Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1911
French physicist Marie Sklodowska-Curie (née Maria Sklodowska) was born in Warsaw, Poland. She was the youngest of five children in the family of Vladislav and Bronislava (Bogushka) Sklodovsky. K. was brought up in a family where science was respected. Her father taught physics at the gymnasium, and her mother, until she fell ill with tuberculosis, was the director of the gymnasium. K.'s mother died when the girl was eleven years old.
K. studied brilliantly in both primary and secondary school. Even at a young age, she felt the magnetic power of science and worked as a laboratory assistant in her cousin's chemical laboratory. The great Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table of chemical elements, was a friend of her father. Seeing the girl at work in the laboratory, he predicted a great future for her if she continued her studies in chemistry. Growing up under Russian rule (Poland was then divided between Russia, Germany, and Austria), K. took an active part in the movement of young intellectuals and anti-clerical Polish nationalists. Although K. spent most of her life in France, she always retained her devotion to the struggle for Polish independence.
Two obstacles stood in the way of realizing the dream of K. on higher education: family poverty and a ban on the admission of women to the University of Warsaw. K. and her sister Bronya devised a plan: Maria would work as a governess for five years to enable her sister to graduate from medical school, after which Bronya should cover the costs of K's higher education. Bronya received her medical education in Paris and, becoming a doctor, invited her sister. After leaving Poland in 1891, K. entered the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). It was then that she began to call herself Marie Sklodowska. In 1893, after completing the first course, K. received a licentiate degree in physics from the Sorbonne (equivalent to a master's degree). A year later, she became a licentiate in mathematics. But this time K. was second in her class.
In the same year, 1894, in the house of a Polish émigré physicist, Marie met Pierre Curie. Pierre was the head of the laboratory at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry. By that time, he had carried out important research on the physics of crystals and the dependence of the magnetic properties of substances on temperature. K. was engaged in the study of the magnetization of steel, and her Polish friend hoped that Pierre would be able to give Marie the opportunity to work in his laboratory. Having first become close on the basis of passion for physics, Marie and Pierre got married a year later. This happened shortly after Pierre defended his doctoral dissertation. Their daughter Irene (Irene Joliot-Curie) was born in September 1897. Three months later, K. completed her research on magnetism and began looking for a topic for her dissertation.
In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium compounds emit deeply penetrating radiation. Unlike the X-ray discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Roentgen, Becquerel radiation was not the result of excitation from an external source of energy, such as light, but an intrinsic property of uranium itself. Fascinated by this mysterious phenomenon and attracted by the prospect of starting a new field of research, K. decided to study this radiation, which she later called radioactivity. Starting work at the beginning of 1898, she first of all tried to establish whether there are other substances, besides uranium compounds, which emit the rays discovered by Becquerel. Since Becquerel noticed that in the presence of uranium compounds the air becomes electrically conductive, K. measured the electrical conductivity near samples of other substances, using several precision instruments designed and built by Pierre Curie and his brother Jacques. She came to the conclusion that of the known elements, only uranium, thorium and their compounds are radioactive. However, soon K. made a much more important discovery: uranium ore, known as uranium resin blende, emits stronger Becquerel radiation than compounds of uranium and thorium, and at least four times stronger than pure uranium. K. suggested that the uranium blende contains not yet discovered and highly radioactive element. In the spring of 1898, she reported her hypothesis and the results of experiments to the French Academy of Sciences.
Then the Curies tried to isolate a new element. Pierre set aside his own research in crystal physics to help Marie. By treating uranium ore with acids and hydrogen sulfide, they separated it into known components. Examining each of the components, they found that only two of them, containing the elements bismuth and barium, have strong radioactivity. Since the radiation discovered by Becquerel was not characteristic of either bismuth or barium, they concluded that these portions of the substance contained one or more previously unknown elements. In July and December 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie announced the discovery of two new elements, which they named polonium (after Marie's homeland of Poland) and radium.
Since the Curies did not isolate any of these elements, they could not provide chemists with decisive evidence for their existence. And the Curies began a very difficult task - the extraction of two new elements from uranium resin blende. They found that the substances they were to find were only one millionth of uranium resin blende. To extract them in measurable quantities, the researchers had to process huge amounts of ore. For the next four years, the Curies worked in primitive and unhealthy conditions. They did chemical separation in large vats set in a leaky, windswept barn. They had to analyze substances in the tiny, poorly equipped laboratory of the Municipal School. During this difficult but exciting period, Pierre's salary was not enough to support his family. Despite the fact that intensive studies and a small child took up almost all of her time, Marie in 1900 began teaching physics at Sevres, at the École Normale Superière, an educational institution that trained secondary school teachers. Pierre's widowed father moved in with Curies and helped look after Irene.
In September 1902, the Curies announced that they had succeeded in isolating one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride from several tons of uranium resin blende. They failed to isolate polonium, as it turned out to be a decay product of radium. Analyzing the compound, Marie determined that the atomic mass of radium was 225. The radium salt emitted a bluish glow and heat. This fantastic substance attracted the attention of the whole world. Recognition and awards for its discovery came to the Curies almost immediately.
With her research completed, Marie finally wrote her doctoral dissertation. The work was called "Researcher on Radiactive Substances" and was presented to the Sorbonne in June 1903. It included a huge number of observations of radioactivity made by Marie and Pierre Curie during the search for polonium and radium. According to the committee that awarded K. degree, her work was the greatest contribution ever made to science doctoral dissertation.
In December 1903, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Becquerel and the Curies. Marie and Pierre Curie received half of the award "in recognition ... of their joint research on the phenomena of radiation discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel." K. became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. Both Marie and Pierre Curie were ill and could not travel to Stockholm for the award ceremony. They received it next summer.
Even before the Curies had completed their research, their work prompted other physicists to also study radioactivity. In 1903, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy put forward the theory that radioactive radiation is produced by the decay of atomic nuclei. During decay (the emission of certain particles that form the nucleus), radioactive nuclei undergo transmutation - transformation into the nuclei of other elements. K. not without hesitation accepted this theory, since the decay of uranium, thorium and radium is so slow that in their experiments, she did not have to observe it. (True, there were data on the decay of polonium, but the behavior of this element K. considered atypical). Yet in 1906 she agreed to accept the Rutherford-Soddy theory as the most plausible explanation for radioactivity. It was K. who introduced the terms decay and transmutation.
The Curies noted the effect of radium on the human body (like Henri Becquerel, they received burns before they realized the danger of handling radioactive substances) and suggested that radium could be used to treat tumors. The therapeutic value of radium was recognized almost immediately, and prices for radium sources skyrocketed. However, the Curies refused to patent the extraction process and use the results of their research for any commercial purposes. In their opinion, the extraction of commercial benefits did not correspond to the spirit of science, the idea of free access to knowledge. Despite this, the financial situation of the Curies improved, as the Nobel Prize and other awards brought them some prosperity. In October 1904, Pierre was appointed professor of physics at the Sorbonne, and a month later, Marie became officially the head of his laboratory. In December, their second daughter, Eva, was born, who later became a concert pianist and biographer of her mother.
Marie drew strength from the recognition of her scientific achievements, her favorite work, love and support from Pierre. As she herself admitted: "I found in marriage everything that I could dream of at the time of the conclusion of our union, and even more." But in April 1906, Pierre died in a street accident. Having lost her closest friend and workmate, Marie withdrew into herself. However, she found the strength to keep going. In May, after Marie refused a pension granted by the Ministry of Public Education, the faculty council of the Sorbonne appointed her to the chair of physics, which was previously headed by her husband. When, six months later, K. gave her first lecture, she became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne.
In the laboratory, K. focused their efforts on the isolation of pure metallic radium, rather than its compounds. In 1910, in collaboration with Andre Debirn, she managed to obtain this substance and thus complete the cycle of research begun 12 years ago. She convincingly proved that radium is a chemical element. K. developed a method for measuring radioactive emanations and prepared for the International Bureau of Weights and Measures the first international standard of radium - a pure sample of radium chloride, with which to compare all other sources.
At the end of 1910, at the insistence of many scientists, K. was nominated for election to one of the most prestigious scientific societies - the French Academy of Sciences. Pierre Curie was elected to it only a year before his death. In the entire history of the French Academy of Sciences, not a single woman was a member, so the nomination of K. led to a fierce battle between supporters and opponents of this step. After several months of insulting controversy in January 1911, K.'s candidacy was rejected in the elections by a one-vote majority.
A few months later, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded K. the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for outstanding achievements in the development of chemistry: the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element." K. became the first twice Nobel Prize winner. Introducing the new laureate, E.V. Dahlgren noted that "the study of radium has led in recent years to the birth of a new field of science - radiology, which has already taken over its own institutes and journals."
Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the University of Paris and the Pasteur Institute established the Radium Institute for research on radioactivity. K. was appointed director of the department of fundamental research and medical applications of radioactivity. During the war, she trained military medics in the applications of radiology, such as X-ray detection of shrapnel in the body of a wounded man. In the frontline zone, K. helped create radiological installations, supply first aid stations with portable x-ray machines. She summarized the accumulated experience in the monograph "Radiology and War" ("La Radiologie et la guerre") in 1920.
After the war, K. returned to the Radium Institute. In the last years of her life, she supervised the work of students and actively promoted the application of radiology in medicine. She wrote a biography of Pierre Curie, which was published in 1923. Periodically K. traveled to Poland, which gained independence at the end of the war. There she advised Polish researchers. In 1921, Mr.. with her daughters K. visited the United States to accept a gift of 1 g of radium to continue the experiments. During her second visit to the United States (1929) she received a donation for which she purchased another gram of radium for therapeutic use in one of the Warsaw hospitals. But as a result of many years of work with radium, her health began to noticeably deteriorate.
K. died July 4, 1934 from leukemia in a small hospital in the town of Sansellemose in the French Alps.
The greatest merit of K. as a scientist was her indomitable perseverance in overcoming difficulties: having set herself a problem, she did not calm down until she could find a solution. A quiet, unassuming woman who was vexed by her fame, K remained unwaveringly loyal to the ideals she believed in and the people she cared about. After the death of her husband, she remained a tender and devoted mother to her two daughters. She loved nature, and when Pierre was alive, the Curies often took country bike rides. Loved K. and swimming.
In addition to two Nobel Prizes, K. was awarded the Berthelot Medal of the French Academy of Sciences (1902), the Davy Medal of the Royal Society of London (1903) and the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1909). She was a member of 85 scientific societies around the world, including the French Medical Academy, received 20 honorary degrees. From 1911 until his death, K. participated in the prestigious Solvay congresses on physics, for 12 years was a member of the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations.
Nobel Prize Laureates: Encyclopedia: Per. from English - M .: Progress, 1992.
© The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
© Translation into Russian with additions, Progress Publishing House, 1992.
Today at 13.45 Moscow time in the building of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm announced the names of the winners of this year's second Nobel Prize - in physics. Worthy of the award in 2006, the Nobel Committee considered John Mather (John C. Mather) and George F. Smoot (George F. Smoot). According to the committee's verdict, the prize was awarded for the discovery of the anisotropy of the microwave background (relic) radiation and the correspondence of its spectrum to the spectrum of a black body.
Mater presents the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD, USA), and Smoot - the University of California at Berkeley (University of California Berkeley, CA, USA).
The CMB, predicted in 1948 by Georgy Gamow, is the cosmic electromagnetic background radiation, approximately uniform in all directions.
The 1978 Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. In fact, the inhomogeneity of this radiation is a "cast" of the Universe in the first hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang.
Surely in Russia they will now say a lot that in fact the priority of the Nobel discovery belongs to domestic science. Indeed, Smoot reported on the results of the American COBE experiment in April 1992. About the results of work scientific satellite "Relikt" The message appeared three months earlier. At the same time, an article was sent to a scientific journal in Russian (“Letters to the Astronomical Journal”) and a little later to the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society).
At the same time, the Relikt satellite was launched in 1983, and the COBE satellite - in 1989.
Why the choice of the Nobel Committee fell on the American team and did not note the Russian team in parallel remains unknown. Interestingly, another Russian was named among the main contenders this year. Most observers and scientists predicted the victory of the Russian Andrey Linda, who teaches today at Stanford University (USA), and his colleagues Alan Guth, Paul Stenhard and Alexei Starobinsky for the theory of inflation of the Universe.
This year, the amount of cash reward amounted to 10 million Swedish kronor ($ 1.4 million).
The Prize in Physics has been awarded for the 106th year with interruptions for 1915-1918, 1921, 1925 and 1940-1942. The very first Nobel laureate in physics was the famous Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen. In 1901, he became a Nobel laureate "in recognition of the extraordinarily important services to science, expressed in the discovery of remarkable rays, subsequently named after him." Since then, 176 people have been awarded the title.
Award 2005. Half was received by the American Roy Glauber "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", and the second half was shared by his compatriot John Hall and the German Theodor Hönsch "for their contribution to the development of high-precision laser spectroscopy and the technique of precision calculation of the light shift in optical frequency standards."
I must say that among Russian scientists, it was physicists who most often received Nobel Prizes, and in the 21st century our Nobel Prizes are exclusively physical. In the third millennium, the award was received by Zhores Alferov (2002), as well as Vitaly Ginzburg and Alexei Abrikosov (2003). Yes, and among the current Russian scientists, if there are real contenders for the award, it's just physicists. This, for example, is called academician Yuri Oganesyan, scientific director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions. G. N. Flerov JINR in Dubna, under whose leadership new chemical elements of the Periodic Table were synthesized.
Among physicists there are also twice Nobel laureates. This was John Bardeen, who received the 1956 prize (together with William Shockley and Walter Brattain) for research on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect, and 1972, together with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer, for the creation of the theory of superconductivity, commonly called the BCS theory. In addition, the legendary Maria Skłodowska-Curie received the award twice. In 1903, she became the first woman laureate in physics (she received half of the prize together with her husband Pierre Curie "for outstanding services in joint research on the phenomena of radiation", the second half of the prize was received by Henri Becquerel), and in 1911 she became the first woman laureate in Chemistry ("for outstanding services in the development of chemistry: the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element"). So far, Curie remains the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice.
In total, there are two women who received the Nobel Prize in physics: in addition to Curie Sr., the German Maria Goeppert-Mayer also received the prize in 1963 (she shared half of the prize with Hans Jensen "for discoveries concerning the shell structure of the nucleus", the second half of the prize was received Eugene Paul Wigner).
In addition to the Curie family, for which there are as many as three Nobel Prizes (one in physics and two in chemistry), there are two more families that received Nobel Prizes - just in physics. In 1922, the great Niels Bohr received the prize (“for his services to the study of the structure of atoms and the radiation they emit”), and half a century later, in 1975, his son Aage Niels Bohr also received a prize in physics. And also for research on the atomic nucleus (“for the discovery of the relationship between collective motion and the motion of an individual particle in the atomic nucleus and the development of a theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this relationship”, with Ben Roy Mottelson and Leo James Rainwater).
And in 1915, William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg - father and son - received the prize "for their services in the study of crystals using X-rays." By the way, Bragg Jr. became the youngest Nobel laureate in history - he was only 25 years old.
The oldest Nobel laureate in the world is also a physicist. In 2002, at the age of 88, half of the Nobel Prize was awarded to Raymond Davis Jr. (together with Masatoshi Koshiba "for the creation of neutrino astronomy", the second half of the prize was received by Riccardo Giacconi "for the creation of X-ray astronomy and the invention of the X-ray telescope").
For a long time they did not give the award to Albert Einstein. As a matter of fact, the great physicist never got any awards for the theory of relativity. But in 1921, Einstein was given the Nobel with the wording "for services to theoretical physics and especially for the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."
Curie, Pierre
(May 15, 1859 - April 19, 1906)
Nobel Prize in Physics, 1903
with Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie
French physicist Pierre Curie was born in Paris. He was the youngest
of the two sons of the physician Eugène Curie and Sophie-Claire (Depoulli) Curie.
The father decided to give his independent and reflective son
home education. The boy turned out to be such a diligent student,
that in 1876, at the age of sixteen, he received a degree
Bachelor of the University of Paris (Sorbonne). Two years later he
received a licentiate degree (equivalent to a master's degree)
physical sciences.
In 1878 Curie became a demonstrator in a physics laboratory
Sorbonne, where he began to study the nature of crystals. Together
with his older brother Jacques, who worked in the mineralogical
laboratories of the university, Curie spent four years
intensive experimental work in this area. Curie brothers
discovered piezoelectricity - the appearance under the action of the applied
outside forces on the surface of some electrical crystals
charges. They also discovered the opposite effect: the same crystals under
under the action of an electric field are compressed. If you apply
to such crystals alternating current, then they can be forced
to oscillate at ultra-high frequencies, at which
crystals will emit sound waves beyond the range of perception
human hearing. Such crystals have become very important
components of radio equipment such as microphones, amplifiers and
stereo systems. The Curie brothers designed and built such
laboratory instrument, like a piezoelectric quartz balancer,
which creates an electrical charge proportional to
applied force. It can be considered the forerunner of the main
nodes and modules of modern quartz clocks and radio transmitters.
In 1882, on the recommendation of the English physicist William Thomson
Curie. was appointed head of the laboratory of the new Municipal
schools of industrial physics and chemistry. Although the salary at the school was
more than modest, Curie remained head of the laboratory for
twenty two years old. A year after the appointment of Curie as head of
laboratory, the collaboration of the brothers ceased, since Jacques
left Paris to become university professor of mineralogy
Montpellier.
In the period from 1883 to 1895, Curie completed a large series
works, mainly in crystal physics. His articles on
geometric symmetry of crystals and still have not lost their
values for crystallographers. From 1890 to 1895 Curie was engaged in
the study of the magnetic properties of substances at different temperatures.
Based on a large number of experimental data in his
doctoral dissertation established the relationship between
temperature and magnetization, which subsequently received
the name of Curie's law.
Working on my dissertation. Curie met Marie in 1894
Skłodowska (Marie Curie), a young Polish physics student
faculty of the Sorbonne. They married in July 1895, through
a few months after Curie completed his doctoral
dissertation. In 1897, shortly after the birth of their first child,
Marie Curie embarked on research into radioactivity, which
soon absorbed Pierre's attention for the rest of his life.
In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium compounds
constantly emit radiation that can illuminate
photographic plate. Having chosen this phenomenon as the topic of their
doctoral dissertation, Marie began to find out if they were emitting
other compounds are "Becquerel rays". Since Becquerel discovered
that the radiation emitted by uranium increases the electrical conductivity
air near the preparations, she used to measure
electrical conductivity piezoelectric quartz balancer brothers
Curie. Soon Marie Curie came to the conclusion that only uranium,
thorium and compounds of these two elements emit radiation
Becquerel, which she later called radioactivity. Marie in
At the very beginning of her research, she made an important discovery:
uranium resin blende (uranium ore) electrifies the surrounding
air is much stronger than the uranium compounds it contains
and thorium, and even than pure uranium. From this observation she made
the conclusion about the existence in uranium resin blende is still
unknown highly radioactive element. In 1898 Marie Curie
reported the results of her experiments to the French Academy
Sciences. Convinced that his wife's hypothesis was not only correct,
but also very important, K. left his own research,
to help Marie isolate the elusive element. From now on
the interests of the Curies as researchers merged so
full that even in their laboratory records they always
used the pronoun "we".
The Curies set themselves the task of separating uranium
resin blende for chemical components. After laborious
operations, they received a small amount of a substance that had
the most radioactivity. It turned out. that the allocated portion
contains not one, but two unknown radioactive elements. AT
In July 1898, the Curies published an article "On a radioactive substance,
contained in uranium resin blende" ("Sur une substance
radioactive contenue dans la pecelende"), which reported on
the discovery of one of the elements, named polonium in honor of the motherland
Maria Sklodowska. In December, they announced the opening of a second
an element called radium. Both new elements were
many times more radioactive than uranium or thorium, and accounted for
one millionth of uranium resin blende. To highlight
from the ore of radium in sufficient quantity to determine its atomic weight
quantity, the Curies in the next four years reworked
several tons of uranium resin blende. Working in primitive
and harmful conditions, they carried out chemical operations
separation in huge vats set in a leaky shed, and
all analyzes - in a tiny, poorly equipped laboratory
Municipal school.
In September 1902, the Curies reported that they
managed to isolate one tenth of a gram of radium chloride and determine
atomic mass of radium, which turned out to be 225. (Select
polonium Curie failed, as it turned out to be a decay product
radium.) Radium salt emitted a bluish glow and heat. it
fantastic-looking substance attracted attention
all over the world. Recognition and awards for his discovery came almost
straightaway.
The Curies published a wealth of information about
radioactivity collected by them during the research: from 1898 to
1904 they produced thirty-six works. Even before completion
their research. The Curies inspired other physicists to do the same.
the study of radioactivity. In 1903 Ernest Rutherford and Frederick
Soddy suggested that radioactive radiation
associated with the decay of atomic nuclei. Breaking up (losing some
of the particles that form them), radioactive nuclei undergo
transmutation into other elements. The Curies were among the first to understand
that radium can also be used for medical purposes. Noticing
the effect of radiation on living tissues, they expressed
suggestion that radium preparations may be useful in
treatment of tumor diseases.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Curies
half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 "as a sign
recognition ... of their joint research on the phenomena of radiation,
discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel, with whom they shared
premium. The Curies were ill and unable to attend the ceremony
awards. In his Nobel lecture, delivered two
years later, K. pointed out the potential danger that
represent radioactive substances, fall into the wrong hands, and
added that "belongs to those who, together with Nobel
believes that new discoveries will bring more trouble to humanity,
than good."
Radium is an element that is extremely rare in nature, and
prices for it, taking into account its medical significance, quickly
increased. The Curies lived in poverty, and the lack of funds could not help but
affect their research. However, they strongly
abandoned the patent for their extraction method, as did
from the prospects for the commercial use of radium. According to them
belief, this would be contrary to the spirit of science - the free exchange
knowledge. Despite the fact that such a refusal deprived them of considerable
profits, Curie's financial situation improved after receiving
Nobel Prize and other awards.
In October 1904, Curie was appointed professor of physics.
Sorbonne, and Marie Curie - head of the laboratory, which previously
her husband was in charge. In December of the same year, Curie gave birth to her second child.
daughter. Increased revenues, improved funding
research, plans for a new laboratory, admiration and
recognition of the world scientific community should have been made
The subsequent years of the Curies were fruitful. But, like
Becquerel, Curie passed away too soon, without having time to enjoy
triumph and achieve what you set out to do. On a rainy day April 19
1906, while crossing the street in Paris, he slipped and fell.
His head fell under the wheel of a passing horse-drawn carriage.
Death came instantly.
Marie Curie inherited his chair at the Sorbonne, where
continued her research on radium. In 1910 she succeeded
isolate pure metallic radium, and in 1911 it was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1923 Marie
published a biography of Curie The eldest daughter of Curie, Irene (Irene Joliot-
Curie), shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband
1935; the youngest, Eva, became a concert pianist and
biographer of his mother.
Serious, restrained, completely focused on his own
work, Curie was at the same time a kind and sympathetic person. He
was widely known as a naturalist
amateur. One of his favorite pastimes was walking or
bicycle rides. Despite being busy in the laboratory and
family concerns, the Curies found time for joint walks.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Curie was awarded several other
awards and honorary titles, including the Davy Medal of London
Royal Society (1903) and Matteucci's gold medal
National Academy of Sciences of Italy (1904). He was elected to
French Academy of Sciences (1905).
Pierre Curie was born on May 15, 1859 in Paris, into a family of doctors. At the age of sixteen he received a bachelor's degree from the Sorbonne, and two years later he became a licentiate (master) of physical sciences. In 1878, Pierre Curie took up the study of the physical properties of crystals in the physical laboratory of the Sorbonne.
In 1880, he and his elder brother Jacques discovered the piezoelectric effect - under the action of external forces, electric charges appeared on the surface of some crystals. And vice versa - the same crystals were bent under the action of an applied electric field. Piezoelectric crystals are now widely used in pickups, microphones, crystal oscillators and watches.
In the period from 1883 to 1895, Pierre Curie was engaged in research on the physics of crystals. He researched and introduced the concept of surface energy of crystal faces, and established the general principle of crystal growth. He developed a principle that allows to determine the symmetry of a crystal under some external influence (Curie principle). His papers on the geometric symmetry of crystals are still of interest to crystallographers.
From 1890 to 1895, Curie studied the temperature dependences of the magnetic properties of substances. As a result of numerous experiments, he established the relationship between the temperature and the magnetization of crystals - the Curie law. He also discovered that above a certain temperature (the Curie point) iron's ferromagnetic properties disappear and the electrical and thermal conductivity change abruptly.
From 1897 until the end of his life, Pierre Curie's scientific interests focused on the study of radioactivity. Working together with his wife, Marie Sklodowska-Curie, he makes a number of outstanding scientific discoveries in this area. So, in 1898 they discovered new radioactive elements - polonium and radium. In 1899 - induced radioactivity, in 1901 - the effect of radioactive radiation on biological objects. In 1903, they established a quantitative law for reducing the level of radioactivity and introduced the concept of the half-life of radioactive elements, put forward the theory of radioactive decay.
The Curies were awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition ... of their joint research into the phenomena of radiation discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel."
In October 1904, Curie was appointed professor of physics at the Sorbonne. World recognition, which entailed improved funding for research, plans to create a new laboratory, admiration of both compatriots (in 1905, Pierre Curie was elected to the French Academy of Sciences) and the world scientific community, all this seemed to open up new grandiose prospects for the Curies. but fate decreed otherwise.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie was appointed to her husband's place at the Sorbonne and continued her research on radium. In 1910, she was able to isolate chemically pure radium. For this, she was once again awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. The works of Marie Curie are the subject of a separate article.
