#women in physics

Amalie Emmy Noether was born on 23rd March 1882 in a world in which women were not always appreciated for their intellect. In the German city in which her family lived, the local university—the University of Erlangen entirely prohibited women from being accepted as students. Despite this, Noether managed to gain special permission to sit in on lectures. This exception presumably had something to do with her father, who was a professor of mathematics at the school. Seven years later, she became the first woman to earn a doctorate degree from the university.

In 1915, David Hilbert and Felix Klein invited her to work at the University of Göttingen, a world-renowned mathematical institute, to help solve a key problem in the field of general relativity, which treats gravity as a bending of space caused by mass and energy. The theory seemed to have a serious sickness: Energy caused the bending of space, but gravity itself was energy. Thus, it would seem that the energy of bending space made yet more energy. Presumably, this would bend space more, resulting in more energy. It seemed like the theory could cascade in this manner to the point that energy would grow forever. And because this didn’t happen, there needed to be a solution. Emmy’s solution, which has come to be called Noether’s theorem, was worked out in the same year she arrived and had far-ranging implications.

source:
— The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality by Professor Don Lincoln
— Nature’s Blueprint Supersymmetry: and the Search for a Unified Theory of Matter and Force by Cosmologist Dan Hooper.