Schrodinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities)

The lives of people (mostly women) who help to produce science or who are affected by it.

The stories in Schrödinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities) travel through laboratories, observatories, rockets, hotel rooms, hospitals, out to the Antarctic and into outer space, following the trails of women scientists, technicians, patients, doctors, and spouses in their encounters with some of the most extraordinary aspects of modern science.

In these science-inspired tales the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner discovers the secrets of nuclear fission while fleeing from the Nazis. An employee in the underground laboratory CERN refuses to have her own photo taken. The biologist Margaret Bastock must figure our the impact of genes on behavior while coping with post-war expectations of women's own behavior. Scientists from East and West Germany stationed at opposite sides of Antarctica experience their own fall of the Berlin Wall. The elusive physicist Bruno Pontecorvo theorizes about an equally elusive particle. Schrödinger's wife Anny uses his theory to get her revenge on her philandering husband. A scientific theory worries about being discovered by a woman, and a resident in a special institution extrapolates the history of the universe from a piece of toast.

In this, her second collection of short stories, Pippa Goldschmidt explores the lives of real and imaginary scientists, focusing on the human emotions and social connections behind the discoveries.

Author: Pippa Goldschmidt
Publisher: Goldsmiths Press
Published: 08/27/2024
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 6.90h x 4.70w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781915983183

About the Author
Pippa Goldschmidt received the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2012. She has contributed to various radio programmes in the UK and Germany, and has published a number of short stories, poems, and essays in print and online. She regularly reviews books for the BBC Sky at Night magazine and the Times Literary Supplement, and writes cultural criticism for Art Review (online). In 2016, she was awarded an MRC Suffrage Science award, for services to science writing and communication. Pippa lives in both Scotland and Berlin.