Joan Hinton

Joan Hinton

Joan Hinton
1921-2010

Image: Seth Faiso, New York Times

You’re Joan Hinton! You don’t need fancy houses, items, or titles to be happy and are strongly led by your morals. You use your scientific mindset to help make the world a better place to live, whether it’s making dairy farms more efficient or participating in political movements.

Joan Hinton’s career in physics began in 1944 when she was in graduate school; she was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project with Enrico Fermi. Assuming the bomb would just be used in a demonstration explosion, she was shocked when the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and became an enthusiastic peace activist. She moved to China in 1948 during the Communist revolution, where she lived and worked until her death in 2010.