Unlucky Max Planck/Marie Curie

Once again I have checked out too many books at the library.  So many seem to reach out and grab me and beg to be taken home.  Once again they are due, and cannot be renewed another time.  So I am skimming my way through a book called "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson.  I have a few things to share.

In 1900, while a theoretical physicist at the University of Berlin, and at the "somewhat advanced age of forty-two," Max Planck unveiled a new quantum theory.  For those of you who are not into physics, just trust me that the important part to know is that this theory would lay the foundation for modern physics.  When Max Planck published his quantum theory in Germany, it ended up in the same publication, same issue as a paper by Einstein on the physics of fluids in drinking straws.  Hmmm.

But Planck was often unlucky in his life.

"His beloved first wife died early, in 1909, and the younger of his two sons was killed in the First World War.  He also had twin daughters whom he adored.  One died giving birth.  The surviving twin went to look after the baby and fell in love with her sister's husband.  They married and two years later she died in childbirth.  In 1944, when Planck was eighty-five, an Allied bomb fell on his house and he lost everything -- papers, diaries, a lifetime of accumulations.  The following year his surviving son was caught in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and executed."

Now on  the next story.  In 1896, Henri Becquerel in Paris left some uranium salts on a wrapped photographic plate in a drawer.  Some time later, he was surprised to find that the salts had burned an impression in it, as if the plate had been exposed to light.

He turned the matter over to a graduate student for investigation.  Marie Curie had recently immigrated from Poland.  She and her new husband, Pierre, found that these rocks, and others, poured out constant, high amounts of energy.  Marie dubbed the effect "radioactivity."  In the process of their work, the Curies found two new elements.  One they named polonium in honor of her native country, and the other was radium.  In 1903 the Curies and Becquerel were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.

Marie Curie would receive a second Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1911.  Her oldest daughter, Irene, would be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935, the year after her mother's death.

Radiation is what killed Marie.  She died of leukemia.  Radiation is so harmful and long lasting that even now her papers from the 1890's -- and her cookbooks -- are too dangerous to handle.  Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes and those who wish to see them must first dress in protective clothing.

Now you have heard something interesting.