Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Prague Post- Czech Woman of Physics

Alice Valkárová: Czech woman of physics

Category: Profiles

Published: 11 January 2016

Written by Morgan Hines

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Scientist discusses life under communism and the changes that came after

For Alice Valkárová, a brightly dressed, wise-looking figure, science has been a way of life from earliest memory. Touring Central Europe throughout her career, like an atom she was not easily contained, eventually expanding beyond Prague to pursue particle physics on a global scale.

Valkárová received the sixth annual Milada Paulová award from the National Contact Center for Gender and Science at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences on Dec. 1.

The award was created by the Ministry of Education and is meant to honor a female scientist for lifelong achievement in scientific research.

Each year, the award is given to a woman in a specific scientific discipline.

Valkárová is a 68-year-old researcher at Charles University on the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Her career began in Prague, moving to Russia, with later research in Hamburg, Germany, and other locations to pursue particle physics.

Her former student and current colleague, Karel Černý, said that he believes Valkárová is very deserving of the award.

“Alice is a very rational, non-confrontational person; all that made the work very pleasant and effective under her supervision. Her broad experience, expertise and reputation helped us students to feel our work was important and that we were part of the scientific community,” said Černý.

“Alice is a respected and appreciated colleague in the community both for her professional and personal qualities,” he added.

Valkárová is also a primary researcher on a project that has been underway since 1992, the H1 experiment in the DESY lab in Germany, which works with the only lepton-hadron collider.

As Valkárová explained it, the H1 detector and HERA collider has allowed her and other scientists involved with the project to study the particles that make up protons and neutrons by colliding them.

The group began collecting data in 1992 and stopped in 2007. The experiment continues in other manners such as assessment, today.

“From these tracks we reconstructed the kinematics of the interaction. Knowledge of the products of the interactions gives us a chance to understand processes during the interaction,” she said.

“In the experiment worked more than 300 people from all countries around the world,” she added.

Valkárová’s mother had her reservations about a career in science for her daughter, especially when experiments took the extra mile and could draw not necessarily wanted attention to her daughter. Though, her father, she said, always supported her dreams to strive for a position in science.

“I had seen that it is not very good to study something which is regime dependent because law is regime dependent,” Valkárová said with a warm smile that emerged after several minutes of conversation.

“But if you study physics or something — if you are writer also regime dependent — but nature science, chemistry or physics or mathematics it is not regime dependent at all. He was very happy to study physics, and he was supporting me a lot.”

During communism, many regime dependent careers had been impacted. Valkárová saw this first hand through her family’s experience. Following the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia, communist ideology began to infiltrate society. The nation’s political decisions were heavily influenced by the Soviet Union through the 1980s. Often, it took only a minute detail to cause the firing of an employee or the dissolution of one’s career.

“I think that my father influenced me a lot because he studied the law. … In 1950 he was thrown out from the office,” said Valkárová.

“He was working as a lawyer but for the state, not that he was bad or something like this, but because of political reasons he was thrown out and sent to work manually at a factory. He worked 15 years in a factory,” she added.

“We had no possibility to travel to west, to work in western laboratories, we didn’t have enough money to buy experimental equipment,” said Valkárová. “We had rather miserable salaries. The official propaganda was that workers, like miners, and peasants, were important. People working intellectually were less important for the regime. It changed, of course, a little bit during the years. It was not so pronounced in ’80s like in ’50s but it was with us all the time.”

The reality of being a scientist in the communist era was a low salary and an intellect that was not valued by the government, despite administrative policies that said science was important, she added.

“Officially science was supported and respected but in practice we had much lower salaries than workers. There was not such an accent in being educated as now. The reason was that you will spend many years in university but then you will have much less money than your classmates who left to work after [basic] school. The only advantage was that you will have not so unfriendly working conditions … or that you are really interested to study and go into science.”

Most of Valkárová's life has been surrounded by science, beginning with her interest in astronomy, and later her studies in nuclear physics.

When she began her education and research in nuclear physics she was the only female in her program.

“I had very nice relations with the boys,” she said. “I had no feeling that I am something different.”

Following her time at university, in 1973, Valkárová was sent to Russia to the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research as a member of a prestigious particle physics experiment.

“There was no selection for the program,” said Valkárová. “It was an obligation to work there for some time. It was meaningful because we had in our field no possibility to go to west and experimental devices comparable with the equipment in west in our field of course were only in the Soviet Union,” she said

Some of her colleagues spent more than 10 years in the Soviet Union and some are still in Russia. “They married Russian women and stayed to work there,” she said.

Valkárová herself stayed for seven years where she met her husband, a Slovak. Their daughter was born in Russia. She only took two months of maternity leave, one month before and one after the birth.

Expectations for many mothers of Czech origin changed following Communism.

Women after the changes with the revolution in 1989 started to think that now their role is to stay at home and to take care of children,” said Valkárová.

Before it was not so easy because there was not enough money, so women were pushed to work. After ’89 there was some tendency to now accept this role of women as a mother, and it was just I think that many women were thinking that it is like this in west. When I have been in Germany, I observed that it is just opposite. Women who have good jobs say that they cannot stay also at home and they go to work soon after birth.”

Life in general has changed greatly since the communist era came to a close in the Czech Republic. Personal life and work life were altered greatly, and the change is both good and bad, according to Valkárová.

“I think that for some other people the situation is not so pleasant, in socialism there was no unemployment, people didn’t have much money but there were not homeless people,” she explained.

“There was not as much crime like today. At that time society was much more homogenous than now, no large differences in salaries, no large differences in a property. The political representatives at that time were relatively rich but they were much less rich than some oligarchs now,” she said.

Despite the differences in job equality now, it is important to note that the Czech Republic still has one of the lowest rates of unemployment in Europe.
“People at that time were not so frustrated when they compared themselves with others because there were no large differences. They were shocked when they visited western supermarkets, so many consumables,” Valkárová said.

“They thought that everybody can go there and buy everything he sees, it was done by a fact that we had a relative lack of consumables and in principle people have relatively sufficient money to buy everything it is in shops. Health care was at that time at a rather high level and not much worse than in western countries, and it was completely charge free. On the other side it was also a field for bribes; doctors were not well paid and if you wanted better care you can pay for it — honestly I never paid anything to doctors and I survived.”

She noted that for those with less money in the Czech Republic that “freedom” is merely a nice term, though somewhat irrelevant.

“How you can enjoy the possibility of traveling and full shops when you are unemployed or homeless?” Valkárová said. “You have the possibility to tell what you like but nobody is listening to you. It is the reason why some people are disappointed with the situation now in comparison with socialism and I can understand their point of view.”