Commemorating Physics History UDC Site is Where Significant
Discovery Was Made WASHINGTON, Nov. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire-
USNewswire/ -- In the 1950s, the site in the Van Ness
neighborhood of Northwest that is now home to the University of
the District of Columbia, contained facilities for the former
National Bureau of Standards (now known as the National
Institute of Standards and Technology). In 1956, a team of
researchers made a discovery that revolutionized modern
understanding of natural law. It was in a research laboratory on
the Van Ness campus that physicists C-S Wu, Ernest Ambler ,
Raymond W. Hayward , Dale D. Hoppes , and Ralph P. Hudson
performed an experiment that changed everything. Their
experiment revealed that, in certain nuclear processes, pairs of
events characterized as mirror images of each other occur with
different probabilities. This reversal of parity law shattered a
fundamental concept of nuclear physics that had been universally
accepted for the previous 30 years. It thus cleared the way f