"Dones i física", the new travelling exhibition elaborated with the collaboration of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona

On Wednesday, September 18th at 18:30 at the Institute for Catalan Studies, IEC, will be presented the exhibition "Dones i física", prepared by the Catalan Physics Society, SCF, a subsidiary of the Institute for Catalan Studies in collaboration with the Institute of Cosmos Sciences, ICCUB, and the Faculty of Physics. The event will precede the presentation conference of the 2019-2020 course of the Catalan Physics Society «La física dona. La dona física» given by Àngels Ramos, researcher at the ICCUB and Professor of Atomic and Nuclear Physics at the University of Barcelona.

The display at the Institute for Catalan Studies will be open from 9:00 to 20:00, from Wednesday 18th September to Saturday 21th September with free admission. 

DONES I FÍSICA

The exhibition "Dones i física" is a small tour through the experiences, scientific contributions and symbols that represent some of the women who lived in the past but are part of the history of today's physics.

Among the 13 women that make up the exhibition we find figures such as Hypatia, the teacher of the School of Alexandria that has become a myth of science, or  the multifaceted and influential abbess of the twelfth century, Hildegard von Bingen, without forgetting the great Marie Curie. But the presentation also reclaim the unrecognized work of female researchers such as the discreet Henrietta Leavitt, who deduces experimentally the relationship between the period and the luminosity of the Cefeids but who was not authorized to sign the articles of his own works, or Cecilia Payne, who has to suggest an error in her thesis when she conclude that hydrogen is the main component of the stars, although later she achives to take part in the great science of Harvard. «Dones i física» also pay attention to the conflict of the atomic era regarding Irène Joliot-Curie, for exemple, and how she hides the work she has done in nuclear reactors to the Nazis and becomes a member of pacifist organizations for nuclear disarmament, or Lise Meitner, which gives explanation to the nuclear fission and refuses to participate in the Manhattan project, where Chien Shiung Wu works, the experimental physics that shows the violation of the parity conservation law in beta decays, and also the Nobel Prize Maria Goeppert-Mayer . The exhibition is completed by women as the great theoretician Emmy Noether, the controversial inventor Hedy Lamarr, the mother of dark matter, Vera Rubin, or the queen of carbon physics, Mildred Dresselhaus.

This exhibition is aware of the impossibility of making a concluding selection that represents all the women who have worked in the different fields of physics in the past, and which renounces to reflect the increasing world of today's female physicists, but that expect to value the work developed by women in physics and to encourage all the female researchers to continue this work.

TRAVELLING EXHIBITIONS MANAGED BY THE ICCUB

«Dones i física» will be part of the group of traveling exhibitions managed by the Institute of Cosmos Sciences. These exhibitions are available in their printed version to be hosted by cultural and educational center for free, with the sole condition of take charge of the transport. Its digital version can be checked and downloaded freely from Serviparticles and Serviastro.

The exhibitions that are currently part of this set are: «Amb A d'AstrònomA», female astronomers with contributions of worldwide relevance, «Investigadores en física nuclear», several female researchers who have contributed very significantly to the field of Nuclear Physics, since its beginning, «Telescopi Assumpció Català», tribute to Maria Assumpció Català, the first woman astronomer numerary professor at the Spanish university. The telescope installed in the Observatory-Classroom of the Observation Center of the Universe (Àger, Montsec) was named after her, «Viatge cap a l'univers fosc», proposes a journey towards the fascinating frontiers of cosmology and gravity, ranging from dark matter and dark energy, to black holes and gravitational waves,«Les distàncies còsmiques»,  shows the methods to measure distances to the celestial bodies and how these methods have been developed over the years according to the distances to be measured, «Mil milions d'ulls per a mil milions d'estrelles», dedicated to the Gaia mission, designed and built by the European Space Agency to measure the positions, distances and movements of billions of stars, «De la Terra a l'Univers», shows the universe through astronomical images of great divulgative scientific relevance, but in addition to incredible beauty, taken from different observatories in the world.