Abstract

Madame Curie was the physicist with expertise in chemistry that, in 1898, discovered the radioactive substances of radium and polonium in Paris, France. She was the first to isolate pure radium, and was world renowned as the leading expert on radiation. In fact, she coined the term, "radioactivity." The Curies and Henri Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize for Physics because of their discovery of natural radioactivity. Years later, after a brutal political fight, Marie was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry for determining the atomic weight of radium. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the life and work of the well known physicist Madame Marie Curie.

Table of Contents

Abstract1

Introduction3

Discussion and Analysis3

Conclusion7

Works Cited9

Madame Marie Curie

Introduction

The discovery of the element radium by Madame Curie in 1898 and the investigation of its properties profoundly modified nineteenth century conceptions about matter and electricity. Up to about 1890 the classical Newtonian theory was unchallenged and some scientists thought that no new fundamental discoveries were to be expected (Goldsmith 29).

Then came Roentgen's discovery of X-rays, J. J. Thomson's discovery of electrons, Curie's discovery of radium and polonium, Planck's quantum theory of radiation, Rutherford's nuclear theory of the atom, Bohr's theory of spectra, and Einstein's theory of relativity, and the whole classical Newtonian conception collapsed.

During the nineteenth century the atoms of the chemical elements were thought of as hard particles, those of any particular element all exactly alike and indivisible. The radioactive atoms were found to disintegrate spontaneously, a radium atom splitting up into a helium atom and a radon atom. Thus the conception of the elementary atoms as indivisible, indestructible particles was proved untenable. The atoms are not hard, indivisible particles, but are complicated structures built up out of smaller particles. These discoveries opened up a new field for investigation, namely, that of the structure of atoms, which has ever since occupied the foremost place in physical science (Goldsmith 29).

Discussion and Analysis

Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, and she married Pierre Curie, who was a professor of physics in the Sorbonne, Paris (Curie 16). In 1896, in Paris, Becquerel found that uranium emits penetrating rays similar to X-rays, and Madame Curie immediately became interested in this new phenomenon and began experimental work on it. She found that certain minerals containing uranium were several times more strongly active than pure uranium (Curie 16). This suggested to her that these minerals must contain substances besides uranium more active than pure uranium. Madame Curie and her husband then obtained a large quantity of the residues left after the commercial extraction of uranium from uranium minerals and proceeded to search for new radioactive bodies in them. They found two new elements, radium and polonium, which are several million times more strongly radioactive than uranium. From about one ton of the residues they finally got about one ten millionth of a ton of pure radium chloride (Curie 16).

Radium is a white metal like silver, but it tarnishes readily in air. Its chemical properties are very similar to those of ...