Dr Marietta Blau - Infinite Women

Born: April 29, 1894, Austria
Died: 27 January, 1970
Country most active: Austria
Also known as: NA

Physicist Dr. Marietta Blau did groundbreaking research on the pion, a subatomic particle made up of a single quark and antiquark that results from the collision of particles or exposure to high-energy gamma rays. Working with her student, Hertha Wambacher, they pioneered the use of nuclear emulsion plates to characterise and measure interactions of different particles. They also discovered “disintegration stars” created by cosmic rays interacting with nuclei in her photographic plates. In 1937, the pair reported the first indisputable evidence of the disintegration of heavy nuclei in accelerators – the basis for many modern accelerators that rely on this fact, like the Large Hadron Collider.
Blau was nominated once for the chemistry Nobel and four times for the Physics, but even though noted physicists Dr. Erwin Schrodinger (himself a Nobel winner) and Dr. Walter Thirring both nominated Blau and Wambacher for the Nobel Prize, the committee declined. Instead, Dr. Cecil Powell received the Nobel Prize in Physics 1950 for work that was founded in Dr. Blau’s discoveries. In his Nobel lecture, Powell mentioned photographic emulsions at least eight times, and tracks from emulsion plates made up seven of the eight figures he used as visuals, but although he includes 12 citations, he didn’t mention Blau or Wambacher at all.