Tuesday 9th March 2027, 6.30pm, Chipperfield Lecture Theatre
Pauline Gagnon (CERN, retired)
What if Einstein’s 1905 “miracle year” wasn’t a solo achievement? Letters and biographical evidence reveal that Mileva Marić—Einstein’s first wife and fellow physicist—was far more than a supportive spouse. She was his intellectual equal, his study partner, and his collaborator on some of his most famous work.
This talk examines the documented evidence of their partnership, placed in its personal and historical context. Through facts rather than speculation, we’ll explore why this talented physicist has been largely erased from history—and what her story reveals about how we remember scientific achievement.
About the speaker
Born in Quebec, Canada in 1955, Pauline Gagnon completed a PhD in particle physics at the University of California in Santa Cruz in 1993 then conducted research at CERN, the largest physics laboratory in the world until she retired in 2014 after participating in the Higgs boson discovery and the search for dark matter. In 2015, Oxford University Press released her popular science book: Who cares about particle physics? Making sense of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider and CERN, which has been published in seven other languages. Over the past decade, she has given over two hundred public talks worldwide both to physicists and general audiences not only on particle physics but also on diversity issues in science and telling the story of Mileva Marić Einstein. She now lives in Germany.
The talk is free and open to all. Doors open about half an hour before the talk begins.
For directions to the lecture theatre, see here.