Her family had lost everything for trying to be Polish in the Russian Empire. Like a lot of geniuses or people of repute, her childhood wasn’t all roses. Dynamite gave him access to a huge fortune with which he established the Nobel Prize, two of which Mme. Marie Curie was born in Poland the year that Alfred Nobel patented dynamite, 1867. And yes, it is a big honour to be a HeadStuff Legend of the Month. Turns out she’s way more legendary and deserving of this honour than I thought. I decided I better read a book about her. When I first decided that Marie Curie would be the next Legend of the Month I only knew the standard stuff about her, that she was brilliant, won two Nobel prizes in different sciences, that for a while she was the first and only woman to do nearly everything and that she spent a lot of time with radioactive things. Well, it has not been easy.” – Marie Curie. To change.“I have been frequently questioned, especially by women, how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. It takes only 138 days for half the atoms in the most stable form of polonium Marie Curie could not get pure polonium because it decays very rapidly. Scientists soon used radioactivity to measure The changes continue, ending up with an atom of lead, which This atom too is not stable, and eventually it becomes a For a uranium atom the result, after a series of steps, is a Shoots out a particle, the atom may change into an atom of a differentĮlement. Substances give off are actually tiny particles. Of the mysterious rays that radioactive (In 1905, Albert Einstein explained how matter and energy were really one and the same thing. This was the source of the mysterious energy of radioactivityit was a fundamental property of matter itself. Each atom also contained an amazingly large stock of energy. Atoms of different elements were different because they had different numbers of these subatomic particles inside them. Atoms were not the smallest possible bits of matter, for there were particles within atoms. To understand why radioactive elements were so hard to work with.īuilding on Marie Curies research, scientists came to a clearer understanding of atoms. She never succeeded in isolating polonium. It took her another eight years to isolate pure radium. Only then could she find the new elementsĪtomic weight. Three years to isolate one-tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride, a If they werent radioactive, nobody could have known they existed. For these elements are found in minerals only in quantities so tiny that they are invisible. To prove that radium and polonium were elements, the Curies would have to show that their atomic weights were different from the weights of any of the known elements. The atomic weight was found by comparing a known number of the elements atoms to the same number of atoms of hydrogen, the lightest element. Mendeleev classified the known elements according to the weight of their atoms. Over 60 elements were known by that time. About the time Marie Curie was born, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev created a chart for organizing the elements. Cientists had a hard time telling whether a new substance was a new element or only a compound of elements that were already known.
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