Lucy Mensing: Forgotten Quantum Pioneer

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Video of the lecture will be made available afterward at AIP History's YouTube channel.
 
Abstract
Lucy Mensing obtained her PhD in theoretical physics working with Wolfgang Pauli in Hamburg in early 1925, then spent a year in Göttingen right around the time matrix mechanics was developed there. After that, she went to Tübingen, where many of the spectroscopic data were obtained that drove the transition from the old to the new quantum theory. It is hard to imagine better places to be in those years for young quantum theorists trying to make a name for themselves. Mensing made some important contributions to the early development of quantum mechanics. In this talk, I will examine these promising early stages of Mensing’s career and ask why she gave it up only three years in. I argue that it was not getting married and having children that forced Lucy Mensing, now Lucy Schütz, out of physics but that it was the other way around: frustration about her own research and a distaste for the cutthroat competitive mentality she encountered made her choose family over physics.
 
Speaker Bio
Michel Janssen is a historian of science in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on the genesis of relativity and quantum theory in the early part of the 20th century. He is the co-author (with Jürgen Renn) of How Einstein Found His Field Equations (Springer, 2022) and the co-author (with Anthony Duncan) of the two-volume Constructing Quantum Mechanics (Oxford, 2019/2023).