Marie Curie: Pioneer of Radioactivity

Marie Curie

• Marie Curie, born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw, Poland, in 1867, faced significant obstacles in her pursuit of scientific knowledge.
• Due to societal limitations against women's education, she had to study in secret and save money to attend the Sorbonne in Paris.
• She met and married Pierre Curie, a physicist, and they began a scientific partnership that would revolutionize understanding of radioactivity.
• Curie and her husband, Pierre, were fascinated by Henri Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity and dedicated their research to the study of uranium ore.
• Their research led to the discovery of two new radioactive elements: Polonium (named after Poland) and Radium.
• The pair's groundbreaking discovery earned them, along with Becquerel, the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Curie and her husband, Pierre, conducted landmark research and published jointly.
• They are credited with coining the term "radioactivity" and establishing the field of atomic physics.
• Curie's work also advanced cancer treatment by collaborating with André-Louis Debierne to isolate radium for therapeutic applications.
• In 1911, Curie became the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, this time for Chemistry.
• During World War I, Curie used money from her Nobel Prize to fund 20 mobile X-ray units, nicknamed "Petites Curies," for battlefield use.
• She drove one of the trucks herself to scan wounded soldiers.
• Curie helped establish the Curie Foundation to research cancer treatment using radium.
• She toured the United States twice to raise money for this research.
• Curie's prolonged exposure to radiation contributed to her death from aplastic anemia at age 66.

Henri Becquerel

• Becquerel (1852-1908) was interested in phosphorescence and wanted to see if there was a connection between phosphorescence and X-rays.
• He took a salt containing uranium, which glowed after exposure to light, and placed it on photographic plates.
• He left these in a dark drawer overnight and the next day found the plates exposed, proving that the uranium had emitted radiation.
• His discovery of natural radioactivity earned him the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Pierre and Marie Curie.
• In recognition of his work, the unit of radioactivity is named after him: the becquerel.

Ernest Rutherford

• Rutherford's research transformed our understanding of the atom, identifying its components and revealing its inner structure.
• He demonstrated that atoms can disintegrate into smaller constituents, and described two types of radiation: gamma and beta radiation.
• He published his discovery of alpha and beta radiation, and the disintegration of elements in 1899.
• He proposed the Rutherford model of the atom, stating that electrons orbit a tiny nucleus.
• Rutherford discovered the proton and transformed one element into another through nuclear fission.
• He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.
• He performed the first transmutation of elements by bombarding nitrogen atoms with alpha particles, causing them to transform into oxygen atoms.
• Rutherford was born into a farming family in Brightwater, New Zealand.
• He earned a scholarship to Canterbury College (now the University of Canterbury), and later a scholarship to Cambridge University, where he worked with J.J. Thomson.
• Thomson recommended Rutherford for a professorship in physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Niels Bohr

• Along with Rutherford, Bohr helped understand atomic structure.
• He explained that electrons could only exist in specific energy levels or "shells" orbiting the nucleus.
• Electrons could change energy levels by absorbing or emitting defined packets of energy (quanta).

António Egas Moniz

• Moniz, a highly regarded Portuguese neurologist, made significant contributions to brain imaging and psychosurgery.
• His work profoundly impacted psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s.
• In 1927, Moniz invented the angiogram, a type of X-ray used to visualize blood vessels, enabling the identification of brain tumors.
• Moniz was a pioneer in psychosurgery.
• He developed a technique called lobotomy (or leucotomy), involving a needle and a wire loop (leucotome) to cut through the connections of the frontal lobes.
• His groundbreaking work earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949, for the invention of prefrontal lobotomy.

Lise Meitner

• Meitner, an Austrian theoretical nuclear physicist, coined the term "nuclear fission" and developed the theory explaining the splitting of uranium atoms' nuclei.
• She was born in Vienna, Austria, the third of eight children.
• Her father, a lawyer, fostered an intellectually stimulating environment at home.
• She showed an early aptitude for mathematics.
• She became one of the first women to enter the University of Vienna's physics program.
• She earned her doctorate and became the second woman at the university to receive a physics doctorate.
• She moved to Berlin to work as a departmental assistant at Max Planck's physics institute.
• She was awarded the Leibniz Medal and became the head of the physics department at the University of Berlin.
• She escaped Nazi Germany and settled in Sweden.
• She published, along with her nephew Otto Frisch, the theory of nuclear fission in Nature on February 11, 1939.
• She was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award by the US Atomic Energy Commission, along with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann.
• Meitner helped to create the theoretical basis for nuclear fission, but the 1944 Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission was awarded to Hahn alone.

Albert Einstein

• Einstein was born in Ulm, southern Germany, to Jewish parents.
• He showed a talent for mathematics from a young age.
• He published four scientific papers in 1905 that garnered significant attention from academics worldwide.
• His work as a professor at the University of Berlin led to the publication of "General Theory of Relativity" in 1915.
• He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his contributions to theoretical physics.
• He emigrated to the US in 1933 due to the rise of Nazism and the persecution of Jews in Germany.
• He signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955, raising awareness about the dangers of developing nuclear weapons.
• He explained the photoelectric effect, which forms the foundation of quantum theory.
• He proved the existence of atoms and molecules, confirming Brownian motion's usefulness.
• He developed special relativity, explaining motion at constant velocities and proving that the speed of light is constant from all observers.
• He also proved that space and time are related.
• He developed general relativity, expanding upon Newton's theories and explaining gravity as the distortion of space-time due to massive objects.
• He published his formula E=mc², demonstrating the equivalence of mass and energy.
• Astronomers observed the bending of starlight as it passed the Sun during a solar eclipse in 1919, confirming Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Satyendra Nath Bose

• He was born in Kolkata, India, in 1894.
• He wrote about the behavior of light particles (photons) in a 1924 paper that Einstein published.
• His work led to the prediction of a fifth state of matter.

Bose-Einstein Condensate

• BECs occur when matter, specifically bosons (particles named after Bose), have very low energy levels and are close to absolute zero.
• Scientists first produced BECs in 1995, which is a new field of superfluids and superconductors.