Mildred Allen (March 25, 1894 – November 4, 1990) was an American physicist.

Biography

Early life and education

Mildred Allen was born in Sharon, Massachusetts to MIT professor C. Frank Allen and Caroline Hadley Allen. She had one younger sister, Margaret Allen Anderson. Allen graduated from Vassar College in 1916 with Phi Beta Kappa honors. She completed her doctoral studies in physics in 1922 at Clark University with Arthur Gordon Webster, with thesis research done at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Career

During the 1920s and early 1930s, Allen taught at Mount Holyoke, Wellesley and

Oberlin College Oberlin College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. It is the oldest Mixed-sex education, coeducational liberal arts college in the United S ...

s and undertook post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago and at Yale University. She began working with William Francis Gray Swann at Yale and continued work under his direction with the Bartol Research Foundation between 1927 and 1930. She also did research at Harvard University before becoming a professor at Mount Holyoke, where she taught for 31 years, until her retirement in 1959. For nearly 20 years, starting in the early 1960s, Allen collaborated with

Erwin Saxl Erwin Joseph Saxl (May 7, 1904 – January 28, 1981) was a physicist and inventor. He was born in Vienna in 1904 and received his Ph.D. there in 1927. In the late 1920s he emigrated to the United States. In 1935 he founded the Saxl Instrument ...

, an industrial physicist living in Harvard, Massachusetts, on experiments with a torsion pendulum. Allen and Saxl reported anomalous changes in the period of a torsion pendulum during a

solar eclipse A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby obscuring the view of the Sun from a small part of the Earth, totally or partially. Such an alignment occurs during an eclipse season, approximately every six month ...

in 1970 and hypothesized that “gravitational theory needs to be modified”. Their measurements, and similar anomalies earlier observed by Allais using a paraconical pendulum, have not been accepted by the physics community as in need of unconventional explanation, and subsequent experiments have not succeeded in reproducing the results.

References

External links

*
Mildred Allen papers
at Mount Holyoke College
Mildred Allen photo
dated 1959, Mount Holyoke Digital Collections Online * . {{DEFAULTSORT:Allen, Mildred 1894 births 1990 deaths Clark University alumni Wellesley College faculty Oberlin College faculty Yale University alumni University of Chicago alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology people Mount Holyoke College faculty Vassar College alumni Harvard University people American women physicists People from Sharon, Massachusetts 20th-century American women scientists 20th-century American physicists Fellows of the American Physical Society American women academics