The dilemma was solved by Harriet Brooks, a talented physicist in her mid-20s. In 1901, in a set of experiments in McGill University’s newly established physics laboratory, Brooks showed that radioactivity actually involves the creation of entirely new atomic elements, a kind of alchemy that previously eluded physicists. Along with her mentor, Ernest Rutherford, she identified the element that was later called radon.

Today, for this contribution and others, Rutherford is rightly considered the “father of nuclear physics.” Brooks’ career in physics was, however, cut short, and her contributions to science were mostly forgotten.

Many modern women have similarly been put in peril of disappearing from the science world by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, analyses of the preprint service arXiv, where physicists share research papers before submitting them to journals, showed that women have authored fewer studies during the pandemic. Research in Nature Human Behaviour found that female physicists faced a reduction in research time that was nearly 50 percent bigger than their male counterparts’. Women in the workforce who managed to keep employment through the most turbulent period of the pandemic reported more stress and burnout than their male colleagues.

As the crisis went on, follow-up studies showed similar trends: Female researchers consistently reported a greater inability to concentrate on research and more unanticipated child care responsibilities than their male colleagues. These gendered effects are likely to have a long-term impact on female physicists’ career arcs, as consistent publication is a big factor for future employment and earning tenure, awards, and promotions.

It is all too easy even for women who have made meaningful contributions to science to be sidelined. It’s been happening for a very long time. Brooks’ stymied career and forgotten legacy serves as a good example.

Before 1927, only human ingenuity seemed to limit how precisely we could measure things. Then Werner Heisenberg discovered that quantum mechanics imposes a fundamental limit on the precision of some simultaneous measurements. The better you pin down a particle’s position, for instance, the less certain you can possibly be about its momentum. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle put an end to the dream of a perfectly knowable world.

In the 1980s, physicists began to glimpse a silver lining around the cloud of quantum uncertainty. Quantum mechanics, they learned, can be harnessed to aid measurement rather than hinder it — the thesis of a growing discipline known as quantum metrology. In 2019, gravitational wave hunters used a quantum metrological technique called quantum squeezing to improve the sensitivity of the LIGO detectors by a whopping 40%. Other groups have employed the phenomenon of quantum entanglement to precisely measure weak magnetic fields.