RENE DESCARTES

René Descartes

Lived 1596 – 1650.

René Descartes invented analytical geometry and introduced skepticism as an essential part of the scientific method. He is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers in history.
His analytical geometry was a tremendous conceptual breakthrough, linking the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra. Descartes showed that he could solve previously unsolvable problems in geometry by converting them into simpler problems in algebra. He represented the horizontal direction as x and the vertical direction as y. This concept is now indispensable in mathematics and other sciences.

Advertisements

Beginnings

René Descartes was born into a well-educated, upper-class family on March 31, 1596 in the French village of La Haye en Touraine. The village is now called Descartes, Indre-et-Loire in his honor.
René’s father was Joachim Descartes, a lawyer at Brittany’s Court of Justice. His mother was Jeanne Brochard, daughter of the Lieutenant General of Poitiers. René was their third child.
A year after René’s birth his mother and her fourth child died during childbirth.
René’s father’s worked six months of the year in the Court of Justice in Rennes, about 200 miles (300 km) from their home. René was raised by his grandmother and his great-uncle. His father remarried when René was four and began living in Rennes permanently. Despite this, there was always affection between René and his father.
From birth René suffered poor health and had a permanent cough. Local doctors thought he would not survive infancy. His father employed a nurse who devoted herself to René’s care. As an adult he believed his nurse saved his life – he paid her a permanent pension.

Education

At the age of about ten or eleven René was finally considered healthy enough to begin school. He boarded at the Jesuit School at La Flèche in Anjou. In a concession to his delicate health he was allowed to rise later in the morning than other students.
René spent seven or eight years at La Flèche learning logic, theology, philosophy, Latin and Greek. In his final two years he also learned mathematics and physics. The physics was that of Aristotle – almost entirely wrong.
He was a boy of prodigious curiosity, asking questions endlessly.
René learned something of Galileo’s work including his recent amazing discovery of Jupiter’s moons. At this time, Galileo had still not published his greatest works overturning Aristotle’s physics; his trouble with the Catholic Church lay in the future.
At the age of 18, in 1614, René Descartes left La Flèche. Later he recorded his thoughts about his education as follows:

On Mathematics

“I took pleasure, above all, in mathematics, because of the certainty and the absoluteness of its reasons; but I had not yet discovered its true use… I was astonished that with such solid foundations nothing more eminent had ever been built upon them.”

René Descartes

1637

 

On Philosophy

“Seeing it had been cultivated by the most powerful minds… but nevertheless there is not in it one single thing which is not disputed, and therefore open to doubt, I had not the presumption to hope that I should succeed better than others. Considering how many different opinions there are… while it was impossible that more than one of them could be true, I regarded as little better than false everything that was merely probable.”

René Descartes

1637

 

On the Sciences

“Since they all borrow their principles from philosophy, I judged that nothing solid could have been built on such insecure foundations.”

René Descartes

1637

 

The Law, the Army, and Mathematics

His father encouraged René Descartes to follow in his footsteps and study law. He did this, graduating from the University of Poitiers in 1616, aged 20, with a diploma and license in church and civil law.
Rather than becoming a lawyer, however, Descartes went traveling for about two years, including spending some time in Paris. He joined the Dutch States Army in Breda in 1618 and began studying engineering in a military academy. He soon met the Dutch scientist and philosopher Isaac Beeckman. In 1619 Descartes wrote Beeckman:

“To tell you the truth, it was really you who got me out of my idleness and made me remember things I once learned and had nearly forgotten: when my mind wandered from serious [mathematical] matters, you put me back on the right path.”

René Descartes

1619

 

Descartes, aged 23, was now profoundly serious in his desire to make new discoveries in mathematics.

René Descartes’ Contributions to Science

The Miracle

On November 10, 1619 Descartes was dozing in a warm, stove-heated room in the German town of Neuburg an der Donau.
There he had a series of dreams that would ultimately change the way scientists work. He believed a spirit sent by God gave him new ideas about:

• The Scientific Method
• Analytical Geometry
• Philosophy

18 years later, in 1637, he published his ideas in Discours de la mèthode (Discussion of the Method), La Gèomètrie (Geometry), Les Mètèores (Meteorology), and La Dioptrique (Optics). The first two of these works contain his most significant contributions.

The Method

In Discussion of the Method Descartes shared his framework for doing science.
One of his main lines of thought was skepticism – that everything should be doubted until it could be proved.
His four main ideas for scientific progress were:
1. Never accept anything as true until all reasons for doubt can be ruled out.
2. Divide problems into as many parts as possible and necessary to provide an adequate solution.
3. Thoughts should be ordered, starting with the simplest and easiest to know, ascending little by little, and, step by step, to more complex knowledge.
4. Make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that nothing is omitted.
It is ironic that Descartes’ own method might lead us to doubt that a dream 18 years earlier could have been the true source of his ideas!

Analytical Geometry

Descartes made the revolutionary discovery that he could solve problems in geometry by converting them into problems in algebra.
In La Gèomètrie he showed that curves could be expressed in terms of x and y on a two-dimensional plane and hence as equations in algebra.
The Cartesian coordinate system used in the image below is named in his honor. (Descartes’ name in Latin is Cartesius.)

The blue line can be expressed using algebra by the equation y = 2x + 1.

Descartes never actually drew an x- or y-axis in his work. These were assumed in his diagrams. The axes were formally introduced by the mathematician Frans van Schooten and other mathematicians in Leiden who translated La Gèomètrie from French into Latin, while developing it further. Latin editions of La Gèomètrie were released in 1649, 1659 and 1661.
Descartes also introduced the modern notation for exponents. For example, rather than writing a.a.a he would write a³.
By unleashing the mathematical power of algebra to tackle problems in geometry, Descartes surpassed the expertise of Ancient Greece’s brilliant geometers: he could now solve problems that had defeated them.
Analytical geometry was independently invented earlier by Pierre de Fermat, who lived in France at the same time as Descartes. Fermat worked on mathematics for his own pleasure and often kept his results private. He did, however, enjoy issuing challenges to other mathematicians to solve problems.
In 1638 Fermat sent a work entitled Introduction to Plane and Solid Loci to the mathematician, Marin Mersenne, to show how problems he had posed at an earlier date could be solved. Fermat’s approach was different from Descartes’. Descartes showed how geometry could be expressed as algebra; Fermat showed how algebra could be expressed as geometry.

Influencing Isaac Newton and the Invention of Calculus

Calculus has been crucial to the progress of mathematics and the sciences. It was developed in the 1660s by Isaac Newton, and developed independently in the 1670s by Gottfried Leibniz.
In La Gèomètrie, Descartes showed how he could find tangents to curves. This process is a vital part of differential calculus. His mathematical competitor Fermat was also able to find tangents to curves; his methods were actually simpler than Descartes’. Both Descartes and Fermat helped guide Newton and Leibniz’s development of calculus.

Silenced by Fear of the Church

Four years before he released his 1637 works, Descartes had intended publishing The World.
In 1633, however, he learned that the Catholic Church had tried Galileo for heresy and sentenced him to life in prison. This was reduced to permanent house arrest because Galileo was rather elderly. The Church also prohibited Galileo’s works.
Descartes, like Galileo, believed the sun sits at the center of the solar system. He decided not to risk the Church’s wrath and did not publish The World. (Galileo could have been burned at the stake if his trial had gone worse than it did.)

Philosophy

Descartes is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Here we are concerned with science rather than philosophy, so we will restrict ourselves to noting his most famous declaration:

“I think therefore I am.”

This could also be expressed as:

“I can think, therefore I exist.”

Descartes regarded this statement as the unshakeable foundation that all other philosophy could be built upon.
His most famous philosophical work is Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641.

Deducing the Laws of Nature from First Principles

Descartes’ most comprehensive work, Principles of Philosophy, was published in 1644. In it he tried to deduce all of nature’s laws from first principles. Although the book had much to commend it to philosophers, its science was incorrect.
He argued that action at a distance is impossible and agreed with the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle that there could be no vacuum. Soon, however, all his power as a philosopher would be defeated by scientific experiments.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.

Max Planck, Theoretical Physicist

1858 to 1947

 

In 1654 Otto von Guericke constructed the first vacuum pump. In 1662 Robert Boyle demonstrated that the magnetic force can travel through a vacuum, establishing that action at a distance is possible.
Unfortunately Descartes did not live long enough to learn of these developments.

Some Personal Details and the End

Descartes was wealthy enough to pursue his own interests. His father gifted him a number of properties which Descartes, at the age of 24, sold. This raised enough money for him to live on comfortably for the rest of his life.
Descartes spent much of his life on the move. He lived for 20 of his later years in various locations in Holland. He also studied and taught mathematics there. He found he could work better in Holland, with fewer distractions than in France.
Although he never married, in 1635, aged 39, he became a father. His partner was an Amsterdam servant, Helena Jans van der Strom. Their daughter was named Francine. Mother and daughter lived with Descartes in his house – he told people Francine was his niece. He planned to educate his daughter in France, but sadly, at the age of five, she died of scarlet fever. Francine’s mother later got married, with Descartes playing a fatherly role by paying the wedding dowry.
In 1649 Descartes was invited to Stockholm by Queen Christina of Sweden. She wanted him to set up a new academy of science.
René Descartes died, aged 53, of pneumonia in Stockholm on February, 11 1650. He was buried at the Adolf Fredriks Church in Stockholm.
In death, as in life, Descartes was mobile. 16 years after his first burial his remains were moved and buried in the Saint-Ètienne-du-Mont church in Paris, France. In 1819 his remains minus skull and finger were moved again, this time to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près in Paris, where he now rests.
In 1663, despite his efforts to avoid such a fate – he regarded himself as a devout Catholic – a number of Descartes’ works joined Galileo’s on the index of books prohibited by the Catholic Church. Over 300 years later, in 1966, this index was finally discontinued

Albert Einstein

Lived 1879 – 1955.

Albert Einstein rewrote the laws of nature. He completely changed the way we understand the behavior of things as basic as light, gravity, and time.
Although scientists today are comfortable with Einstein’s ideas, in his time, they were completely revolutionary. Most people did not even begin to understand them.
If you’re new to science, you’ll probably find that some of his ideas take time to get used to!

Advertisements

Quick Guide to Albert Einstein’s Scientific Achievements

Albert Einstein:
• provided powerful evidence that atoms and molecules actually exist, through his analysis of Brownian motion.
• explained the photoelectric effect, proposing that light comes in bundles. Bundles of light (he called them quanta) with the correct amount of energy can eject electrons from metals.
• proved that everyone, whatever speed we move at, measures the speed of light to be 300 million meters per second in a vacuum. This led to the strange new reality that time passes more slowly for people traveling at very high speeds compared with people moving more slowly.
• discovered the hugely important and iconic equation E = mc², which shows that energy and matter can be converted into one another.
• rewrote the law of gravitation, which had been unchallenged since Isaac Newton published it in 1687. In his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein:
    » showed that matter causes space to curve, which produces gravity.
    » showed that light follows the path mapped out by the gravitational curve of space.
    » showed that time passes more slowly when gravity becomes very strong.
• became the 20th century’s most famous scientist when the strange predictions he made in his General Theory of Relativity were verified by scientific observations.
• spent his later years trying to find equations to unite quantum physics with general relativity. This was an incredibly hard task, and it has still not been achieved.

His Beginnings

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. He was not talkative in his childhood, and until the age of three he hardly talked at all. He spent his teenage years in Munich, where his family had an electric equipment business. As a teenager, he was interested in nature and showed a high level of ability in mathematics and physics.
Einstein loved to be creative and innovative. He loathed the uncreative spirit in his school at Munich. His family’s business failed when he was aged 15, and they moved to Milan, Italy. Aged 16, he moved to Switzerland, where he finished high school.
In 1896 he enrolled for a science degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He didn’t like the teaching methods there, so he bunked classes to carry out experiments in the physics laboratory or play his violin. With the help of his classmates’ notes, he passed his exams; he graduated in 1900.
Einstein was not considered a good student by his teachers, and they refused to recommend him for further employment.

Einstein 1903

While studying at the Polytechnic, Einstein learned about one of the biggest problems of the day that was baffling physicists. This was how to marry together Isaac Newton’s laws of motion with James Clerk Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. He thought a lot about this problem.
In 1902 he obtained the post of an examiner in the Swiss Federal patent office. In 1903 he wedded his former classmate Mileva Maric. He had two sons with her but they later divorced. After some years Einstein married Elsa Loewenthal.

Early Scientific Publications

Einstein made most of his greatest scientific breakthroughs while he was working at the patent office. The University of Zurich awarded him a Ph.D. in 1905 for his thesis “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions.”

1905: The Year of Miracles

In 1905, the same year as he submitted his doctoral thesis, Albert Einstein published four immensely important scientific papers dealing with his analysis of:

• Brownian motion
• the equivalence of mass and energy
• the photoelectric effect
• special relativity

Each of these papers on their own was a huge contribution to science. To publish four such papers in one year was considered to be almost miraculous. Einstein was just 26 years old.

Mass Energy Equivalence

Einstein gave birth in 1905 to what has become the world’s most famous equation:

E = mc²

The equation says that mass (m) can be converted to energy (E). A little mass can make a lot of energy, because mass is multiplied by c² where c is the speed of light, a very large number.

A small amount of mass can make a large amount of energy. Conversion of mass in atomic nuclei to energy is the principle behind nuclear weapons and is the sun’s source of energy.

The Photoelectric Effect

If you shine light on metal, the metal may release some of its electrons. Einstein said that light is made up of individual ‘particles’ of energy, which he called quanta. When these quanta hit the metal, they give their energy to electrons, which allows these electrons to escape from the metal.
Einstein showed that light can behave as a particle as well as a wave. The energy each ‘particle’ of light carries is proportional to the frequency of the light waves.

Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity

In Einstein’s third paper of 1905 he returned to the big problem he had heard about at university – how to resolve Newton’s laws of motion with Maxwell’s equations of light. His approach was the ‘thought experiment.’ He imagined how the world would look if he could travel at the speed of light.
He realized that the laws of physics are the same everywhere, and regardless of what you did – whether you moved quickly toward a ray of light as it approached you, or quickly away from the ray of light – you would always see the light ray moving at the same speed – the speed of light!
This is not obvious, because it’s not how things work in everyday life, where, for example, if you move towards a child approaching you on a bike he will reach you sooner than if you move away from him. With light, it doesn’t matter whether you move towards or away from the light, it will take the same amount of time to reach you. This isn’t an easy thing to understand, so don’t worry about it if you don’t! (Unless you’re at university studying physics.) Every experiment ever done to test special relativity has confirmed what Einstein said.
If the speed of light is the same for all observers regardless of their speed, then it follows that some other strange things must be true. In fact, it turns out that time, length, and mass actually depend on the speed we are moving at. The nearer the speed of light we move, the bigger differences we seen in these quantities compared with someone moving more slowly. For example, time passes more and more slowly as we move faster and faster.

Einstein Becomes Known to the Wider Physics Community

As people read Einstein’s papers and argued about their significance, his work gradually gained acceptance, and his reputation as a powerful new intellect in the world of physics grew. In 1908 he began lecturing at the University of Bern, and the following year resigned from the Patent Office. In 1911 he became a professor of physics at the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague, before returning to Zurich in 1912 to a professorship there.
Working on the general theory of relativity, in 1911 he made his first predictions of how our sun’s powerful gravity would bend the path of light coming from other stars that passed close to the sun.

The General Theory of Relativity – Einstein Becomes Famous Worldwide

A very, very rough approximation: the earth’s mass curves space. The moon’s speed keeps it rolling around the curve rather than falling to Earth. If you are on Earth and wish to leave, you need to climb out of the gravity well

Einstein published his general theory of relativity paper in 1915, showing, for example, how gravity distorts space and time. Light is deflected by powerful gravity, not because of its mass (light has no mass) but because gravity has curved the space that light travels through.
In 1919 a British expedition traveled to the West African island of Principe to observe an eclipse of the sun. During the eclipse they tested whether light from far away stars passing close to the sun was deflected. They found that it was! Just as Einstein had said, space truly is curved.
On November 7, 1919, the London Times’ headline read:
Revolution in science – New theory of the Universe – Newtonian ideas overthrown.

Honors and More Honors

Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. People are sometimes surprised to learn the award was not made for his work in special or general relativity, but for his overall services to theoretical physics and one of the works from his miracle year in 1905, specifically the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.
The Royal Society of London awarded him its prestigious Copley Medal in 1925 for his theory of relativity and contributions to the quantum theory. The Franklin Institute awarded him the Franklin medal in 1935 for his work on relativity and the photoelectric effect.
Universities around the world competed with one another to award him honorary doctorates, and the press wrote more about him than any other scientist – Einstein became a celebrity.

Einstein’s Later Years

Einstein made his greatest discoveries when he was a relatively young man.
In his later years he continued with science, but made no further groundbreaking discoveries. He became interested in politics and the state of the world.
Einstein had been born German and a Jew. He died an American citizen in 1955. Einstein was in America when Hitler came to power. He decided it would be a bad idea to return to Germany and renounced his German citizenship. Einstein did not practice Judaism, but strongly identified with the Jewish people persecuted by the Nazi Party, favoring a Jewish homeland in Palestine with the rights of Arabs protected.
It was Einstein’s wish that people should be respected for their humanity and not for their country of origin or religion. Expressing his cynicism for nationalistic pride, he once said:
“If relativity is proved right the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew.”

Advertisements

Charles Darwin

Lived 1809 – 1882.

Charles Darwin is often cited as the greatest biologist in history. His most famous work, On the Origin of Species, explains the theory of evolution by natural selection, providing numerous supporting examples. Darwin believed that all of life on earth had descended from a common ancestor, whose offspring could vary slightly from the previous generation. Successive generations of life took part in a struggle for existence in which the best adapted variations survived to seed new generations. Less well adapted variations became extinct.

Advertisements

Beginnings

Charles Robert Darwin was born into a wealthy family on February 12, 1809 in the town of Shrewsbury, England, UK. He was the fifth child of six.

Charles Darwin, aged 7

His grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a prosperous physician and scientist who had already made significant contributions to scientific ideas about evolution.
His father, Robert Darwin, was a physician. Robert Darwin had grown rich by shrewdly investing money earned from his medical practice.
Charles’s mother was Susannah Wedgewood, from the famous pottery family. She died when Charles was eight years old. He then started attending an elementary school
School
At the age of nine, Charles was sent to Shrewsbury School, about a mile from his family home. He boarded there, often briefly returning home to keep up with family goings-on.
His boarding school followed a traditional classical curriculum revolving around Ancient Greek and Latin, which Charles loathed. He was not considered to be particularly smart. His foreign language skills were poor.
His schoolwork usually involved learning by heart for the next day lines of Roman or Greek literature. Although he disliked doing this, he was happy to work hard. He learned his lines thoroughly, then promptly forgot them all again as soon as class was over.
He enjoyed hunting and going for long walks, observing and collecting things from the natural world. At one point he became so obsessive about hunting that his father declared:

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

Robert Darwin

Charles Darwin’s Father

 

Despite his father’s uncharacteristic outburst, the young Charles Darwin was very enthusiastic about science. He was taught geometry by a private tutor, which he enjoyed, and he also enjoyed learning how complex things worked. He was captivated by a book Wonders of the World, which planted a seed in him to travel. The seed would later bloom into his famous voyage on HMS Beagle.
His brother built a chemistry laboratory in the garden tool-house, and Charles helped with experiments, often late into the night. Chemistry became his favorite subject. Unfortunately, it was not part of his school’s curriculum. In fact he was reprimanded his headmaster for ‘wasting his time’ on chemistry!
Edinburgh and Medical School
In 1825, aged 16, Charles became a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, as his father had done 42 years earlier. His father had pleasant memories of Edinburgh, where he was taught by the great chemist Joseph Black, who discovered magnesium, carbon dioxide, and latent heat.
Unlike his father, however, Charles did not enjoy medical school.
He found that dissecting human bodies disgusted him, being present during surgical operations horrified him, and visiting hospital wards distressed him. Moreover, attending lectures bored him:

“The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry.”

Charles Darwin

Autobiography, written 1876

 

Confident his father would give him enough money to live in comfort, he decided not to worry about passing his exams.
In his second year at Edinburgh, Charles became interested in zoology, and he collected and dissected marine creatures. He also attended geology lectures, but found them incredibly boring.
His exasperated father decided to halt Charles’s medical studies. He withdrew his son from Edinburgh and sent him to the University of Cambridge with the idea that his idle son would eventually become a Church of England clergyman.
Cambridge and an Easy Degree
Early in 1828, just before his twentieth birthday, Charles Darwin enrolled at the University of Cambridge to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree.
After three easy years he received his B.A. degree with marks placing him near the top of the class. He had spent much of his time hunting, dining, drinking, and playing cards – all of which he enjoyed heartily.
Ironically, given Darwin’s later work, his favorite book at university was Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Its author, William Paley, used the example of a watch and a watchmaker in support of his argument that the natural world had been designed by God. Each species of life is much more complex than a watch, Paley said, therefore clearly these species must have been designed by someone – and that someone was God.
The Natural World
During his time in Cambridge, Darwin continued to pursue his scientific interests, particularly in botany and zoology: his greatest interest by far was in collecting different species of beetle.

“One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”

Charles Darwin

Autobiography, written 1876

 

Reading Alexander von Humboldt’s book Personal Narrative of travels 1799-1804 and John Herschel’s Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy energized Darwin. He thirsted for overseas adventures and scientific discoveries.
After finishing at Cambridge, he began taking a serious interest in geology, studying rocks near his hometown of Shrewsbury and going on a two week expedition to Wales mapping rock strata.

Charles Darwin’s Contributions to Science

The Voyage of the Beagle 1831 – 1836

Darwin spent nearly five years traveling around the world on the Beagle.

Near the end of summer 1831, after completing his degree, Darwin was offered a position as a naturalist on HMS Beagle, one of the British Royal Navy’s survey ships. The position had previously been offered to John Henslow, a geologist and naturalist at Cambridge, but he had turned it down and recommended Darwin.
The Beagle was scheduled to make a long expedition to the South Seas. Darwin would have to pay for his place on the ship, but would be at liberty to collect specimens and send them back to the United Kingdom for his own use or profit.
It was a wonderful opportunity to emulate his hero Alexander von Humboldt. Darwin was determined to grab it with both hands. His father, with some reluctance, agreed to pay for his son’s voyage.
The voyage, much like the fictitious Starship Enterprise’s, was a five year mission. It followed the route shown on the map above. The conditions on the small ship were much less comfortable than those enjoyed by the Starship Enterprise’s crew!

Plan of HMS Beagle

The Beagle – A cramped home for a five year voyage

The Voyage
While sailing southward from the British Isles, the Beagle’s first stop was at the volcanic Cape Verde Islands, west of Africa. Darwin found seashells high up in cliffs there. The Beagle’s captain, who had a great interest in the natural world, helped Darwin explain the observation, giving him a copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology.
Principles of Geology explained uniformitarian ideas in geology – the theory of gradualism, first proposed late in the previous century by James Hutton. A few years later the book’s author, Charles Lyell, would become one of Darwin’s greatest friends and supporters.
The expedition continued, with Darwin writing about his experiences in each new place he visited, collecting samples of flora, fauna, and fossils, and observing rock formations.
He saw a variety of unusual, unique species on the Galapagos Islands. Each separate island seemed to have its own distinct varieties of wildlife. Observations like these provoked him to write late in the voyage:

“such facts would undermine the stability of Species.”

Charles Darwin

1835

 

Back Home Again
Darwin arrived back in England in October 1836. He had kept in touch with John Henslow, sending him notes regularly about his geological work on the expedition. Henslow put these notes together into a 31 page pamphlet, which he distributed to Cambridge’s scientific community and beyond.
Henslow also showed paleontologists fossils Darwin sent him, which caused more excitement.
Although Darwin embarked on the voyage as an unknown recent graduate, he returned as a respected, well-known scientist. Also, he assembled a large, exciting collection of specimens that naturalists were queuing up to study and catalog.
His father was relieved his prediction that Charles would disgrace the family had been proven wrong. Charles Darwin was now admired in the world of natural science, and his father agreed to continue funding his work. In fact, other people also recognized the value of Darwin’s work, and he now received a large grant from the British government to write up his observations from the Beagle’s expedition.

Scientific Results from Darwin’s Voyage

Darwin established that the South American continent is gradually rising from the ocean. Charles Lyell, whose geology book influenced Darwin on the voyage, arranged for Darwin to present this work to the Geological Society of London at the beginning of 1837.
At the same meeting Darwin presented specimens of birds he had collected from the Galapagos Islands. Within a week, the ornithologist John Gould examined the specimens and declared the birds belonged to an entirely new group of finches. Darwin had discovered 12 new finch species and a new group of finches.

Evolution by Natural Selection

On his long voyage, at times mesmerized by nature’s abundance, Darwin’s thoughts had increasingly turned to the question of how different species had formed.

Earlier Ideas about Evolution

The concept of evolution had been hatched thousands of years before Darwin’s time.
His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had made some striking contributions to evolutionary theory, including the idea that all life has a common origin.

Darwin’s Theory

In July 1837 Darwin began keeping a notebook of his thoughts and theories about the variation of plants and animals.
By this time, he had completely accepted that species could evolve (or, to use Darwin’s language, transmute).
He decided he would make his investigation according to the principles of Francis Bacon – he would assemble facts before producing a theory.
In October 1838 he read Thomas Malthus’s work on population, showing that populations increase until food runs out, then crash. There is a struggle for existence. Darwin said that having read Malthus:

“It at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.”

Charles Darwin

Autobiography, written 1876

 

By December 1838 Darwin was mulling over how breeders improve domestic animals by selecting the animals with the best qualities. In the natural world the selection is carried out by the environment. The lifeforms best adapted to the environment survive and breed. This is natural selection.
In 1842 he wrote his first paper on what came to be known as evolution by natural selection, but only for his own use.
In 1845 he published thoughts, formed much earlier, about the new species of finches he discovered in the Galapagos Islands, saying he could imagine that one original species had been modified into all the different species.

Darwin decided that the different species of finches on the Galapagos Islands were all descended from a single finch ancestor.

If Darwin had been an ambitious scientist, he could have published a theory of evolution by natural selection in 1839, but he didn’t. He continued:

• gathering and weighing evidence and assessing specimens from his voyage
• breeding animals and plants to determine how species could be modified by artificial selection
• writing books and papers about a variety of topics including geology

Darwin’s Hand is Forced

On 18 June 1858, aged 49, Darwin opened his mail and got a terrible shock. He had been corresponding with Alfred Russel Wallace, a young, self-trained naturalist who was on an expedition in the East Indies.
Wallace now asked for Darwin’s opinion of a paper he had written. The paper described the theory of evolution by natural selection – the theory Darwin had spent decades gathering evidence for, but had never published. Darwin wrote back, offering his opinion that Wallace’s paper could be published in any journal of Wallace’s choosing.
Darwin also showed Wallace’s paper to his scientific friends Charles Lyell (Wallace had requested this) and Joseph Dalton Hooker.
Darwin was in crisis at this time because his young son had been terribly sick, eventually dying of scarlet fever on June 28.
His friends were aware that Darwin actually arrived at the theory first. They decided the joint theories of Darwin and Wallace should be read to the Linnean Society on July 1. Darwin did not attend the reading. His place was at his son’s funeral.
In the event, the reading of the Darwin-Wallace paper provoked little interest.

The Origin of Species

Darwin’s game-changing book On the Origin of Species – often called the most important book in the history of biology – became available to the public on November 24, 1859; booksellers immediately sold all 1250 copies.
Trying to avoid controversy, Darwin avoided making any claims for the origin a particular species, such as Homo sapiens. He did however, in agreement with his grandfather’s much earlier theory, write:

“… probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.”

Charles Darwin

On the Origin of Species, 1859

 

Over the following years Darwin updated the book regularly. He eventually authored six significantly different editions.
Some of the most familiar ideas of ‘Darwinism’ did not appear until the later editions: the famous phrase “survival of the fittest” appeared for the first time in the 1869 fifth edition. Remarkably, the word evolution made its first appearance in the sixth edition in 1872.
In support of his theory of common ancestry, Darwin was particularly taken by the similarity of the embryos of different species.

“Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I was at work on the ‘Origin,’ as the explanation of the wide difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult animal, and of the close resemblance of the embryos within the same class.”

Charles Darwin

Autobiography, written 1876

 

Further Work

In 1868 Darwin wrote The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Feeling the need to offer a mechanism for heredity, and unaware that Gregor Mendel had already provided it, Darwin incorrectly proposed heredity resulted from a process called pangenesis.

Many people believed that Darwin’s proposed descent of humans from apes was an attack on society’s moral foundations.

In 1871 Darwin’s The Descent of Man presented evidence that humans are animals – we are members of the ape family, and are the descendants of apes.
During Darwin’s lifetime, there was fierce opposition to his theory.
The great German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, for example, opposed Darwin from the beginning and never relented in his opposition.
In fact, in 1877, Virchow said the idea that man had descended from apes was an attack on society’s moral foundations. He voiced his opinion that teaching the theory of evolution should not be permitted in Germany’s public schools.
In 1872 Darwin looked at the evolution of human psychology in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, showing there are similarities in human and animal psychology.
The idea that species evolve had become accepted by most mainstream scientists by about the time the sixth edition of The Origin of Species came out in 1872.
The concept of natural selection, however, was less accepted. In considering the rate at which natural selection pushed evolutionary change, Darwin was heavily influenced by his friend Charles Lyell’s championing of gradualism.

“Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.”

Charles Darwin

Origin of Species

 

It was only much later, after publication of the 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection by Ronald Fisher, that evolution by natural selection became widely accepted by mainstream scientists. Fisher unified the theory of natural selection with the heredity laws of Gregor Mendel

Some Personal Details and the End

Darwin’s wife Emma two years after their marriage.

Darwin married Emma Wedgewood on January 29 1839. He was aged 29 and she was 30. They were first cousins.
The couple had ten children; three died in childhood.
Three of their sons, George, Francis, and Horace, became notable scientists and were elected fellows of the Royal Society. George became an astronomer, Francis a botanist, and Horace an engineer.
Another son, Leonard, financially supported the publication of Ronald Fisher’s earliest work.
In 1837, as he began to work hard on a multi-volume book of observations from the Beagle expedition, and simultaneously began seriously researching the transmutation of species, Darwin fell ill. He would be plagued by ill-health for the rest of his life.
In 1842 he moved with his family to a country house outside London, away from the smoke and dirt. He lived a quiet life, not socializing much, concentrating on family life and writing books and scientific papers.
In 1864 Darwin was awarded the Copley Medal, then the greatest honor in science. The award was for:

“his important researches in geology, zoology, and botanical physiology.”

Previous winners included Benjamin Franklin, Alessandro Volta, Hans Christian Oersted, Michael Faraday, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Lyell, and Robert Bunsen.
Charles Darwin died aged 73 on April 19, 1882, of heart failure at his country house. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, London, next to John Herschel whose work had inspired him at university, and near his best friend Charles Lyell, whose work had influenced him greatly. Other scientists buried in Darwin’s vicinity at Westminster Abbey include Isaac Newton, Ernest Rutherford, J. J. Thomson, and Lord Kelvin.

Advertisements

• 
  

JOHN DAITON

John Dalton

Lived 1766 – 1844.

John Dalton’s Atomic Theory laid the foundations of modern chemistry.

John Dalton’s Early Life and Education

John Dalton was born on September 6, 1766, in Eaglesfield, England, UK.
Both of his parents were Quakers. Although Quakers were Christians, they were seen as dissenters by the established Church of England. As a result of this, John Dalton’s higher educational opportunities were restricted to dissenting places of education.
His father was a weaver, who owned a house and a small amount of land.
John Dalton was an intelligent child, who took an interest in the world around him and tried to learn as much as he could about everything.
He attended his village school until he was 11, and then began helping as a teacher.
At age 15, he started helping his older brother John to run a Quaker boarding-school in the town of Kendal, 40 miles from his home. All the while, he continued teaching himself science, mathematics, Latin, Greek, and French. By the time he was 19, he had become the school’s principal, continuing in this role until he was 26 years old.
It seems that the school’s students enjoyed being taught by Dalton, one of them recalling:

“The boys (were) all glad to be taught by John Dalton, because he had a gentler disposition; and besides his mind was so occupied with mathematics, that their faults escaped his notice.”

Advertisements

Becoming a Scientist

In the first half of 1793, aged 26, Dalton took the position of teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy at Manchester’s New College, a dissenting college.
In 1794, he wrote his first scientific paper which he called: Extraordinary Facts Relating to the Vision of Colours.
This was the first ever paper to discuss color blindness. Dalton had realized the condition was hereditary, because he and other members of his family had it. Ultimately, Dalton’s theory for color blindness was wrong, but as he was the first person ever to research it, the condition became known as Daltonism.
After this, he published more research papers in the physical sciences looking at heat conduction, gas expansion by heat, the properties of light, the aurora borealis, and meteorology.
In 1800, Dalton resigned from New College, which was in financial difficulty, and began working as a private tutor of science and mathematics.

Atomic Theory

The Behavior of Gases

In 1801, Dalton gave a series of lectures in Manchester whose contents were published in 1802. In these lectures he presented research he had been carrying out into gases and liquids. This research was groundbreaking, offering great new insights into the nature of gases.
Firstly, Dalton stated correctly that he had no doubt that all gases could be liquefied provided their temperature was sufficiently low and pressure sufficiently high.
He then stated that when its volume is held constant in a container, the pressure of a gas varies in direct proportion to its temperature.
This was the first public statement of what eventually became known as Gay-Lussac’s Law, named after Joseph Gay-Lussac who published it in 1809.
In 1803, Dalton published his Law of Partial Pressures, still used by every university chemistry student, which states that in a mixture of non-reacting gases, the total gas pressure is equal to the sum of the partial pressures of the individual gases.
Dalton’s work distinguished him as a scientist of the first rank, and he was invited to give lectures at the Royal Institution in London.

Dalton and Atoms

His study of gases led Dalton to wonder about what these invisible substances were actually made of.
The idea of atoms had first been proposed more than 2000 years earlier by Democritus in Ancient Greece. Democritus believed that everything was made of tiny particles called atoms and that these atoms could not be split into smaller particles. Was Democritus right? Nobody knew!
Dalton was now going to solve this 2000-year-old mystery.
He carried out countless chemical reactions and in 1808 published what we now call Dalton’s Law in his book A New System of Chemical Philosophy:

If two elements form more than one compound between them, then the ratios of the masses of the second element which combine with a fixed mass of the first element will be ratios of small whole numbers.

For example, Dalton found that 12 grams of carbon could react with 16 grams of oxygen to form the compound we now call carbon monoxide.
He also found that that 12 grams of carbon could react with 32 grams of oxygen to form carbon dioxide.
This ratio of 32:16, which simplifies to 2:1, intrigued Dalton.
Analyzing all the data he collected, Dalton stated his belief that matter exists as atoms. He went further than Democritus, by stating that atoms of different elements have different masses. He also published diagrams showing, for example:
1. How atoms combine to form molecules

At the top of his diagram, Dalton assigns atom 1 to be hydrogen, 2 nitrogen, 3 carbon, 4 oxygen, 5 phosphorus, etc.
He then shows how molecules might look when the atoms combine to form compounds. For example, molecule 21 is water (OH), 22 is ammonia (NH) and 23 is nitrogen oxide (NO). Modern readers will see that Dalton got molecules 21 and 22 wrong. This is less important than the fact that Dalton’s system of atoms and molecules is almost identical to how we might represent them today. For example, Dalton’s molecule 28 is carbon dioxide. Today, we would still draw carbon dioxide in this way.
Amedeo Avogadro soon published work that built on Dalton’s and corrected some of Dalton’s errors – for example Avogadro said that water should be written H₂0. Unfortunately Avogadro’s work was ignored for many years, partly because it disagreed with Dalton’s.
2. How molecules of water might look in ice

Here Dalton shows how water molecules might arrange themselves when they are frozen in ice. We use similar diagrams today to show how atoms and molecules arrange themselves in crystals.

Dalton’s Atomic Theory states that:

1. The elements are made of atoms, which are tiny particles, too small to see.
2. All atoms of a particular element are identical.
3. Atoms of different elements have different properties: their masses are different, and their chemical reactions are different.
4. Atoms cannot be created, destroyed, or split.
5. In a chemical reaction, atoms link to one another, or separate from one another.
6. Atoms combine in simple whole-number ratios to form compounds.
Although we have learned that atoms of the same element can have different masses (isotopes), and can be split in nuclear reactions, most of Dalton’s Atomic Theory holds good today, over 200 years after he described it. It is the foundation modern chemistry was built upon.

“Mr. Dalton’s permanent reputation will rest upon his having discovered a simple principle, universally applicable to the facts of chemistry – in fixing the proportions in which bodies combine, and thus laying the foundation for future labors… his merits in this respect resemble those of Kepler in astronomy.”

Humphry Davy, 1778 to 1829

 

Honors

Dalton did not marry and had no children. He remained a faithful Quaker all of his life, living modestly.
In 1810, he declined an invitation to become a member of the Royal Society. In 1822, he was elected without his knowledge. In 1826, he was awarded the Society’s Royal Medal for his Atomic Theory.
In 1833, the French Academy of Sciences elected him as one of its eight foreign members. In 1834, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him as a foreign member.

The End

When he was 71 years old, Dalton had a small stroke – or paralysis as it was known then. A year later, a more significant stroke left him unable to speak as clearly as he once could. In 1844, when he was 77, another stroke hit him. He died aged 77 on July 27, 1844.
His scientific reputation was so great that when his body was placed in Manchester Town Hall it was visited by more than 40,000 people paying their respects. John Dalton was buried in Manchester in Ardwick cemetery.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie

Marie Curie discovered two new chemical elements – radium and polonium. She carried out the first research into the treatment of tumors with radiation, and she was the founder of the Curie Institutes, which are important medical research centers.
She is the only person who has ever won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry.

Advertisements

Marie Curie’s Early Life and Education

Maria Salomea Sklodowska was born in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867. At that time, Warsaw lay within the borders of the Russian Empire. Maria’s family wanted Poland to be an independent country.
Marie’s mother and father – Bronislawa and Wladyslaw – were both teachers and encouraged her interest in science.
When Marie was aged 10, her mother died. Marie started attending a boarding school, then moved to a gymnasium – a selective school for academically strong children. Aged 15, Marie graduated from high school, winning the gold medal for top student. She was passionate about science and wanted to continue learning about it.

Problems

Two obstacles stood in Marie’s way:

• her father had too little money to support her ambition to go to university
• higher education was not available for girls in Poland

Marie’s sister Bronya faced exactly the same problems.

Two Polish Girls in Paris (Eventually)

Marie aged 16.

To overcome the obstacles they faced, Marie agreed to work as a tutor and children’s governess to support Bronya financially. This allowed Bronya to go to France and study medicine in Paris.
For the next few years of her life, Marie worked to earn money for herself and Bronya. In the evenings, if she had time, she studied chemistry, physics, and mathematics textbooks. She also attended lectures and laboratory practicals at an illegal free “university” where Poles learned about Polish culture and practical science, both of which had been suppressed by the Russian Tsarist authorities.
In November 1891, aged 24, Marie followed Bronya to Paris. There she studied chemistry, mathematics, and physics at the Sorbonne, Paris’s most prestigious university. The course was, of course, taught in French, which Marie had to reach top speed in very quickly.
At first she shared an apartment with Bronya and Bronya’s husband, but the apartment lay an hour away from the university. Marie decided to rent a room in the Latin Quarter, closer to the Sorbonne.
This was a time of hardship for the young scientist; winters in her unheated apartment chilled her to the bone.

Top Student Again

In summer 1893, aged 26, Marie finished as top student in her master’s physics degree course. She was then awarded industrial funding to investigate how the composition of steel affected its magnetic properties. The idea was to find ways of making stronger magnets.
Her thirst for knowledge pushed her to continue with her education: she completed a master’s degree in chemistry in 1894, aged 27.

Homesick

For a long time, Marie had been homesick. She dearly wished to return to live in Poland. After working in Paris on steel magnets for a year, she vacationed in Poland, hoping to find work. She there were no jobs for her.
A few years earlier she had been unable to study for a degree in her homeland because she was a woman. Now, for the same reason, she found she could not get a position at a university.

Back to Paris and Pierre

Marie decided to return to Paris and begin a Ph.D. degree in physics.
Back in Paris, in the year 1895, aged 28, she married Pierre Curie. Pierre had proposed to her before her journey back to Poland. Aged 36, he had only recently completed a Ph.D. in physics himself and had become a professor. He had written his Ph.D. thesis after years of delay, because Marie had encouraged him to.
Pierre was already a highly respected industrial scientist and inventor who, at the age of 21, had discovered piezoelectricity with his brother Jacques.
Pierre was also an expert in magnetism: he discovered the effect now called the Curie Point where a change of temperature has a large effect on a magnet’s properties.

Pierre and Marie Curie in their laboratory

Marie Curie’s Scientific Discoveries

The Ph.D. degree is a research based degree, and Marie Curie now began investigating the chemical element uranium.

Why Uranium?

In 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen had discovered mysterious X-rays, which could capture photographs of human bones beneath skin and muscle.
The following year, Henri Becquerel had discovered that rays emitted by uranium could pass through metal, but Becquerel’s rays were not X-rays.
Marie decided to investigate the rays from uranium – this was a new and very exciting field to work in. Discoveries came to her thick and fast. She discovered that:

• Uranium rays electrically charge the air they pass through. Such air can conduct electricity. Marie detected this using an electrometer Pierre and his brother had invented.
• The number of rays coming from uranium depends only on the amount of uranium present – not the chemical form of the uranium. From this she theorized correctly that the rays came from within the uranium atoms and not from a chemical reaction.
• The uranium minerals pitchblende and torbernite have more of an effect on the conductivity of air than pure uranium does. She theorized correctly that these minerals must contain another chemical element, more active than uranium.
• The chemical element thorium emits rays in the same way as uranium. (Gerhard Carl Schmidt in Germany actually discovered this a few weeks before Marie Curie in 1898: she discovered it independently.)

By the summer of 1898 Marie’s husband Pierre had become as excited about her discoveries as Marie herself. He asked Marie if he could cooperate with her scientifically, and she welcomed him. By this time, they had a one-year old daughter Irene. Amazingly, 37 years later, Irene Curie herself would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“My husband and I were so closely united by our affection and our common work that we passed nearly all of our time together.”

Marie Curie

 

Discovery of Polonium, Radium and a New Word

Marie and Pierre decided to hunt for the new element they suspected might be present in pitchblende. By the end of 1898, after laboriously processing tons of pitchblende, they announced the discovery of two new chemical elements which would soon take their place in Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table.
The first element they discovered was polonium, named by Marie to honor her homeland. They found polonium was 300 times more radioactive that uranium. They wrote:

“We thus believe that the substance that we have extracted from pitchblende contains a metal never known before, akin to bismuth in its analytic properties. If the existence of this new metal is confirmed, we suggest that it should be called polonium after the name of the country of origin of one of us.”

The second element the couple discovered was radium, which they named after the Latin word for ray. The Curies found radium is several million times more radioactive than uranium! They also found radium’s compounds are luminous and that radium is a source of heat, which it produces continuously without any chemical reaction taking place. Radium is always hotter than its surroundings.
Together they came up with a new word for the phenomenon they were observing: radioactivity. Radioactivity is produced by radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium, polonium and radium.

A Ph.D. and a Nobel Prize in Physics!

In June 1903, Marie Curie was awarded her Ph.D. by the Sorbonne.

Marie Curie in 1903 – her Nobel Prize photo.

Her examiners were of the view that she had made the greatest contribution to science ever found in a Ph.D. thesis.
Six months later, the newly qualified researcher was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics!
She shared the prize with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, the original discover of radioactivity.
The Nobel Committee were at first only going to give prizes to Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel.
However, Pierre insisted that Marie must be honored.
So three people shared the prize for discoveries in the scientific field of radiation.
Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

“I have to keep going, as there are always people on my track. I have to publish my present work as rapidly as possible in order to keep in the race. The best sprinters in this road of investigation are Becquerel and the Curies.”

Ernest Rutherford

Physicist

 

Marie Curie Theorizes Correctly About Radioactivity

“Consequently 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 at the foundation of modern chemistry.

Moreover, we have seen that radium acts as though it shot out into space a shower of projectiles, some of which have the dimensions of atoms, while others can only be very small fractions of atoms. If this image corresponds to a reality, it follows necessarily that the atom of radium breaks up into subatoms of different sizes, unless these projectiles come from the atoms of the surrounding gas, disintegrated by the action of radium; but this view would likewise lead us to believe that the stability of atoms is not absolute.”

Marie Curie, 1904

 

Tragedy and Progress

The money from their Nobel Prizes made life easier for Marie and Pierre. For the first time, they could afford a laboratory assistant. Pierre took the Chair of Physics at the Sorbonne. The university also agreed to provide a new, well-equipped laboratory for the couple. In 1904, Marie and Pierre had a second daughter, Eve.
And then their happy life together came to an end. In 1906, Pierre was killed when he was hit by a horse-drawn carriage in the street.
Although distraught over her loss, Marie accepted the offer from the Sorbonne to replace Pierre as the Chair of Physics.
Again, she was breaking the mold: she had been first woman to win a Nobel Prize, now she was the first female professor at the University of Paris.

Nobel Prize for Chemistry

In 1910, Marie isolated a pure sample of the metallic element radium for the first time. She had discovered the element 12 years earlier.
In 1911, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the “discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element.”
Again, Marie Curie had broken the mold: she was the first person to win a Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry. In fact, she is the only person ever to have done this.

The Coming of War – Helping the Wounded

During World War 1, 1914 – 1918, Marie Curie put her scientific knowledge to use. With the help of her daughter Irene, who was only 17 years old, she set up radiology medical units near battle lines to allow X-rays to be taken of wounded soldiers. By the end of the war, over one million injured soldiers had passed through her radiology units.

One of the Greats

Marie Curie was now recognized worldwide as one of science’s “greats.” She traveled widely to talk about science and to promote The Radium Institute which she founded to carry out medical research.
Marie was one of the small number of elite scientists invited to one of the most famous scientific conferences of all-time – the 1927 Solvay Conference on Electrons and Photons.

Marie Curie, aged 59, at the 1927 Solvay Conference on Electrons and Photons. This was an invitation-only meeting of the world’s greatest minds in chemistry and physics. In the front row are Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein. In the row behind are Martin Knudsen, Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Kramers, Paul Dirac and Arthur Compton. All except Knudsen and Kramers were Nobel Prize winners.

Healing the World – The Radium Institute

Marie Curie became aware that the rays coming from radioactive elements could be used to treat tumors. She and Pierre decided not to patent the medical applications of radium, and so could not profit from it.
In her later years, Marie Curie’s dearest wish was to explore the use of radioactivity in medical applications. To do this, she established the Radium Institute.
At $120,000 per gram, radium was horrendously expensive – millions of dollars in today’s money. Marie Curie could only afford 1 gram of it for use in cancer therapies.

Pierre Curie voluntarily exposed his arm to the action of radium during several hours. This resulted in a lesion resembling a burn that developed progressively and required several months to heal. Henri Becquerel had by accident a similar burn as a result of carrying in his vest pocket a glass tube containing radium salt. He came to tell us of this evil effect of radium, exclaiming in a manner at once delighted and annoyed: “I love it, but I owe it a grudge.”

Marie Curie, 1867 to 1934

 

In 1920, Marie gave an interview about her work at the Radium Institute to the American journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney, who was usually called “Missy.”
Missy asked if there was any way she could help the Institute. Marie told her that American chemical companies had now isolated 50 grams of radium. Her Institute desperately needed one more gram for medical research, but could not afford it.
Missy returned to the USA and became Chair of the Marie Curium Radium Fund, with the aim of getting Marie Curie her 1 gram of radium.
Money was raised in small donations all over the country until $100,000 had been collected. The Standard Chemical Company of Pittsburgh then agreed to supply a gram of radium at the reduced price of $100,000.
On May 20th, 1921, President Warren G. Harding presented Marie with the radium in a lead-lined steel box at the White House.
Since then, the Radium Institute (now the called the Curie Institute) has gone from strength to strength. Three of its workers have been awarded Nobel Prizes: Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie won the chemistry prize in 1935 and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes won the physics prize in 1991. Irene was Marie and Pierre’s daughter. She shared the prize with her husband Frederic. The Curie Institute continues to do important research work today.

The End

Marie Curie died aged 66 on July 4, 1934, killed by aplastic anemia, a disease of the bone marrow. The radioactivity she was exposed to during her career probably caused the disease.
Scientists are now much more cautious in their handling of radioactive elements and X-rays than they were in the first few decades after their discovery. Marie Curie’s own books and papers are so radioactive that they are now stored in lead boxes, which may only be opened by people wearing protective suits.

“Not only did she do outstanding work in her lifetime, and not only did she help humanity greatly by her work, but she invested all her work with the highest moral quality. All of this she accomplished with great strength, objectivity, and judgment. It is very rare to find all of these qualities in one individual.”

Albert Einstein

Theoretical Physicist

 

“She not only conquered great secrets of science but the hearts of the people the world over.”

New York Times, July 5, 1934

Marie Curie’s Obituary

 

Advertisements

Author of this page: The Doc
Images of Marie Curie enhanced and colorized by this website.
© All rights reserved.

Cite this Page

Please use the following MLA compliant citation:

"Marie Curie." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 8 Sep. 2014. Web. 

12/24/2018 
<www.famousscientists.org/marie-curie/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

More from FamousScientists.org:

• Lise Meitner
• Irene Joliot-Curie
• Top Women Scientists
• Rosalind Franklin