Marie Curie Fisica francese di origine polacca

Marie Curie, nata Maria Salomea Skłodowska, (nata il 7 novembre 1867, Varsavia, Regno dei congressi della Polonia, Impero russo, morì il 4 luglio 1934, vicino a Sallanches, Francia), fisica francese di origine polacca, famosa per il suo lavoro sulla radioattività e due volte vincitore del premio Nobel. Con Henri Becquerel e suo marito, Pierre Curie, ricevette il premio Nobel per la fisica nel 1903. Fu l'unica vincitrice del premio Nobel per la chimica del 1911. È stata la prima donna a vincere un premio Nobel ed è l'unica donna a vincere il premio in due campi diversi.

Domande principali

Cosa ha realizzato Marie Curie?

Lavorando con suo marito, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie scoprì il polonio e il radio nel 1898. Nel 1903 vinsero il premio Nobel per la fisica per aver scoperto la radioattività. Nel 1911 vinse il premio Nobel per la chimica per l'isolamento del radio puro. Dopo i lavori sui raggi X durante la prima guerra mondiale, ha studiato sostanze radioattive e le loro applicazioni mediche.

Quali premi ha vinto Marie Curie?

Con Henri Becquerel e suo marito, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie ricevette il premio Nobel per la fisica nel 1903. Fu l'unica vincitrice del premio Nobel per la chimica del 1911. È stata la prima donna a vincere un premio Nobel e l'unica donna a vincere il premio in due campi diversi.

Perché Marie Curie era importante?

Marie Curie’s contributions to physics were immense, not only in her own work, as indicated by her two Nobel Prizes, but also through her influence on subsequent generations of nuclear physicists and chemists. Her work paved the way for the discovery of the neutron and artificial radioactivity.

Early life

From childhood she was remarkable for her prodigious memory, and at the age of 16 she won a gold medal on completion of her secondary education at the Russian lycée. Because her father, a teacher of mathematics and physics, lost his savings through bad investment, she had to take work as a teacher and, at the same time, took part clandestinely in the nationalist “free university,” reading in Polish to women workers. At the age of 18 she took a post as governess, where she suffered an unhappy love affair. From her earnings she was able to finance her sister Bronisława’s medical studies in Paris, with the understanding that Bronisława would in turn later help her to get an education.

Move to Paris, Pierre Curie, and first Nobel Prize

In 1891 Skłodowska went to Paris and, now using the name Marie, began to follow the lectures of Paul Appel, Gabriel Lippmann, and Edmond Bouty at the Sorbonne. There she met physicists who were already well known—Jean Perrin, Charles Maurain, and Aimé Cotton. Skłodowska worked far into the night in her student-quarters garret and virtually lived on bread and butter and tea. She came first in the licence of physical sciences in 1893. She began to work in Lippmann’s research laboratory and in 1894 was placed second in the licence of mathematical sciences. It was in the spring of that year that she met Pierre Curie.

• 

• 

Their marriage (July 25, 1895) marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance, in particular the discovery of polonium (so called by Marie in honour of her native land) in the summer of 1898 and that of radium a few months later. Following Henri Becquerel’s discovery (1896) of a new phenomenon (which she later called “radioactivity”), Marie Curie, looking for a subject for a thesis, decided to find out if the property discovered in uranium was to be found in other matter. She discovered that this was true for thorium at the same time as G.C. Schmidt did.

Turning her attention to minerals, she found her interest drawn to pitchblende, a mineral whose activity, superior to that of pure uranium, could be explained only by the presence in the ore of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity. Pierre Curie then joined her in the work that she had undertaken to resolve this problem and that led to the discovery of the new elements, polonium and radium. While Pierre Curie devoted himself chiefly to the physical study of the new radiations, Marie Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic state—achieved with the help of the chemist André-Louis Debierne, one of Pierre Curie’s pupils. On the results of this research, Marie Curie received her doctorate of science in June 1903 and, with Pierre, was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. Also in 1903 they shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.

The birth of her two daughters, Irène and Ève, in 1897 and 1904 did not interrupt Marie’s intensive scientific work. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the École Normale Supérieure for girls in Sèvres (1900) and introduced there a method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.

• 

• 

•