Ep. 16 You're not a son, but... - My Favorite Feminists

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This episode Megan & Milena cover Chinese American nuclear physicist Chien-Shiung Wu & Russian born portrait photographer Ida Kar

Chien-Shiung Wu

All hail the Queen of Nuclear Physics!

Chien-Shiung Wu, born in 1912, turned the physics world on its head. Quite possibly literally.

Our girl became the leading voice on beta decay, a very special kind of radiation. She used her expertise to disprove an already established theory on how physics would act in a mirrored universe. It also helped find an absolute left and right in terms of Physics in case a bunch of aliens asked us what it was. Sure, we don’t know if a mirrored universe exists, and I doubt any aliens want anything to do with us. But her experiment let us understand how subatomic particles would behave ANYWHERE in the universe, regardless of atmosphere, rotation, and gravitational pull. This made our understanding of these radioactive elements even more solid.

SO- we stole this diagram online for those visual learners in the audience. If the Law of conservation of parity held true, our mirrored universe would look something like the left part of the following diagram. Wu’s experiment yielded the results on the right.

Ida Kar

Artist with a Camera

Photography is every where – it’s so pervasive in our lives from advertising to journalism to Instagram that it’s hard to imagine that for a time photography was not considered art. Ida Kar helped change that.

Born in 1908 Soviet Russia, Ida is best known for her midcentury portrait photos of England’s cultural elites. She was the first artist in London to have her work shown as art – photographs as art. Today that sounds like a ‘yeah, duh’ but in the 1950’s and 60’s there were still Art World snobs that maintained photo’s would never be art. Thankfully all those Art World snobs are dead – as is Ida, but her art helped paved the way for photography’s acceptance as art. This episode we profile how she came into photography, the importance of a seedy neighborhood and the perks of being creatively stubborn.

Selected Works

Early Photos

1943 photo of Ida’s second husband, Victor Musgrave

One of Ida’s 1940’s surrealist inspired photo studies

Like most learning photography, Ida used friends and family as subjects – above is Ida’s parents Melkon & Anahit from the early 1940’s

Very Big Deal Art Names

After moving from Cairo to England, Ida became immersed in London’s creative scene, photographing some of the most prominent figures of the time. Below are a few Big Names