Presented By: Department of Physics
Special MIRA - U-M Physics Department Seminar | The Tragic Destiny of Mileva Marić Einstein
Pauline Gagnon, Retired Senior Research Scientist (Indiana University)
What were Albert Einstein's first wife’s contributions to his extraordinary productivity in the first years of his career? A first biography of Mileva Marić was published in Serbian in 1969 but remained largely unknown despite being translated first in German, then in French in the 1990’s. The publication of Mileva and Albert’s love letters in 1987 brought more information but more recently, two very well documented publications shed even more light on Mileva Marić’s life and work. I will review this evidence in its social and historical context to give a better idea on her contributions. The audience will be able to appreciate why such a talented physicist has been so unkindly treated by history.
About the Speaker:
Pauline Gagnon was born in Chicoutimi in Quebec, Canada in 1955. She received a B.Sc. in Physics from Université du Québec à Montréal in 1978 and taught physics for six years in local colleges. After moving to California, she first obtained a Masters degree at San Francisco State University then completed a PhD in particle physics at the University of California in Santa Cruz in 1993. She joined a research team from Carleton University in Ottawa to conduct research at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located near Geneva. She later became Senior Research Scientist at Indiana University until she retired in 2016. She contributed to the construction of a tracking device for the ATLAS detector, and searched for dark matter particles in the decays of Higgs bosons and in the form of hypothetical particles called dark photons.
From 2011 until 2014, she worked within the CERN Communication group, writing blogs for the Quantum Diaries and answering questions from numerous media worldwide. Explaining particle physics in simple and accessible terms has become her trademark. Since 2013, she has given more than 80 presentations to large audiences in eight countries on three continents. Her popular science book Who Cares about Particle Physics: Making Sense of the Higgs boson, the LHC and CERN goes beyond the current research program at CERN, looking at how research is done by large international teams and exploring the importance of fundamental research in physics. With this book, she hopes to reach even larger audiences, being convinced that particle physics is too much fun to leave it only to physicists!
About the Speaker:
Pauline Gagnon was born in Chicoutimi in Quebec, Canada in 1955. She received a B.Sc. in Physics from Université du Québec à Montréal in 1978 and taught physics for six years in local colleges. After moving to California, she first obtained a Masters degree at San Francisco State University then completed a PhD in particle physics at the University of California in Santa Cruz in 1993. She joined a research team from Carleton University in Ottawa to conduct research at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located near Geneva. She later became Senior Research Scientist at Indiana University until she retired in 2016. She contributed to the construction of a tracking device for the ATLAS detector, and searched for dark matter particles in the decays of Higgs bosons and in the form of hypothetical particles called dark photons.
From 2011 until 2014, she worked within the CERN Communication group, writing blogs for the Quantum Diaries and answering questions from numerous media worldwide. Explaining particle physics in simple and accessible terms has become her trademark. Since 2013, she has given more than 80 presentations to large audiences in eight countries on three continents. Her popular science book Who Cares about Particle Physics: Making Sense of the Higgs boson, the LHC and CERN goes beyond the current research program at CERN, looking at how research is done by large international teams and exploring the importance of fundamental research in physics. With this book, she hopes to reach even larger audiences, being convinced that particle physics is too much fun to leave it only to physicists!
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