Women that are smarter than Lawrence Summers
(Second in a new, occasional series.)
I decided to start this new feature where I will be highlighting stories from my science magazines where the women achieved successes that the men had not, or where the addition of a woman to a team helped the team achieve success where previous, all-male teams had not. This is not in any way meant to imply that men are stupid or that they aren't as smart as women. However, the best way to show that something is at least equal to X is to show that it can be more than X. People that want to yell and scream at me for this... that's what that little comment link down there is for. Go for it. Meanwhile, on with the show.
Various researchers have been trying to prove - via experimentation - that E really does equal mc2. They were having problems at Cornell with "magnetic noise" problems in the Penning trap they were using to measure the mass of an ion. They worked for at least 3 years on this problem without success. But then in 1999, when Debbie Fygenson joined them, the team finally solved the problem by trapping two different ions at the same time, which proceeded to move in a syncopated fashion. Researchers were then able to weigh the two ions against each other in order to cancel out the effect of the noise.
Alas, the researchers did not move to this "revolutionary" discovery immediately. They wasted four more years using the old one-ion method, before giving up in 2003. Using the new method they were finally able to measure the mass of an ion to within 5 parts in a trillion.
Thanks, Debbie Fygenson, for your contributions to the team, to the research, and to advancing the exposure of women in science!
9:20:34 PM 
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