland talk here about their lives and about becoming world-class scientists at a time when women were under-represented, under-appreciated, and often unrecognized for their achievements. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2022

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, this is Alice.
0:02.0	There's a good chance you're listening to this podcast on your smartphone.
0:09.0	And if that's the case, take a look at its glass screen for a minute.
0:13.1	It might crack if you drop it on the sidewalk, sure,
0:16.1	but really, isn't it kind of amazing how durable it is?
0:20.4	That's because it was made using something called chirped pulse amplification or CPA,
0:27.0	a technology that was developed in the 1980s by a graduate student named Donna Strickland to produce lasers that are way more intense
0:36.4	and precise than any that had come before.
0:40.3	CPA has led to big changes not only in manufacturing but also in cancer treatments for deep tissue tumors and for corrective eye surgery.
0:49.0	It's also opened the door to new ways of studying the fundamentals of physics.
0:55.0	Donna Strickland earned the Nobel Prize for her work in 2018, sharing it with her professor.
1:01.2	She was only the third woman in history to earn the Nobel in physics.
1:06.6	The first was Marie Curie in 1903. The second was Maria Gaper Mayor in 1963.
1:14.4	Talk about some dry spells.
1:16.8	But of course there are far more incredible women doing great research in physics and chemistry.
1:21.6	What is needed is to have these women recognized
1:24.8	so that in a few years when a woman wins a Nobel Prize, the media stories are all about
1:29.6	the fantastic research she did to change the world because we have all stopped counting the number of women who have won the award.
1:37.0	That's Donna Strickland speaking at the Academy of Achievement Summit soon after receiving her Nobel.
1:43.2	Two years later in 2020, along came Andrea Gez, the fourth woman to earn a Nobel in physics.
1:50.7	Suddenly we went from an average of one woman every 38 years to one every 29 years.
1:58.0	Sometimes you just got to look for the positive spin and signs of hope. Andrea Gez found a way to prove that at the middle of the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Academy of Achievement, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Academy of Achievement and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.