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Ele Willoughby, PhDminouette@spore.social
Jul 3, 2026, 12:31 PM
She studied physics at Calcutta University where she was the only woman in a class of 24 to graduate with an M.Sc. in 1936. She had to fight to get a job with Bose who said he did not have any projects suitable for a woman, but she persisted. They exposed photographic plates to record cosmic rays & study what they called “mesotron showers” for months at various heights in the Himalayas where she set up the instrumentation & gathered the exposed plates afterwards for analysis, 🧵2/
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Ele Willoughby, PhDminouette@spore.social
Jul 3, 2026, 12:32 PM
travelling on horseback - a potentially scandalous action for an unmarried Indian woman in the 30’s.
Using a high-power microscope, they examined the lengths, spacing & scattering of tracks to determine the mass, energy & momentum of the particles. They found that most tracks were from particles of higher velocities & lower kinetic energies than protons, suggesting importantly that they were lower mass than protons, as expected from Yukawa’s theoretically proposed particle to 🧵3/
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Ele Willoughby, PhDminouette@spore.social
Jul 3, 2026, 12:32 PM
explain how protons & neutrons are held together in nuclei. She published 4 papers in Nature from ‘40-‘42. She was the 1st person to measure the mass of a meson. She realized they would need improved photographic plates to continue the research, but these were unavailable due to imposed WWII restrictions. Cosmic ray research at the Bose Institute stopped. 7 years later Powell did a similar study with better quality photo emulsion & was awarded the Nobel in 1950.
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Ele Willoughby, PhDminouette@spore.social
Jul 3, 2026, 12:33 PM
She completed her PhD in Nobel laureate Blackett’s lab, & worked in France, US & mainly India for the rest of her life, never getting the recognition she deserved but able to pursue the research she loved. 🧵5/5
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