Just how dangerous only became clear when the “Radium Girls” – women hired to apply radium-laced paint to watches and dials – began dying horribly. What few people realized was that most of these products were not only ineffective but dangerous. It also inspired a worldwide craze – a rush of radium-laced products that promised to cure everything from impotence to hair loss. Radium’s wondrous ability to glow in the dark wasn’t only of interest to scientists. Thanks to this Polish expatriate … this graduate student … this young mother … scientists had a pressing new question to answer: What’s inside the atom? That question would occupy scientists around the world for the next 30 years and beyond. If radioactivity was atoms falling apart, then atoms must have parts. Marie Curie had overturned two of the bedrock principles of chemistry: that atoms are the smallest units of matter, and that one element cannot turn into another. In time, other scientists would explain this mysterious phenomenon: The energy came from radium atoms breaking down, spitting out pieces of themselves and turning into different elements. In the process she discovered that radium glowed in the dark, pouring out heat and light, seemingly forever. To convince skeptical chemists that radium was real, Marie spent four years isolating one tenth of a gram of radium chloride from ten tons of pitchblende. Since it was no longer appropriate to call them “uranic rays,” Marie proposed a new name: “radioactivity.”Įven more surprising, Marie next found that a uranium ore called pitchblende contained two powerfully radioactive new elements: polonium, which she named for her native Poland, and radium. But she soon discovered that the element thorium also gave off these rays. Using instruments Pierre had invented, Marie began what she expected to be a workmanlike study of this new phenomenon. Marie was in a unique position to investigate these rays, because Pierre was a world expert on ways to measure minute electrical currents. These “uranic rays,” discovered by French physicist Henri Becquerel just a year earlier, had the strange power to “ionize” the air around them, making it a better conductor of electricity. While scientists all around her were investigating the latest exciting discovery – X-rays – Marie focused her dissertation on a different kind of ray given off by the element uranium. But in 1897, even with a young daughter to care for, Marie set her sights on earning something no other woman in France had ever received: a doctorate in physics. They married in 1895 and immediately began a family.
At the Sorbonne, she graduated first in her class in physics, and soon after graduation she met a physicist named Pierre Curie. In Paris, Maria reveled in the freedom and technological sophistication of the most modern city in the world. “She waited her turn, and she didn’t give up,” says biographer Susan Quinn. Only at age 24 did she finally get her chance. But because her family could not afford to send her, Maria would first have to work for six long years as a governess to support her older sister’s studies. But in Russian-ruled Poland, women were not allowed to attend university, let alone become scientists. The daughter of two teachers, Maria excelled in science and math. She was born Maria Sklodowksa in 1867, at a time when Warsaw had been swallowed by Russia and Poland literally wiped off the map. Yet in four short years, Marie Curie’s discoveries would transform our understanding of matter and make her one of the most famous women in the world.
She was the unlikeliest of revolutionaries: a 30-year-old graduate student … a woman at a time when they were essentially unheard of in physics and chemistry … from Poland, a country hardly known for its leadership in science.
0 kommentar(er)
