Pierre Curie (May 15, 1859 – April 19, 1906) was a French physicist and pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity.
Success story
Before he joined the research of his wife, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Pierre Curie was already widely known and respected in the world of physics. Together with his brother Jacques, he discovered the phenomenon of piezoelectricity, in which a crystal can become electrically polarized, and invented the quartz balance. His work on the symmetry of crystals and his conclusions about the relationship between magnetism and temperature also received acclaim in the scientific community. He shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel and with his wife Marie Curie.
Pierre and his wife played a key role in the discovery of radium and polonium, substances that have had a significant impact on humanity with their practical and nuclear properties. Their marriage founded a scientific dynasty: the children and grandchildren of famous physicists also became famous scientists.
Marie and Pierre Curie: biography
Pierre was born in Paris, France, the son of Sophie-Claire Depuis, the daughter of a manufacturer, and Dr. Eugene Curie, a free-thinking physician. His father supported the familyhumble medical practice while satisfying his love of the natural sciences along the way. Eugène Curie was an idealist and ardent republican, and founded a hospital for the wounded during the Commune of 1871.
Pierre received his pre-university education at home. Taught first by his mother, and then by his father and older brother Jacques. He especially enjoyed excursions into the countryside, where Pierre could observe and study plants and animals, developing a lifelong love of nature, which was his only recreation and recreation during his later scientific career. At the age of 14, he showed a strong aptitude for exact sciences and began studying with a professor of mathematics, who helped him develop his gift in this discipline, especially spatial representation.
As a boy, Curie observed his father's experiments and developed a taste for experimental research.
From pharmacologists to physics
Pierre's knowledge of physics and mathematics earned him a Bachelor of Science degree in 1875 at the age of sixteen.
At the age of 18, he received an equivalent diploma from the Sorbonne, also known as the University of Paris, but did not immediately enter the doctoral program due to lack of funds. Instead, he acted as a laboratory assistant at his alma mater, becoming Paul Desen's assistant in 1878, in charge of laboratory work for physics students. At the time, his brother Jacques was working in the laboratory of mineralogy at the Sorbonne, and they began a productive five-year scientific collaboration.
Successful marriage
In 1894, Pierre met his future wife, Maria Skłodowska, who studied physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne, and married her on July 25, 1895, in a simple civil marriage ceremony. Maria used the money received as a wedding gift to purchase two bicycles, on which the newlyweds made their honeymoon trip through the French outback, and which were their main means of recreation for many years. Their daughter was born in 1897, and Pierre's mother died a few days later. Dr. Curie moved in with a young couple and helped take care of his granddaughter, Irene Curie.
Pierre and Maria devoted themselves to scientific work. Together they isolated polonium and radium, pioneered the study of radioactivity, and were the first to use the term. In their writings, including Maria's famous doctoral work, they used data from a sensitive piezoelectric electrometer built by Pierre and his brother Jacques.
Pierre Curie: biography of a scientist
In 1880, he and his older brother Jacques showed that when a crystal is compressed, an electrical potential, piezoelectricity, is generated. Shortly thereafter (in 1881) the opposite effect was demonstrated: crystals can be deformed by an electric field. Almost all digital electronic circuits today use this phenomenon in the form of crystal oscillators.
Before his famous doctoral dissertation on magnetism to measure magnetic coefficients Frenchthe physicist developed and perfected an extremely sensitive torsion balance. Their modifications were used by subsequent researchers in this field.
Pierre studied ferromagnetism, paramagnetism and diamagnetism. He discovered and described the dependence of the ability of substances to magnetize on temperature, known today as the Curie law. The constant in this law is called the Curie constant. Pierre also found that ferromagnetic substances have a critical transition temperature, above which they lose their ferromagnetic properties. This phenomenon is called the Curie point.
The principle that Pierre Curie formulated, the doctrine of symmetry, is that a physical effect cannot cause an asymmetry that is absent from its cause. For example, a random mixture of sand in weightlessness has no asymmetry (the sand is isotropic). Under the influence of gravity, an asymmetry arises due to the direction of the field. Sand grains are "sorted" by density, which increases with depth. But this new directional alignment of sand particles actually reflects the asymmetry of the gravitational field that caused the separation.
Radioactivity
The work of Pierre and Marie on radioactivity was based on the results of Roentgen and Henri Becquerel. In 1898, after careful research, they discovered polonium, and a few months later, radium, isolating 1 g of this chemical element from uraninite. In addition, they discovered that beta rays are negatively charged particles.
Discovery of Pierre and MaryThe Curies required a lot of work. There was not enough money, and in order to save on transport costs, they rode bicycles to work. Indeed, the teacher's salary was minimal, but the couple of scientists continued to devote their time and money to research.
Discovery of polonium
The secret of their success lay in Curie's new method of chemical analysis, based on the precise measurement of radiation. Each substance was placed on one of the capacitor plates, and the air conductivity was measured using an electrometer and piezoelectric quartz. This value was proportional to the content of an active substance such as uranium or thorium.
The couple tested a large number of compounds of almost all known elements and found that only uranium and thorium are radioactive. However, they decided to measure the radiation emitted by ores from which uranium and thorium are extracted, such as chalcolite and uraninite. The ore showed an activity that was 2.5 times greater than that of uranium. After treating the residue with acid and hydrogen sulfide, they found that the active substance accompanies bismuth in all reactions. However, they achieved partial separation by noting that bismuth sulfide was less volatile than the sulfide of the new element, which they named polonium after Marie Curie's homeland of Poland.
Radium, radiation and the Nobel Prize
On December 26, 1898, Curie and J. Bemont, head of research at the "Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry", in their report to the Academy of Sciences announced the discovery of a newelement they called radium.
A French physicist, together with one of his students, first discovered the energy of the atom by discovering the continuous radiation of heat from the particles of the newly discovered element. He also studied the radiation of radioactive substances, and with the help of magnetic fields, he was able to determine that some emitted particles were positively charged, others were negatively charged, and still others were neutral. This is how alpha, beta and gamma radiation were discovered.
Curie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife and Henri Becquerel. It was awarded in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered with their research into the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Becquerel.
Recent years
Pierre Curie, whose discoveries at first did not receive wide recognition in France, which did not allow him to take the chair of physical chemistry and mineralogy at the Sorbonne, left for Geneva. The move changed things, which can be explained by his leftist views and disagreements over the policy of the Third Republic towards science. After his candidacy was rejected in 1902, he was admitted to the Academy in 1905.
The prestige of the Nobel Prize prompted the French Parliament in 1904 to create a new professorship for Curie at the Sorbonne. Pierre said that he would not stay at the School of Physics until there was a fully funded laboratory with the necessary number of assistants. His demand was met and Maria took over his lab.
By the beginning of 1906, Pierre Curie was ready, finally, for the first timeto start work in proper conditions, although he was sick and very tired.
April 19, 1906 in Paris during a lunch break, walking from a meeting with colleagues at the Sorbonne, crossing the rain-slick Rue Dauphine, Curie slipped in front of a horse-drawn carriage. The scientist died in an accident. His untimely death, although tragic, nevertheless helped him avoid death from what Pierre Curie discovered - radiation exposure, which later killed his wife. The couple is buried in the crypt of the Pantheon in Paris.
Scientist's Legacy
The radioactivity of radium makes it an extremely dangerous chemical element. Scientists realized this only after the use of this substance to illuminate dials, panels, clocks and other instruments in the early twentieth century began to affect the he alth of laboratory workers and consumers. However, radium chloride is used in medicine to treat cancer.
Polonium has received various practical applications in industrial and nuclear installations. It is also known to be highly toxic and can be used as a poison. Perhaps most important is its use as a neutron primer for nuclear weapons.
In honor of Pierre Curie at the Radiological Congress in 1910, after the death of a physicist, a unit of radioactivity was named equal to 3.7 x 1010 disintegrations per second or 37 gigabecquerels.
Scientific dynasty
Children and grandchildren of physicists also became great scientists. Their daughter Irene married Frédéric Joliot and in 1935they received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together. The youngest daughter, Eva, born in 1904, married an American diplomat and director of the United Nations Children's Fund. She is the author of Madame Curie (1938), a biography of her mother, translated into several languages.
Granddaughter - Helene Langevin-Joliot - became a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Paris, and grandson - Pierre Joliot-Curie, named after his grandfather - a famous biochemist.
