Cass

let me tell you about the most disrespected physicist you've never heard of.

chien-shiung wu was born in china in 1912. her father was radical for his time — he believed girls deserved education and founded a school for them. wu thrived. she moved to the US in 1936 to pursue graduate studies in physics at berkeley. she never saw her parents again. they died during the turmoil in china while she was building a career on the other side of the world.

she became one of the foremost experts on nuclear physics. during the manhattan project — yes THAT manhattan project — she was recruited to help solve a critical problem with nuclear reactors. she fixed it. she was one of the few women involved and her contributions were quietly filed away while the men around her became famous.

but the real betrayal came later.

in 1956 two theoretical physicists — tsung-dao lee and chen-ning yang — proposed something wild. they suggested that parity — a fundamental symmetry law in physics that had been assumed true for decades — might not hold in certain nuclear reactions. basically they were saying the universe might not be symmetrical in the way everyone believed. it was a bold claim. but it was just theory. someone needed to prove it.

they went to wu. because she was the best experimentalist alive. they knew it. everyone knew it.

wu designed and conducted one of the most elegant and difficult experiments in the history of physics. she cooled cobalt-60 atoms to near absolute zero and observed their radioactive decay. the results were clear. parity was violated. a law of physics that had been treated as sacred was wrong. she proved it.

the physics world was shaken. this was a massive deal. one of those moments that reshapes how we understand the universe.

in 1957 lee and yang won the nobel prize in physics. the fastest nobel award in history at the time. they proposed the theory. wu proved it. guess who the committee left out.

chien-shiung wu.

the two men who said "hey what if this law is wrong" got the highest honor in science. the woman who actually demonstrated that it WAS wrong got nothing. not even a shared prize. not even a mention.

let that sit for a second. in physics, theory without experimental proof is just a guess. lee and yang's idea would have remained a hypothesis without wu's experiment. she didn't assist. she didn't support. she DID the work that made the discovery real.

and it's not like she was unknown. she was called "the first lady of physics." her colleagues respected her enormously. lee and yang themselves acknowledged her work was essential. but the nobel committee looked at three chinese-american physicists, picked the two men, and moved on.

she spent the rest of her career continuing to do extraordinary work. she became the first woman president of the american physical society. she received other awards eventually. but the nobel — the one that would have put her in textbooks forever — never came.

she once said "i wonder whether the tiny atoms and nuclei, or the mathematical symbols, or the DNA molecules have any preference for either masculine or feminine treatment." she knew exactly what was happening. she just kept working anyway.

wu died in 1997. her gravestone reads "she was one of the giants of physics." and she was. but the world made her fight for every inch of recognition while handing glory to the men standing next to her.

Does it make you happy? Well, men don't always know when they're happy.

Before I started writing in earnest, I did not understand how much writing was going to eat into my fic reading time. We joke about having too many tabs open, but I have a different problem: the amount of tabs I have open on new fics is way smaller than it used to be. My ao3 wrapped would be a sad affair. Unless I’ve subscribed to an author or come across something on my dash, I basically don’t see it

Which has really driven home for me how much fandom cannot just be creators. You have to have people who want to read fic and meta discussions and joke posts. You have to have people who want to look at art and gifs. It has to be mutual.

Community thrives on flow. You have to have that movement of people sharing things with each other for a community to exist

not really about Ateez, but recently in a post (this one), you wrote the following:

Usually, likable men (and really, likability only applies to men - inquire within for more details)

and I was wondering what you meant by it? there were a couple of ways I interpreted it, but I am not entirely sure so I thought I'd just ask.

[on another note (sort of related) which of the feminist works that you have read would you say were most impactful to you? I'm curious as I've been wanting to read more feminist theory.]

The publisher summary reads:

Women are stuck in an impossible bind. At work, strong women are criticized for being cold, and warm women are seen as pushovers. An award-winning journalist examines this fundamental paradox and empowers readers to let go of old rules and reimagine leadership rather than reinventing themselves.

Consider that even competent women must appear likeable to successfully negotiate a salary, ask for a promotion, or take credit for a job well done―and that studies show these actions usually make them less likeable. And this minefield is doubly loaded when likeability intersects with race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and parental status.

This book,The Likeability Trap by Alicia Menendez is really important to me, because it came at the right time in my life. My boss (male, significantly older) at the time kept dragging me into 'conferences' to have 'consult's about my 'work performance' and thanks to this book I realized he kept saying that he didn't like me and that other men didn't like me either and that's all he was conveying. This book freed me from being manipulated by this person, and to lean fully into my competence and insane (autistic) capacity for frightening (to normies) amounts of hyperfocused productivity. I am still disliked, as far as I know, and I've reason to believe that I am also now feared, but I don't give a shit, and I've never been swayed or influenced by someone going, essentially, I don't like that you're here, Woman I Can't Dismiss, ever since. I also love my job and enjoy my career, by the way, and I've always also gotten good evaluations.

Other books I consider essential reading, in English:

Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues by  Catharine A. MacKinnon (This is pretty dense but it will reorganize your whole brain if you work through it. I'm a huge fan of MacKinnon.)

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by  Susan Faludi

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (I recommend the entire works of Audre Lorde, all of them - every poem, every essay, every book)

My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men - If you only read one of these books, THIS IS THE ONE TO READ.

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

On Liberty and the Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill (the only worthwhile white male philosopher to ever exist)

Working at Harvard in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as a “Computer”, Annie Jump Cannon cataloged stars using their spectra from photographic plates, in an effort to understand the mysteries and peculiarities of stellar spectra.

This was hard, detailed, nuanced work. By 1889, three years into her work, she had classified over 1,000 stars. By 1913, she could classify 200 stars an hour. She could classify three stars a minute, just by sight. Using a magnifying glass, she could classify stars down to 9th magnitude, 16 times fainter than the human eye can see. And she did this all with exceptional accuracy.

Over the course of her career, she personally classified more than 350,000 stars, accounting for a mind-boggling 98% of all contemporary stellar spectra classifications, a feat that wouldn’t be bested until the 1990’s with automated digital sky surveys.

Cannon used these classifications to develop the Harvard spectral classification system (O–B–A–F–G–K–M), organizing stars by surface temperature and physical properties.

It is hard to overstate just how foundational her work was to modern astronomy and astrophysics. Her classifications have enabled more than a century of breakthroughs in stellar structure and evolution, including the understanding of how stars change over time and how temperature, luminosity, and composition are related. The system underpins the Hertzsprung–Russell (HR) diagram, one of the most important tools in astrophysics, and remains embedded in modern research, from stellar population studies to galaxy evolution.

It was incredibly funny. Niina came up to me and said, “Can you be part of my number? I need to kill you.” Then she asked, “How do you want to go? Bullet to the head, strangulation, or poisoning?” I told her, “Your choice.” In the end, I ended up lying on the ground and thought, "It’ll be weird if I get up in the middle of the number, fold the chair, and walk off." So I waited, hoping the number would end quickly, but it lasted longer than I expected (laughs).

Alysa Liu (USA)

2026 Milano Cortina Olympics | Women's Figure Skating Podium

Alysa left the sport because of burn out. Because of what she went through. When she came back, she said that she’d skate to whatever music that she wanted. That she’d be in charge of her training schedule. That she’d be able to take a very active role in choreographing her programs and choosing her costumes. Her entire comeback has been about her taking authority over her career. She is in charge of her own career, as it should be. As it should always be.