Mary K. Gaillard: One Woman's Journey In Physics

Oh, it is much better, even at CERN. At many places there is onsite childcare, family leave, and you can stop the tenure clock when you have a baby. There is certainly no discrimination at Berkeley. There are still problems of juggling family and career, but that is beginning to be more of a shared problem between spouses, I think. I think younger men have a totally different approach to marriage than people did in my generation. There is still a problem, though. We hear from female students that they feel somewhat intimidated and there are questions of insensitivity. Not on the part of the faculty, but on the part of other male graduate students.

The Standard Model of particle physics is based on this group of fundamental particles, including the charm quark, the mass of which Gaillard predicted.

Looking back over your long career, was there one problem you really enjoyed working on?

The most fun time I had in my life was with charm, and that it was actually discovered eventually. Oh, you feel good. But at the time that we wrote the paper on charm, it was far from universally accepted. Somebody asked me when I was going to stop believing in charm. But I was sure there was charm. That was a long wait until they found the actual charm-carrying particles at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

Your work on charm came out of your work on the weak force, which is involved in such things as radioactive decay. What is charm?

We are made out of "up" quarks and "down" quarks, and the "charm" quark is the same as an "up" quark but is heavier. That’s the only difference. Charm is necessary to make the theory of weak interactions sensible.

The Higgs particle, which gives mass to all the other particles in the universe, was found two years ago at CERN. What was your role in the search for the Higgs?

I had just returned to CERN after writing this paper, The Search for Charm, and a colleague suggested that we write something similar for the Higgs, how to search for it. Charm was found a year and a half after our paper, but the Higgs took about 40 years after our paper. They have made more and more measurements since 2013, and it looks more and more like they found the Higgs, which is in a way disturbing. They should be finding other Higgs particles – the theory of supersymmetry predicts at least five Higgs particles – or other stuff, or properties of the Higgs that are not what the Standard Model predicts. We hope that the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider see something at a higher energy.

Your second husband, Bruno Zumino, who died last year, was one of the originators of the theory of supersymmetry, which postulates that every elementary particle has a supersymmetric pair. Are you working on that theory?

For the last 15 years I have been trying to connect superstring theory to experiment. Right now, though, I think the most exciting field in physics is cosmology, because it is getting so much data. We are learning very precisely the composition of the universe. You can combine particle theory with cosmology. Accelerator and cosmic dark matter searches are basically looking for the same thing.

Do you have any advice for women going into physics today?

Just do what you like. Find a nice partner. I think women in physics today are a lot better off than they were in my day. The women in the physics department now are probably more balanced in their lives. I'd also like to convey that physics is fun. If some young women get motivated by reading my book, that would be great.

A Singularly Unfeminine Profession: One Woman’s Journey in Physics

Mary K. Gaillard website

The Standard Model of particle physics (Symmetry magazine)

Pages: 1 · 2 · 3

News and Issues, Issues, Learning, Women of Note, Senior Women Web, Articles, Sightings, What's New Add comments

Mary K. Gaillard: One Woman's Journey In Physics

More Articles