PIERRE CURIE, THE FRENCH NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Pierre Curie, the French physicist who died on a day like today in 1906.

Pierre Curie (15 May 1859-19 April 1906) was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity.

In 1903, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel, in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel. With their win, the Curies became the first ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize, launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes.

Born in Paris on 15 May 1859, Pierre Curie was the son of Eugène Curie (1827–1910), a doctor of French Catholic origin from Alsace, and Sophie-Claire Curie. He was educated by his father and in his early teens showed a strong aptitude for mathematics and geometry. When he was 16, he earned his Bachelor of Science in mathematics.

By the age of 18, he earned his license, the equivalent of a U.S. masters degree, in physical sciences from the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne, also known as the University of Paris.

He did not proceed immediately to a doctorate due to lack of money. Instead, he worked as a laboratory instructor. When Pierre Curie was preparing for his Bachelor of Science degree, he worked in the laboratory of Jean-Gustave Bourbouze in the Faculty of Science.

In 1895, he went on to receive his doctorate at the University of Paris. The submission material for his doctorate consisted of his research over magnetism. After obtaining his doctorate, he became professor of physics and in 1900, he became professor in the faculty of sciences.

In 1880, Pierre and his older brother Paul-Jacques (1856-1941) demonstrated that an electric potential was generated when crystals were compressed. To aid this work they invented the piezoelectric quartz electrometer.

The following year they demonstrated the reverse effect: that crystals could be made to deform when subject to an electric field. Almost all digital electronic circuits now rely on this in the form of crystal oscillators. In subsequent work on magnetism Pierre Curie defined the Curie scale. This work also involved delicate equipment -balances, electrometers.

 More information: Nobel Prize

Pierre Curie was introduced to Maria Skłodowska by their friend, physicist Józef Wierusz-Kowalski. Curie took her into his laboratory as his student. His admiration for her grew when he realized that she would not inhibit his research. He began to regard Skłodowska as his muse. She refused his initial proposal, but finally agreed to marry him on 26 July 1895.

The Curies had a happy, affectionate marriage, and they were known for their devotion to each other.

Before his famous doctoral studies on magnetism, he designed and perfected an extremely sensitive torsion balance for measuring magnetic coefficients. Variations on this equipment were commonly used by future workers in that area. Pierre Curie studied ferromagnetism, paramagnetism, and diamagnetism for his doctoral thesis, and discovered the effect of temperature on paramagnetism which is now known as Curie's law.

The material constant in Curie's law is known as the Curie constant. He also discovered that ferromagnetic substances exhibited a critical temperature transition, above which the substances lost their ferromagnetic behavior. This is now known as the Curie temperature.

The Curie temperature is used to study plate tectonics, treat hypothermia, measure caffeine, and to understand extraterrestrial magnetic fields. The Curie is a unit of measurement used to describe the intensity of a sample of radioactive material and is named after Marie and Pierre Curie.

Pierre Curie formulated what is now known as the Curie Dissymmetry Principle: a physical effect cannot have a dissymmetry absent from its efficient cause. Introduce a gravitational field, and there is a dissymmetry because of the direction of the field. Then the sand grains can self-sort with the density increasing with depth. But this new arrangement, with the directional arrangement of sand grains, actually reflects the dissymmetry of the gravitational field that causes the separation.

Curie worked with his wife in isolating polonium and radium. They were the first to use the term radioactivity, and were pioneers in its study. Their work, including Marie Curie's celebrated doctoral work, made use of a sensitive piezoelectric electrometer constructed by Pierre and his brother Jacques Curie.

Pierre Curie's 1898 publication with his wife and M. G. Bémont for their discovery of radium and polonium was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society presented to the ESPCI ParisTech, officially the École supérieure de physique et de Chimie industrielles de la Ville de Paris, in 2015.

More information: ThoughtCo

In 1903, to honor the Curies' work, the Royal Society of London invited Pierre to present their research.

Marie Curie was not permitted to give the lecture so Lord Kelvin sat beside her while Pierre spoke on their research. After this, Lord Kelvin held a luncheon for Pierre. While in London, Pierre and Marie were awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society of London. In the same year, Pierre and Marie Curie, as well as Henri Becquerel, were awarded a Nobel Prize in physics for their research of radioactivity.

Curie and one of his students, Albert Laborde, made the first discovery of nuclear energy, by identifying the continuous emission of heat from radium particles.

Curie also investigated the radiation emissions of radioactive substances, and through the use of magnetic fields was able to show that some of the emissions were positively charged, some were negative and some were neutral. These correspond to alpha, beta and gamma radiation.

The Curie is a unit of radioactivity (3.7×1010 decays per second or 37 gigabecquerels) originally named in honor of Curie by the Radiology Congress in 1910, after his death. Subsequently, there has been some controversy over whether the naming was in honor of Pierre, Marie, or both.

Pierre Curie died in a street accident in Paris on 19 April 1906.

More information: Atomic Heritage

Is it right to probe so deeply into Nature's secrets?
The question must here be raised
whether it will benefit mankind,
or whether the knowledge will be harmful.

Pierre Curie

MARIE & PIERRE CURIE: THE ISOLATIUM OF RADIUM

Radium

Today, The Grandma has been resting after the Christmas dinner. She has decided to read a little about two important scientists who she admires a lot, Marie and Pierre Curie.

The Curies announced their discovery to the French Academy of Sciences on a day like today in 1898. Before reading about The Curies, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 54 & Checkpoint 9). 

More information: Pronouns 2

Radium is a chemical element with symbol Ra and atomic number 88. It is the sixth element in group 2 of the periodic table, also known as the alkaline earth metals. Pure radium is silvery-white, but it readily reacts with nitrogen, rather than oxygen, on exposure to air, forming a black surface layer of radium nitride (Ra3N2). All isotopes of radium are highly radioactive, with the most stable isotope being radium-226, which has a half-life of 1600 years and decays into radon gas, specifically the isotope radon-222. When radium decays, ionizing radiation is a product, which can excite fluorescent chemicals and cause radioluminescence.

Radium, in the form of radium chloride, was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. They extracted the radium compound from uraninite and published the discovery at the French Academy of Sciences five days later. Radium was isolated in its metallic state by Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne through the electrolysis of radium chloride in 1911.

Pierre Curie

In nature, radium is found in uranium and, to a lesser extent, thorium ores in trace amounts as small as a seventh of a gram per ton of uraninite. Radium is not necessary for living organisms, and adverse health effects are likely when it is incorporated into biochemical processes because of its radioactivity and chemical reactivity.

Currently, other than its use in nuclear medicine, radium has no commercial applications; formerly, it was used as a radioactive source for radioluminescent devices and also in radioactive quackery for its supposed curative powers. Today, these former applications are no longer in vogue because radium's toxicity has since become known, and less dangerous isotopes are used instead in radioluminescent devices.

Radium is the heaviest known alkaline earth metal and is the only radioactive member of its group. Its physical and chemical properties most closely resemble its lighter congener barium.

More information: American Physical Society

Pure radium is a volatile silvery-white metal, although its lighter congeners calcium, strontium, and barium have a slight yellow tint. Its color rapidly vanishes in air, yielding a black layer of radium nitride (Ra3N2). Its melting point is either 700 °C or 960 °C and its boiling point is 1,737 °C. Both of these values are slightly lower than those of barium, confirming periodic trends down the group 2 elements. Like barium and the alkali metals, radium crystallizes in the body-centered cubic structure at standard temperature and pressure: the radium–radium bond distance is 514.8 picometers.

Radium has a density of 5.5 g/cm3, higher than that of barium, again confirming periodic trends; the radium-barium density ratio is comparable to the radium-barium atomic mass ratio, due to the two elements' similar crystal structures.

Marie Curie

Radium was discovered by Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre Curie on 21 December 1898, in a uraninite, pitchblende, sample. While studying the mineral earlier, the Curies removed uranium from it and found that the remaining material was still radioactive.

They separated out an element similar to bismuth from pitchblende in July 1898, which turned out to be polonium. They then separated out a radioactive mixture consisting mostly of two components: compounds of barium, which gave a brilliant green flame color, and unknown radioactive compounds which gave carmine spectral lines that had never been documented before.

The Curies found the radioactive compounds to be very similar to the barium compounds, except that they were more insoluble. This made it possible for the Curies to separate out the radioactive compounds and discover a new element in them. The Curies announced their discovery to the French Academy of Sciences on 26 December 1898. The naming of radium dates to about 1899, from the French word radium, formed in Modern Latin from radius (ray): this was in recognition of radium's power of emitting energy in the form of rays.

More information: Nobel Prize

On September 1910, Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne announced that they had isolated radium as a pure metal through the electrolysis of a pure radium chloride (RaCl2) solution using a mercury cathode, producing a radium–mercury amalgam. This amalgam was then heated in an atmosphere of hydrogen gas to remove the mercury, leaving pure radium metal. Later that same year, E. Eoler isolated radium by thermal decomposition of its azide, Ra(N3)2.

Radium metal was first industrially produced in the beginning of the 20th century by Biraco, a subsidiary company of Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) in its Olen plant in Belgium.

Pierre & Marie Curie

The common historical unit for radioactivity, the curie, is based on the radioactivity of 226Ra.

Some of the few practical uses of radium are derived from its radioactive properties. More recently discovered radioisotopes, such as cobalt-60 and caesium-137, are replacing radium in even these limited uses because several of these isotopes are more powerful emitters, safer to handle, and available in more concentrated form.

The isotope 223Ra, under the trade name Xofigo, was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 2013 for use in medicine as a cancer treatment of bone metastasis. The main indication of treatment with Xofigo is the therapy of bony metastases from castration-resistant prostate cancer due to the favourable characteristics of this alpha-emitter radiopharmaceutical. 225Ra has also been used in experiments concerning therapeutic irradiation, as it is the only reasonably long-lived radium isotope which does not have radon as one of its daughters.

More information: Factinate

Radium is still used today as a radiation source in some industrial radiography devices to check for flawed metallic parts, similarly to X-ray imaging. When mixed with beryllium, radium acts as a neutron source.

Radium-beryllium neutron sources are still sometimes used even today, but other materials such as polonium are now more common: about 1500 polonium-beryllium neutron sources, with an individual activity of 1,850 Ci (68 TBq), have been used annually in Russia. These RaBeF4-based (α, n) neutron sources have been deprecated despite the high number of neutrons they emit, 1.84×106 neutrons per second, in favour of 241Am–Be sources. Today, the isotope 226Ra is mainly used to form 227Ac by neutron irradiation in a nuclear reactor.

Download The Laboratory Notebooks of Pierre and Marie Curie and the Discovering of Polonium and Radium

When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove 

useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. 

And this is a proof that scientific work must not be 

considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. 

Marie Curie

ALBERTO: POLISH RYGOR

Alberto Addams in Cracow, Polland

Alberto is another member of The Addams Family. He’s unquiet and inquisitive and, perhaps, because of this, he works as a TV Star. He has participated in different TV shows like Survivors, Big Brother and Kitchen Nightmares.

Alberto was born in Cracow (Poland), the country home of other famous people like Maria Skłodowska Curie (Marie Curie), Fryderyk Chopin and Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus), who wrote De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and theorized about another universe’s model where the Sun placed the Earth at its center. It’s not the case of Alberto’s life: its whole one is dedicated to his children, especially, after his wife, Marta, decided to enter into a convent in Poblet (Tarragona) and serve God. It was a great shock for all the family and the most affected was Alberto, because Marta is his beloved wife, the mother of his children and the center of his life, in Alberto’s words “the sun that illuminates and shines my life”. 

We don’t know what happened between Alberto and Marta. It’s one of the best hidden secrets in this family, but some closer voices say that the influence of Polish culture over her was so intense that she consecrated her life to follow another famous Polish, Karol Józef Wojtyla (aka Pope John Paul II).

Jak cie widza, tak cie pizza.
 
How they see you, that's how they perceive you.

Polish Proverb