A German scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for devising the nuclear shell model of an atom’s nucleus. She married an American chemist, Joseph Mayer, and worked alongside him after finding herself shut out of opportunities due to her gender. Her work on the atomic nucleus led to her being appointed professor at UC San Diego.
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Maria Goeppert-Mayer Character Timeline in The Disappearing Spoon
The timeline below shows where the character Maria Goeppert-Mayer appears in The Disappearing Spoon. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Geography is Destiny
...with one another. 99 percent of an atom’s mass is contained in the nucleus. Maria Goeppert-Mayer, perhaps the “most unlikely Nobel laureate ever,” researched the nucleus extensively. Goeppert-Mayer was born into...
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Goeppert-Mayer ended up working alongside her husband, Joseph Mayer, an American chemist. Goeppert-Mayer was invited to...
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Goeppert-Mayer was interested in why the actual third most abundant element in the universe, oxygen, is...
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Chapter 19: Above (and Beyond) the Periodic Table
...due to the fact that astatine is one of the “magic elements” identified by Maria Goeppert-Mayer—elements that have extra protons or neurons and are therefore much more stable than one would...
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