Thursday, October 8, 2009

Marie Curie

This article was about the life of a French woman of science.

Marie Curie was born in the mid 1800's and had always had an interest in science. When she was 24 she went to the Sorbonne to learn more about her specific interest in radium. Throughout her whole life she experimented with radium which is an almost pure white metal that is extremely radioactive. This means that it is very dangerous and she helped make it possible for people to study the metal and all of its properties. By separating radium particles it would be easy for the scientists to further study this metal.

In 1903 she won the Nobel Prize for physics because of all the work she contributed by looking at radium. In 1911 she actually won another Nobel Prize in chemistry because of her further work having to do with radioactivity. She had her own radioactive safe lab and was known for working in it until the year she died in 1922.

This subject has to do with many things that our class is doing in science. First of all we were talking about the Nobel Prize winner for physics and chemistry and I thought that it was interesting that there was actually a female winner for both of those categories. Another thing I found interesting about this topic is that she did all of her work on a metal which is what we just had a test on and it's on the periodic table. I also think that this topic has to do with the atomic theory because she was working with very radioactive substances and that is what we are about to learn about. Finally radium is an element and this topic just goes to show that elements have so much to do with the real world we live in.


DW