Background

An only child, Goeppert Mayer was born Maria Göppert on July 28, 1906, in the German city of Kattowitz in Upper Silesia (now Katowice, Poland). When she was four, her father, Dr. Friedrich Göppert, was appointed a professor of pediatrics at the University at Göttingen, Germany. Situated in an old medieval town, the university had historically been respected for its mathematics department, but was on its way to becoming the European center for yet another discipline-theoretical physics.

Maria's mother, Maria Wolff Göppert, was a former teacher of piano and French who delighted in entertaining faculty members with lavish dinner parties and providing a home filled with flowers and music for her only daughter. Dr. Göppert was a most progressive pediatrician for the times, as he started a well-baby clinic and believed that all children, male or female, should be adventuresome risk-takers. His philosophy on child-rearing had a profound effect on his daughter, who idolized her father and treasured her long country walks with him, collecting fossils and learning the names of plants. Because the Göpperts came from several generations of university professors, it was unstated but expected that Maria would continue the family tradition. When Maria was just eight, World War I interrupted the family's rather idyllic university life with harsh wartime deprivation. After the war, life was still hard because of postwar inflation and food shortages. In 1927 Göppert's father died.

Education

Maria Göppert attended a small private school run by female suffragists to ready young girls for university studies. The school went bankrupt when Göppert had completed only two of the customary three years of preparatory school. Nonetheless, she took and passed her university entrance exam. The University of Göttingen that Göppert entered in 1924 was in the process of becoming a center for the study of quantum mechanics - the mathematical study of the behavior of atomic particles. Many well-known physicists visited Göttingen, including Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist who developed a model of the atom. Noted physicist Max Born joined the Göttingen faculty and became a close friend of Göppert's family. Göppert, now enrolled as a student, began attending Max Born's physics seminars and decided to study physics instead of mathematics, with an eye toward teaching. Her prospects of being taken seriously were slim: there was only one female professor at Göttingen, and she taught for "love," receiving no salary. She continued her study, determined to finish her doctorate in physics in 1929. She spent a semester in 1930 in Cambridge, England, where she learned English and met Ernest Rutherford, the discoverer of the electron. She completed her doctorate with a thesis entitled "On Elemental Processes with Two Quantum Jumps."

Career

Maria Goeppert married Joseph Edward Mayer and moved to the United States, where her American husband had been offered a job at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Goeppert-Mayer found it difficult to adjust. She was not considered eligible for an appointment at the same university as her husband but rather was considered a volunteer associate, what her biographer Joan Dash calls a "fringe benefit" wife. She had a tiny office, little pay, and no significant official responsibilities. Nonetheless, her position did allow her to conduct research on energy transfer on solid surfaces with physicist Karl Herzfeld, and she collaborated with him and her husband on several papers.

Later, she turned her attention to the quantum mechanical electronic levels of benzene and of some dyes. During summers she returned to Göttingen, where she wrote several papers with Max Born on beta ray decay - the emissions of high-speed electrons that are given off by radioactive nuclei. These summers of physics research were cut off as Germany was again preparing for war. Max Born left Germany for the safety of England. Returning to the states, Goeppert Mayer applied for her American citizenship.

Soon she became friends with Edward Teller, a Hungarian refugee who would play a key role in the development of the hydrogen bomb. When Joe unexpectedly lost his position at Johns Hopkins, he and Goeppert Mayer left for Columbia University in New York. There they wrote a book together, Statistical Mechanics, which became a classic in the field. As Goeppert Mayer had no teaching credentials to place on the title page, their friend Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, arranged for her to give some lectures so that she could be listed as "lecturer in chemistry at Columbia."

In New York, Goeppert Mayer made the acquaintance of Enrico Fermi, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics for his work on radioactivity. Fermi had recently emigrated from Italy and was at Columbia on a grant researching nuclear fission. Nuclear fission-splitting an atom in a way that released energy - had been discovered by German scientists Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Lise Meitner. The German scientists had bombarded uranium nuclei with neutrons, resulting in the release of energy. Because Germany was building its arsenal for war, Fermi had joined other scientists in convincing the United States government that it must institute a nuclear program of its own so as not to be at Hitler's mercy should Germany develop a nuclear weapon. Goeppert Mayer joined Fermi's team of researchers, although once again the arrangement was informal and without pay.

In 1941, the United States formally entered World War II. Goeppert Mayer was offered her first real teaching job, a half-time position at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. A few months later she was invited by Harold Urey to join a research group he was assembling at Columbia University to separate uranium-235, which is capable of nuclear fission, from the more abundant isotope uranium-238, which is not. The group, which worked in secret, was given the code name SAM-Substitute Alloy Metals. The uranium was to be the fuel for a nuclear fission bomb. Like many scientists, Goeppert Mayer had mixed feelings about working on the development of an atomic bomb. (Her friend Max Born, for instance, had refused to work on the project). She had to keep her work a secret from her husband, even though he himself was working on defense-related work, often in the Pacific. Moreover, while she loved her adopted country, she had many friends and relatives in Germany. To her relief, the war in Europe was over early in 1945, before the bomb was ready. However, at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, the bomb was still being developed. At Edward Teller's request, Goeppert Mayer made several visits to Los Alamos to meet with other physicists, including Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi, who were working on uranium fission. In August of 1945 atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a destructive ferocity never before seen. According to biographer Joan Dash, by this time Goeppert Mayer's ambivalence about the nuclear weapons program had turned to distaste, and she was glad she had played a relatively small part in the development of such a deadly weapon.

After the war, Goeppert Mayer returned to teach at Sarah Lawrence. Then, in 1946, her husband was offered a full professorship at the University of Chicago's newly established Institute of Nuclear Studies, where Fermi, Teller, and Urey were also working. Goeppert Mayer was offered an unpaid position as a voluntary associate professor; the university had a rule, common at the time, against hiring both a husband and wife as professors. However, soon afterward, Goeppert Mayer was asked to become a senior physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory, where a nuclear reactor was under construction. It was the first time she had been offered a position and salary that put her on an even footing with her colleagues. Again her association with Edward Teller was valuable. He asked her to work on his theory about the origin of the elements. They found that some elements, such as tin and lead, were more abundant than could be predicted by current theories. The same elements were also unusually stable. When Goeppert Mayer charted the number of protons and neutrons in the nuclei of these elements, she noticed that the same few numbers recurred over and over again. Eventually, she began to call these her "magic numbers." When Teller began focusing his attention on nuclear weapons and lost interest in the project, Goeppert-Mayer began discussing her ideas with Enrico Fermi. Goeppert-Mayer had identified seven "magic numbers": 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. Any element that had one of these numbers of protons or neutrons was very stable, and she wondered why. She began to think of a shell model for the nucleus, similar to the orbital model of electrons spinning around the nucleus. Perhaps the nucleus of an atom was something like an onion, with layers of protons and neutrons revolving around each other. Her "magic numbers" would represent the points at which the various layers, or "shells," would be complete. Goeppert Mayer's likening of the nucleus to an onion led fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli to dub her the "Madonna of the Onion." Further calculations suggested the presence of "spin-orbit coupling": the particles in the nucleus, she hypothesized, were both spinning on their axes and orbiting central point-like spinning dancers, in her analogy, some moving clockwise and others counter-clockwise. Goeppert Mayer published her hypothesis in Physical Review in 1949. A month before her work appeared, a similar paper was published by J. Hans D. Jensen of Heidelberg, Germany. Goeppert Mayer and Jensen began corresponding and eventually decided to write a book together. During the four years that it took to complete the book, Jensen stayed with the Goeppert Mayers in Chicago. Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure gained widespread acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic for the theory they had discovered independently.

In 1959, Goeppert Mayer and her husband were both offered positions at the University of California's new San Diego campus.

In 1963, she received her Nobel Prize for theoretical Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen.

She continued teaching at the university, however, her health began to fail. A lifelong smoker debilitated by her stroke, she began to have heart problems. She had a pacemaker inserted in 1968. Late in 1971, Goeppert-Mayer suffered a heart attack that left her in a coma.

Achievements

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  Maria Goeppert Mayer was one of the inner circle of nuclear physicists who developed the atomic fission bomb at the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. Through her theoretical research with nuclear physicists Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, Goeppert Mayer developed a model for the structure of atomic nuclei (shell nuclear model).
  
  Mayer's work is remarkable in that her early theories, although mathematically derived, had a strong physical basis and in several cases foreshadowed later discoveries. Her early work served as a solid theoretical basis for subsequent developments in laser spectroscopy, double-beta decay, the theory of rare-earth elements, and photochemical isotope separation. In 1963, Mayer received the Nobel Prize for physics for her work with Jensen on the nuclear shell model.
  
  In 1996, Maria Goeppert Mayer was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Statistical Mechanics

    (The rapid increase, in the past few decades, of knowledge...)

    1940
  • Elementary Theory Of Nuclear Shell Structure 2013
  • Statistical Mechanics 1977

Views

Lacking a comprehensive background in nuclear physics, Maria Goeppert Mayer developed her knowledge of the field through discussions with colleagues. Her lack of familiarity with many traditional beliefs proved to be an advantage and led to her most famous contribution to physics. In 1945, Niels Bohr's compound-nucleus interpretation of nuclear reactions and the assumption that the nucleus behaves as a liquid drop prevailed, but early in 1947, Mayer found evidence that nuclei in some instances behave as collections of discrete particles. She noticed that nuclei with 2, 8, 20, 50, or 82 neutrons or protons or with 126 neutrons were particularly abundant and therefore unusually stable. This phenomenon could not be explained by the liquid drop model. Mayer interpreted these "magic numbers," as she called them, as providing evidence that individual nucleons have individual values of energy and angular momentum and that they can be viewed as occupying different energy levels, or "shells," like electrons in an atom. Quantum mechanics could not predict the magic numbers above twenty. Two years later, as a result of a suggestion by Fermi, Mayer realized that the answer lay in an effect called "spin-orbit coupling," in which the intrinsic spin of each nucleon, when coupled with its orbital angular momentum, can affect its total binding energy enough to move some nucleons into the next energy level.

Quotations: "Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man."

"My father said, Don't grow up to be a woman, and what he meant by that was, a housewife ... without any interests."

"Winning the prize wasn't half as exciting as doing the work itself."

"The shell model, although proposed by theoreticians, really corresponds to the experimentalist's approach. It was born from a thorough study of the experimental data, plotting them in different ways, and looking for interconnections."

Membership

Goeppert Mayer was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 1941 she was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

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  National Academy of Sciences , United States

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  American Physical Society , United States

  1941

Personality

Physical Characteristics: In 1959, Goeppert Mayer suffered a stroke that left an arm paralyzed. Some years earlier she had also lost the hearing in one ear.

Connections

While a student, Maria met an American physical chemistry student from California, Joseph E. Mayer, studying in Göttingen on a grant. Over the next several years, Maria and Joe became close, going hiking, skiing, swimming, and playing tennis. When they married, in 1930, Maria adopted the hyphenated form of their names. (When they later moved to the United States, the spelling of her family name was anglicized to "Goeppert.") They would have two children, Marianne and Peter. Marianne was an astronomer, and her husband, Donat Wentzel - an astrophysicist. Peter was an assistant professor of economics, keeping up Goeppert-Mayer's family tradition of university teaching.

Father:

Friedrich Goppert

Mother:

Maria Wolff Goppert

Spouse:

Joseph Mayer

5 February 1904 - 15 October 1983

Son:

Peter Conrad Mayer

16 March 1938 - 14 June 2016

Daughter:

Maria Mayer Wentzel

31 May 1933 - 1 March 2005

son-in-law:

Donat Wentzel

Friend:

Max Born

colleague:

Karl Herzfeld

Friend:

Harold Urey

Friend:

Enrico Fermi

Acquaintance:

Edward Teller

Acquaintance:

Niels Bohr

Acquaintance:

James Franck

References

• A life of one's own: Three gifted women and the men they married
• The Triumph of Discovery: Women Scientists Who Won the Nobel Prize
• Son Of Entropy 2: Personal Memories Of A Son Of A Chemist, Joseph E. Mayer, And A Nobel Prize Winning Physicist, Maria Goeppert Mayer