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Questions and answers with Mary K. Gaillard

16 February 2016
The trailblazing female physicist recounts scientific accomplishments and painful memories of discrimination in telling her story, which she says has a happy ending.

She was born in New Jersey, but Mary K. Gaillard’s educational and career pursuits have taken her all over the world. Gaillard received her bachelor’s degree from Hollins College, her master’s degree from Columbia University, and her PhD from the University of Paris, all in physics. In her career as a theoretical physicist, she has worked and lectured in many renowned institutions, including CERN, Fermilab, and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 1981 she became the University of California, Berkeley’s first female tenured physics professor. Gaillard’s professional accomplishments include her prediction, with Benjamin Lee, of the mass of the charm quark and her computational work that guided the ultimately successful experimental search for the Higgs particle.

Mary K. Gaillard

But as a pioneering woman in physics, Gaillard also faced gender-based discrimination. She documents her experiences—both positive and negative—in her new book, A Singularly Unfeminine Profession: One Woman’s Journey in Physics (World Scientific, 2015). Belén Gavela, in her review of the book for this month’s issue of Physics Today, writes, “It should be illuminating to anybody concerned about discrimination in science.”

Physics Today recently contacted Gaillard to discuss her new book.

PT: Why did you write this bio at this stage of your career?

GAILLARD: I had vaguely thought at times about a book on particle physics for a general readership, but I never expected I would get around to it. I never imagined I would write a book about my personal experiences until someone asked me, “When are you going to write your book?” Soon thereafter I was having lunch with women graduate students and it became clear that what they were most interested in was hearing about my own experiences. I had also become aware that I was something of a role model, and I decided that such a book might be helpful to young, aspiring female scientists.

PT: How difficult was it to put together a book that highlights some positives in your career experiences alongside the negative personal experiences?

GAILLARD: At times it was difficult writing about painful memories, but overall it was not as hard as one might think, since the story had a happy ending. I wanted to convey the difficulties I experienced—and also to express the joy and excitement of doing physics—to young aspiring scientists as well as to any reader.

PT: How far along do you think physics has moved in the direction of being less unfeminine? And what particular challenges, and opportunities, do you see for women now entering the field?

GAILLARD: We have come a long way, but there is still a considerable way to go. The number of successful women in our field has grown considerably, although the numbers are still small on an absolute scale. What is more worrying to me are the reports we still hear from women students about implicit, or explicit, bias, misogynistic comments, and even recent cases of sexual harassment.

I also worry about the messages that young girls are getting from the entertainment media and advertisements—in this country, at least. There was a time after the beginnings of the women’s movement that I had the impression things were changing for the better in this regard, but there seems to have been a trend backwards in recent years.

PT: What was your reaction to the Higgs boson discovery, and what questions do you expect or hope to be answered by upcoming high-energy-physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and elsewhere?

GAILLARD: I was, of course, very excited about the Higgs boson discovery because my collaborators and I had been the first to discuss in a systematic way the means for its detection almost 40 years ago, and its measured properties are still conforming to our predictions in the context of the standard model.

However, like everyone else, I am disappointed in the dearth of evidence so far for physics beyond the standard model. I am still partial to supersymmetry: It is the most elegant way to solve the mystery of the very tiny rest mass of the Higgs particle as compared with the energy characteristic of gravity; it is an integral part of superstring theory, which offers the current best hope for unifying the standard model with gravity; and it just has remarkable cancellations of the infinities that are found in theories without supersymmetry. I never expected that we would find supersymmetric partners of ordinary particles as light as some people had anticipated, but now the [LHC] is probing energies where most of us expected something to show up and still finds nothing—except for a recent hint that may soon disappear.

I'm still hoping that something definitively new will show up at the LHC. At present we are getting the most exciting data from cosmological observations that are pinning down the parameters of the universe and may tell us something about what caused inflation, a period of exponential expansion of the universe that is needed for us to understand why it looks the way it does today.

PT: What’s your next major project, professional or personal?

GAILLARD: Well, my personal and professional lives were put on hold for a couple of years because of a personal loss that occurred while I was writing the book. I have been traveling a bit to see old friends and slowly trying to get back to work. I partially finished and am trying to expand on work on connecting superstring theory to observational physics that was started with graduate students some time ago. I have been writing some invited reviews and giving talks. I’m waiting to see what will come out of the LHC. I have no plans to write another book, but I had never planned to write the first one, so who knows?

PT: What books are you currently reading?

GAILLARD: I haven't been reading a lot, but the books I have read had some personal connection, the most deeply personal being Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf, 2005). I read Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête (The Meursault Investigation, Other Press, 2015), an homage to and critique of Albert Camus, who never gave a name to the murdered Arab in L'étranger (The Stranger, Vintage, 1989), which I had read when I was a student in Paris. Most recently I read Tunnel Visions (University of Chicago Press, 2015) by Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb about the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider. (This book is reviewed in the March 2016 issue of Physics Today.) I had worked very hard to help that machine become a reality, and its loss was devastating for the US high-energy-physics community.

But right now I'm just reading John Grisham’s Sycamore Row (Belfry Holdings, 2013), purely for relaxation.

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