Multimedia Collection
High Energy: Physicist Melissa Franklin
(Discovering Women series)
VHS
60 minutes
Q130 .D51 1995 tape 1
To Melissa Franklin, building a michine that zaps subatomic particles is as much of a kick as staying up all night listening to Frank Zappa albums. She's an eclectic innovator with a quirky sense of humor - and she's also the first woman to become a tenured professor in Harvard University's physics department. In this profile, Franklin brings the cameras inside the multi-million dollar, 140-ton particle detector at Chicago's Fermilab. The detector, which Franklin helped build, accelerates "the smallest things in the world," subatomic particles, and then smashes them together to produce data that physicists can record and study. Out of this work, Franklin and her colleagues have produced evidence of the top quark, the final, elusive particle needed to complete the Standard Model of quantum physics. Franklin balances this demanding work with a personal credo - "One's role in life is to be amusing" - that makes her provacative and funny.
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