When Shirley Ann Jackson was in elementary school in the 1950s, she would prowl her family’s backyard, collecting bumblebees, yellow jackets and wasps. She would bottle them in mayonnaise jars and test which flowers they liked best and which species were the most aggressive. She dutifully recorded her observations in a notebook, discovering, for instance, that she could alter their daily rhythms by putting them under the dark porch in the middle of the day. The most important lesson she took away from these experiments was not about science but compassion. “Don’t imprison any living thing for very long,” she says in a mellow drawl that belies her reputation as a lightning-fast thinker and influential physicist. “I have never been a fan of dead insect collections.”

Jackson came of age during the civil-rights movement. She was valedictorian of her graduating class at Roosevelt High School in Washington, D.C., in 1964 and went on to study particle and high-energy physics. In 1973 she became the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D.

3 Comments

1. 1. Eugene Sittampalam 04:41 PM 11/19/11

   Cogratulations to you, Prof Shirley Ann Jackson, on your great achievement, ascending from a backyard prowler to the seat of “Advocate in chief for building the reputation of a major research university.”
   I. too, prowled my backyard during my high school days, collecting and raising a variety of birds and animals, including a star tortoise. After that, with a university bachelor’s degree to boot, such curiosity into the nature of things drove me to fundamental physics, where in my self-study, I found too many unanswered questions to my liking to make any headway. As I prowled deeper, I typically found, contrary even to our current popular textbook wisdom, that a moving body DOES contract in directions TRANSVERSE to its line of motion. I was stuck for an answer from the many mainstream physicists I contacted.
   II. The article here rightly observes about you that ,” Science literacy will play a vital role in addressing major national challenges such as formulating energy policy;” and, “If we don’t have the right talent, we’re not going to be able to meet our energy needs.” I couldn't agree more.
   III. In this context, may I most humbly suggest that, apart from the right talent, we check the very foundation of physics on which any energy policy to meet our energy needs would inevitably depend on?
   IV. Without further ado, I shall leave here with this one challenging question for you or any reader here to kindly answer:
   DOES THE MOVING BODY CONTRACT TRANSVERSE TO MOTION?
   Standard textbooks in basic physics today reflect an unsubstantiated view of mainstream physicists, which concept was also uncritically accepted by Einstein in his relativity theories, that a moving body contracts ONLY in the direction of its motion and that NO contraction takes place along any direction perpendicular to that line of motion of the body. For an elaboration on this question, please see the following two web pages.
   (1)www.sittampalam.net/LateralThoughts.pdf
   (2)www.sittampalam.net/NobelResponse.pdf
   (2)
   Please do take this question very seriously, as the true and substantiated answer here would have ramifications across the ENTIRE realm of physics today, reinforcing physics as the bedrock of science!
   V. Than you all most heartedly.
   Eugene
   

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2. 2. Tony_Who 11:55 PM 12/17/11

   @ Eugene,
   
   Check out "Poisson's Ratio":
   
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson%27s_ratio
   
   It is about stress and strain of materials.
   
   Hopefully this will give you some insight into your question.
   
   Thanks,
   -Tony

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3. 3. Eugene Sittampalam 08:22 PM 2/7/12

   Thanks, Tony,
   Sorry for this belated response, but Poisson’s ratio concerns transverse contraction of elastic bodies (even transverse extension, in certain materials) uder longitudinal (axial) strain No debate there, while the transverse contraction that Einstein uncritically assumed as nonexistent, is for any body of matter moving longitudinally (that is, along any one given axis/direction). And since both his theories of relativity are crucially dependent on this contraction factor, better known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald Contraction Factor, the question naturally rises as to the very validity of Eintein’s theories, fundamentally, under close scientific scrutiny. This is where even Nobel laureates and physics department heads have found themselves dumbfounded for an answer. Fundamental physics will thus remain ever stagnant if the mainstream remains adamant to change, thereby being its own obstacle to progress, while billions of dollars that now get drained into 'big-science' projects to research the cosmos for dark energy, dark matter and black holes, which I have shown to be all nonentities, could also be easily salvaged if fundamentals are better understood at the outset. Convince yourself with a quick perusal of: www.sittampalam.net/Synopsis.htm
   Thank you, and Cheers!

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