The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean Chapter 12 Summary/Reflection

1. Radiation poisoning, after working with radioactivity for all their lives.
2. Marie Curie discovered Polonium and Radium, Curium was named after her, and all of them were radioactive,sadly her discoveries killed her.
3. Hevesy hid gold from the Nazi’s by dissolving it into a substance that looked normal.  He then extracted the gold to recast them into the Nobel prizes.
4. They worked together on many things, but Meitner had a Jewish background, she was unable to publish her results on Fermi’s mistake (because Nazi’s are evil).  Hahn then took the credit.

Summary

 Marie Curie (aka Marie Sklodowska) was born in Poland (where Nazis were born), a country that was often controlled by other countries (Germany) and could never truly gained its independence until the after WWII.  She and her family all worked on radioactivity and its effects (naturally very dangerous).  She named the first element she discovered after Poland in order to push the Polish independence movement.  Like Poland, the element was highly unstable and turned into other elements very quickly (or countries).  Her other discovery, Radium, was more useful and congratulated in the Scientific world.

Hevesy, influenced by Curie, used what he learned from their works into developing radioactive tracers.  Niels Bohr (who added onto the planetary model) had supposedly predicted element 72 through only quantum mechanics.  This led to a divergence between chemistry and physics.  Apparently, 3 people before Bohr had already predicted the element, but due to being “no-names”, no one trusted them.  Later on, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner worked together to disprove Fermi’s discovery of new elements, and through this process discovered that Fermi had actually observed nuclear fission.  Hahn later cheated her out of a Nobel prize, but not a element name.

Reflection

This was like Academic Decathlon all over again. Most of the stuff mentioned I already knew so it was almost like review. It was interesting, however, to know a little bit more about the lives of the scientist.