Donna Strickland Astrophysicists Now, what's amazing Canadians making history, Women making history, and well this also goes to show, without Persia and immigration, where would we be? !!!!!!!!!!!
After having just dont a blog on Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, the astrophysicists, by complete coincidence yesterday I found out a Canadian woman has won the Nobel price this year for Physics, along with Athur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou. "Donna Strickland, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, on Tuesday became the first woman in 55 years and the third ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing it with an American scientist and another from France for their work in laser physics. 3rd female laureate in physics Strickland is the first female Nobel laureate to be named in three years and is only the third woman winning in physics: Polish-French physicist Marie Curie earned the award in 1903 and German-born American theoretical physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963." Quote from the CBC More powerful lasers Their research enabled new studies of matter by allowing scientists to produce more powerful bursts of laser light, said Michael Moloney, chief executive officer of the American Institute of Physics. While laser eye surgery is the most familiar application of their work, Moloney?said, it has also let scientists probe fundamental forces acting within matter at very high temperatures and pressures. "With the technique we have developed, laser power has been increased about a million times, maybe even a billion," Mourou said in a video statement released by Ecole Polytechnique.  Gina Parvaneh Cody - Engineer Gina Parvaneh Cody came to Montreal from Iran in 1979 with $2,000 in her pocket and dreams of becoming an engineer. Now for me this story has two wonderful sides to it, first is great to see more equality and Gina Parvaneh Cody is a leader advancing the sciences and engineering for woman, but also for education in general. She was also an immigrant to Canada, from Iran, and this shows how immigration is of such an immense benefit to Canada, and that being a more open and inclusive society helps us all!   Extract from the Montreal Gazette After an hour-long interview with her brother's engineering professor at Concordia University, Cody was given a scholarship to help cover the cost of her master's degree. Ten years later, she became the first woman in Concordia University's history to earn a Ph.D in building engineering. After a highly successful career as an engineer and business leader in Canada, Cody announced on Monday that she is giving a $15-million gift to her alma mater. "Concordia welcomed me and provided me with support that changed my life," she said. "My gift to the university is for the next generation, so that more people can succeed like I did." In recognition of her generous donation, Concordia has named its faculty of engineering and computer science after Cody. The Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science is the first engineering faculty in Canada to be named after a woman. Cody, 61, said she developed a love of building and engineering as a child growing up in Iran. "I used to fix everything, if the chair was broken, I would fix it or change the bulbs in the television," she told the Montreal Gazette in an interview. Her father, who owned a private boys high school in Iran, had the 17-year-old Cody teach math and science to students during the summer. Cody said she believes that higher education is the best way for women and minorities to succeed and she hopes her donation will encourage them to study engineering. Her mother always told her that the best way for a woman to become independent was to achieve higher education, she said. She attributes her success as an engineer and businesswoman to hard work, perseverance and confidence. The $15-million donation will fund graduate and undergraduate scholarships, as well as research on smart cities. It will also allow the university to create three new chairs in data analytics and artificial intelligence; the internet of things; Industry 4.0 and advanced manufacturing. A portion of the gift, which Concordia will match, will go toward a special fund for equity, diversity and inclusion programming. At present, only 20 per cent of university engineering students are women and only 12.8 per cent of working engineers are women, according to Statistics Canada. The small percentage of female engineers in the workforce could be due to a lack of role models, Cody said, but also because "girls are still told that engineering and computer science are for boys." Parents and school administrators need to tell girls that they are just as capable as boys when it comes to math and science, she said. "We are equal in our brain, equal in our abilities and we should be equal in numbers." Concordia President Alan Shepard said Cody's generosity is "a watershed moment for engineering and computer science in Canada."
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Draft, please email edits Although times are changing, I thought it would be nice to do a blog on a woman that has not really been given credit for her work, and in fact some might say some tried to steal the credit so to speak. We don't always realize it was only a short time ago, women didn't have the right to vote, and they certainly weren't meant to excel in education and the sciences. It sis something I find hard to grasp, and there is still social biases to this day. I thought what better way than to show these GREAT WOMAN of the past and how their determination never let them give up. I even managed to finds some historical photos, for me photos help to bring stories to life! I have written many poems on famous woman, and hope to do more blog's on the topic as well!  Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was a British–American astronomer and astrophysicist who, in 1925, proposed in her Ph.D. thesis an explanation for the composition of stars in terms of the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium  “Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.” -- Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)  Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge. Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said fuck that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.  Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.” Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne—after telling her not to publish).  Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work. Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science. Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her. (via bansheewhale)
The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience... The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape.
—Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin |
Arthur Vaso
Hi there, the blog has been running for almost a year, and as you can see I try to keep up a few posts a month. More about poetry and fellow poets, but also about current events, social issues as well as art and music. I look forward to any suggestions from readers and fellow poets! Archives
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