~~Marie+Curie~~

=Marie Curie=

November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934 Place of Birth: Poland Year of Discovery: c. 1904 []

Marie Curie was essentially the boss. The Chairman of the Board. She didn't let society keep her down, and she got two Nobel prizes because she wouldn't back down. Born Maria Sklodowskain Poland in 1867, she had an average education growing up, and even was a bit of a sh*t stirrer because she joined a revolution movement as a student to protest Russian domination of Poland. Things were said and Russia got mad so she decided it would be in her best interest to move to Austria after that. In 1891 she moved to Paris and recieved advanced degrees in physics and mathamatics from Sorbonne University, and it is in the city of lights she also met her husband Pierre Curie. They became partners in crime and began studying the properties of radiation from elements. For the rest of her life she steadily rose to prominance in the scientific comunitity, ultimatly discovering two new elements, Radium and Polonium, and realizing that the atom is not unchanging and modern chemistry needed to be revised from Dalton's old view. She died of animea, a side effect of the prolonged radiation exposure she subjected herself to for her entire career. To this day, the original papers from her life are too contaminated to handle without proper saftey measures in place.

(>")> HER DISCOVERY <("<)

To borrow from my ever so smart chemistry professor ;-) : "If we assume that radium contains a supply of energy which it gives out little by little, we are led to believe that this body does not remain unchanged, as it appears to, but that it undergoes an extremely slow change. Several reasons speak in favor of this view. First, the emission of heat, which makes it seem probable that a chemical reaction is taking place in the radium. But this is no ordinary chemical reaction, affecting the combination of atoms in the molecule. No chemical reaction can explain the emission of heat due to radium. Furthermore, radioactivity is a property of the atom of radium; if, then, it is due to a transformation, this transformation must take place in the atom itself. Consequently, from this point of view, the atom of radium would be in a process of evolution, and we should be forced to abandon the theory of the invariability of atoms, which is the foundation of modern chemistry [M. Curie 1904]."

To say in layman's terms, the radiation given off in the form x rays and heat can only come from something occurring within the atoms of the radioactive elements. SO if the atom is changing, then the first rule Dalton put down is null and void, and the scientific community as a whole needed to update their text books []

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