6/8/2016
If the Bernoulli family of Basel, Switzerland had mathematics running in them, then
The Becquerel family of Paris, France had physics going for them.
Into this wealthy and learned family was born Henri Becquerel in 1852.
It was a time when France was moving from being a Second Republic to Second Empire after the 1848 revolution and 1851 coup by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.
Remember mon ami, Europe of those times was far more violent and bloody than today's South Asia.
Henri Becquerel became the third person in his family to occupy the physics chair at Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
(You must visit this wonderful museum if you ever happen to be on the river Seine in Paris.
One entire gallery is devoted to evolution of life on planet earth).
Becquerel was primarily interested in phosphorescence which I had differentiated it from fluorescence in one of my recent bed-time story as an evidence of atomic theory.
Roentgen had already sent a wave of excitement in the world of physics in 1895-96 with his discovery of x-rays that could penetrate objects.
Becquerel was studying some uranium salts for their "phosphorescent" properties.
He assumed that these uranium salts emit some kind of penetrating radiation AFTER they have been illuminated by bright sunlight.
On February 24, 1896 (when x-rays were getting splashed over the print media) Becquerel presented his findings to the French Academy of Sciences.
What did he present?
Let us keep the excitement for tomorrow.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, narrator of exciting stories of excited atoms.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/9/2016
Tasteless cereals
6/9/2016" One wraps a Lumiere (famous brothers) plate with a bromide emulsion in 2 sheets of very thick black paper, such that the plate does not become clouded upon being exposed to the sun for a day (very slow speed films).
One places on the sheet of paper, on the outside, a slab of the phosphorescent substance, and one exposes the whole to the sun for several hours.
When one then develops the photographic plate, one recognizes the silhouette of the phosphorescent substance appears in black on the negative.
If one places between the phosphorescent substance and the plate a piece of money, one sees the image of this on the negative...
One must conclude from these experiments that the phosphorescent substance in question emits rays which pass through the opaque paper and reduces silver salt."
Becquerel still thought that the phenomenon he was observing was phosphorescence which required sunlight to excite the material.
He could not have been more wrong mon ami.
But what happened next?
We shall have to wait for the planet earth to make yet another rotation to get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the chimpanzee who probably started chattering and jabbering some 14 million years ago.
As it was then that our family of the great apes of Hominidae (chimpanzees, bonobos, humans, gorillas and orangutans) branched away from the family of lesser apes or Hylobatidae.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/10/2016
Henri Becquerel was experimenting in the wintery month of February in France.
In some of those days sun was seen only intermittently (u have to live "abroad" to really understand this).
Remember, to Becquerel it was the sunlight that was doing the excitation work on his potassium uranyl sulphate crystals that was resulting in the emission of some kind of penetrating rays based on phosphorescence.
So he kept his photographic Lumiere plates along with crystalline crusts of potassium uranyl sulphate in the darkness of his bureau drawer.
That was February 27, 1896 (120 years ago).
There was no sun for several days.
For some reason, on March the 1st, he decided to develop the Lumiere plates which he had kept in the bureau drawer in darkness.
Much to his surprise, the silhouettes he got were very intense.
For the first time then it dawned upon this investigator that this phenomenon was not phosphorescence.
He further conducted similar investigations, but this time with uranium salts that were known to be non phosphorescent.
This clinched the argument that the penetrating rays or radiation was coming from the uranium itself, without any need for excitation by external energy source.
Becquerel inadvertently had discovered what would go on to revolutionize atomic physics.
But mon ami, all these developments that took place in particle physics rested on the discovery of chemical elements starting in 1700s and almost over by 1800s end.
By then, quantitative chemical analysis was already an established and maybe even a classical field (remember the messy titration experiments we were made to do in our high schools?)
The story of 118 elements that makes up everything in our universe, including the microbes, the mighty stars and galaxies and even your humble storytelling chimpanzee is another fascinating saga that has to be narrated some night.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape that is merely 200,000 years old, a blink in the history of our planet.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape (each word verified and justified).
6/11/2016
Becquerel had merely scratched the surface of something novel and exotic.
His work was to be taken up by a remarkable woman, perhaps the most outstanding since Hypatia.
I hope you have not forgotten this singular mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who lived 1666 years ago in Alexandria and was murdered by a Christian mob of sick zealots.
Marie Curie was born in 1867 Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland under the yolk of the Russian Empire.
Her original name is Maria Salomea Sklodowska.
Her both the parent families were national patriots, loosing all their property and fortunes in seeking national independence from Russian Empire (think about Indians and the British Empire).
Her father Wladyslaw Sklodowski was a teacher of mathematics and physics, subjects that Maria would ultimately pursue.
She and her 4 elder siblings had a difficult childhood because their father was fired by his Russian bosses for harbouring pro Polish sentiments.
Because of poverty, Maria lost her mother and eldest sister to the infectious diseases of tuberculosis and typhus (not to be mistaken with typhoid.
Typhus is caused by Rickettsia which is an obligate intracellular parasitic bacteria) at the age of ten.
This loss led Maria to give up her belief in Catholicism and she became an agnostic (her father was, like me, already an atheist).
She finished her schooling from a gymnasium for girls (not to be confused with modern meaning of gymnasium or gym),
But was unable to enroll in a regular institution of higher education.
Can u guess why?
No Sir, not for monetary reasons.
Higher institutions those days simply did not allow women to pursue higher studies.
So to make a living she took a position of a governess and a home tutor first in Warsaw and later in the village of Szczuki (a classical East European name with multiple Zs attached to C and S).
She landed up working with the Zorawskis, a wealthy family related to her father.
Maria was a passionate woman and there she fell in love with their son Kazimierz Zorawski, a man who in future would become an eminent mathematician (he was a student of another great Norwegian professor of mathematics Sophus Lie of the famed Lie algebra).
As it often happens, his parents rejected the very idea of their son marrying to a penniless relative.
It was a tragic loss for both of them.
Even as an old man and a professor of mathematics at Warsaw Polytechnic, he would sit before the statue of Maria Sklodowska which was erected in 1935.
We shall continue this fascinating story of an astounding mind and a passionate women over few nights mon ami for such a person deserves at least this much.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
(Just remember, we all would never be here without incest...
In fact a lot of incest).
6/12/2016
Interestingly, at the age of 23, with no prospect of getting admitted into an institute of higher education, Maria started working in a chemical laboratory run by her cousin in Warsaw.
She continued to educate herself by reading books, exchanging letters and making a living by working as a governess.
When she was 23, one of her surviving sister Bronislawa had managed to pursue her medical studies at the Sorbonne, Paris.
Maria, amazingly enough, had helped her sister financially through her medical school (it was a promise made by Maria to Bronislawa when they were very little).
Bronislawa later graduated as a gynecologist and married a fellow physician and political exile Kazimierz Dluski.
In return, the grateful Bronislawa invited Maria to join her in Paris.
Maria left for Paris in late 1891 at the age of 24, living initially with her sister and brother in law before renting a small, dismal, damp attic or garret on top of a house.
Almost immediately she enrolled at the University of Paris or the Sorbonne (metonymy) for physics, chemistry and mathematics (remarkable subjects for a young lady).
Maria lived dismally with meager resources, suffering the cold bleak winters and sometimes even fainting from hunger!
After her college, she tutored in the evenings, barely to sustain her survival.
In 2 years she was awarded a degree in physics and then started working in an industrial laboratory under Professor Gabriel Lippmann (another great mind worth devoting a story on).
It was at this stage of her life that she met Pierre Curie, a Frenchman and a physicist.
Pierre Curie is another remarkable mind who earned his math degree at the age of 16.
In fact, it seems that most people who crossed the life Maria Sklodowska were extraordinary in their own ways.
Let us take this extraordinariness slowly and over few nights.
It is people like these who actually convince me that we have come a long way from our ancestor Homo habilis who were one of the first members of the genus Homo to appear in East Africa.
Mind you, the separation of genus Homo and Pan is very very blurry and it is simply a matter of nomenclature and human ego.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape with the FOXP2 gene.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/13/2016
Some of the greatest friendships have been built on common interests and shared passion.
So it was with Maria Sklodowska and Pierre Curie.
Their mutual passion for sciences, specially chemistry and physics brought them increasingly closer.
Pierre proposed to her but she hesitated as she wanted to return back to Poland.
She even applied for a position at the Krakow University in Poland (today it is the best Polish university).
Yet again she was denied a position simply because she was not a man.
Pierre then convinced her to return back to Paris and pursue her PhD (he himself had got his doctorate recently on his work on magnetism).
In 1895, at the age of 28 Maria Sklodowska married Pierre Curie and thus became Marie Curie as we all know her to be.
Neither of them wanted a religious service (one important aspect of critical thinkers).
Marie Curie wore a dark blue outfit in her wedding instead of a white bridal gown (a total and a proud iconoclast).
This dark blue dress would serve her for many years as a laboratory garb.
Besides the passion for science, they both loved long bicycle trips and journeys to foreign lands which brought them all the more closer.
In Pierre, Marie Curie had found a new love, partner and a scientific collaborator on whom she could depend.
In Marie, Pierre had made his biggest discovery.
With the groundwork been laid, the stage is set to narrate the scientific achievements of this perfect couple and this amazing woman.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, whose ancestors the Homo habilis (the handy man) some 2.5 million years ago survived on dirty leaves and uncooked meat cleaved off carrion using primitive tools.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/14/2016
Marie Curie (this is how I will be calling her now), soon thereafter started to work on her thesis.
Inspired by the discoveries of Roentgen and Becquerel, she chose to work on uranium salt and the penetrating rays that it emitted.
She used a device called electrometer which measures electric charge (it is yet another cunning device) in her investigations.
She found that uranium rays caused air around a it to conduct electricity.
Second, this activity of uranium depended solely on the quantity of uranium present.
Based on these findings, she made a tentative hypothesis that the mysterious rays was NOT due to molecular interaction but something coming from the atoms itself.
This was absolutely revolutionary.
From a conceptual point of view, it is her most important contribution to the development of physics.
Now please note mon ami, how a hypothesis differs from a theory.
Hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon that cannot satisfactorily be explained with the available scientific theories.
The Curies did not have a dedicated laboratory.
They were conducting all their experiments (which most likely would appear useless and weird to any ordinary woman even of today's world) in a converted shed next to School of Physics and Chemistry.
The shed was once a medical school dissecting room;
It was poorly ventilated and it even leaked.
These pioneers had no idea of the biological deleterious effects of the uranium radiation.
Her school was not sponsoring her research.
She was buying two uranium minerals, pitchblende or uraninite (uranium dioxide) and torbernite from various metallurgical and mining companies (chemistry was always ahead of physics).
Her electrometer showed that the pitchblende was 4 times more active than uranium and torbernite twice as active.
Then these 2 minerals must contain something else also radiating waves besides uranium!
Marie was not only great thinker, but also streetwise; she was acutely aware of the importance of publishing her discoveries.
Had Becquerel just 2 years ago not presented his discovery to the French Academy of Sciences the day after he made it, credit for discovery of radioactivity and even the Nobel would have gone to the Englishman Silvanus Thompson.
Thus on April 12, 1898 Marie published her first paper at the age of 31 to the academy through her former professor Gabriel Lippmann.
This was to be just the beginning of the many scientific feats that awaited this wonderful mind.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/15/2016
After this publication, Marie went through the periodic table.
She found that the only known elements known to emit mysterious rays were uranium and thorium (just published 2 months earlier by Gerhard Schmidt).
Marie was certain that there was something new in the pitchblende ore akin to Bismuth.
Why similar to Bismuth?
Marie and Pierre had started their arduous and painstaking analytical work of separation and fractionation.
Marie would process as much as 20 kilos of ore per day, first clearing away debris and pine needles and later boiling and stirring them with a rod as big her.
She found that closer she fractionated closer to Bismuth, the stronger the radioactivity she got.
She named the new element Polonium (on her homeland Poland) whose atomic number is 84 (that of Bismuth is 83).
After another few months of insufferable work, they came across another very active substance that was chemically very similar to Barium.
They named it radium from the word ray.
Radium has the atomic number 88 and lies in the second group (vertical row) of the periodic table called alkaline earth metals having 2 electrons in the outermost shell (remember electron configuration?).
Between 1898 and 1902, the Curies published a total of 32 scientific papers, almost all original (a remarkable feat)!
1903 brought to them all the glories that a scientist can hope for:
1. Marie received her doctorate
2. She was made the first woman faculty member of Ecole Normale Superieure (French grande ecole, a higher education establishment like the Royal College).
3. Invitation to speak at the Royal Institution where yet again she was prevented from speaking
(I hope you know why. She did not carry a pair of testicles and a penis).
4. Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity (shared with Becquerel).
And if you think this is the end of the story, you could not possibly me more wrong.
This is where the twists and turns begin to start.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the narrator of the lives of few rare apes.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/16/2016
The Curies were called to go to Stockholm to receive the prize in person and deliver the routine speech.
Both declined as they were busy with their work and Pierre being an extremely private idealistic person who disliked pomp and ceremonies (again a hallmark of great man).
By now, they had reproduced (like any ape would) and that too twice.
They had two daughters Irene and Eve.
It all seemed so perfect when tragedy struck.
Just 3 years from all the heady successes, in 1906 Pierre was run over by a horse-drawn wagon in Paris and killed (basically a road traffic accident).
Marie was devastated and completely broken down.
When offered pension this tough and courageous lady declined:
I am 38 and able to support myself (and 2 daughters) was her reply.
She was given the chair of the department of physics at the Sorbonne which was originally meant for Pierre.
Marie also had definite ideas about upbringing and education of children.
She took the view that scientific subjects should be taught at an early age but not following a rigid curriculum (exactamente my view).
She organized a private school of 10 children (including her own) with the parents themselves (her circle of friends as we know were all professors and scientists) acting as teachers.
Games, physical activities and travel was also stressed as it was necessary for children to develop freely.
For Irene the elder daughter, it was these years that laid the foundation for her future in research.
In 1910, Marie succeeded in isolating radium (which was earlier only theorized) and defined the international standard for radioactive emissions rightfully named after her ( 1 Curie or Ci = 3.7 x 10^10 decays per second).
In 1911, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (overcoming a stupid "scandal" of her love affair with the physicist Paul Langevin, another great mind), bestowed upon her the honor for the second time.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and remains alone with Linus Pauling as Nobel laureates in 2 fields.
Oddly enough, soon after the award she was hospitalized with depression and renal disease.
There is more to come on this incredible woman and a fantastic mind.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape who can work with fine instruments and can type as well.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/17/2016
After 1911, when Europe broke out into madness of butchery and bloodshed, Marie Curie after a quick study of radiology and anatomy (What a woman!), set up France's first military radiology center at the front lines.
She became the director of the Red Cross Radiology Service helping in set up of over 200 radiological units and training other women as aids.
She even tried to donate her Nobel Prize gold medals to the wat effort but the French National Bank refused to accept them.
To my mind, the greatest acceptance of her intellect came when she was invited to the First (1911) and the Fifth (1927) Solvay Conferences.
This landmark conference was started by the industrialist Ernest Solvay in 1911 which became the turning point for physics.
It was an all elite white boys club which included stellar luminaries like Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré (of the famous Poincaré conjecture which my greatest friend introduced this average ape to), and of course, our dear old Albert Einstein (then only 32 years old).
The only exception was this slight, very humble lady, who alone among these giants, had won Nobel Prizes in 2 separate scientific disciplines!
In 1921, after the first bloody world war, when she visited or rather toured the United States to raise funds for research (America by then had started to be the wealthy nation as we know it to be), the US President Warren Harding received her at the White House to present her with the 1 gram of radium collected in the United States.
Yet, inspite of her fame, she remained honest and lived a simple life.
She did not patent the radium isolating process.
She gave much of her prize money to friends, family, students and research associates.
In fact, both Pierre and Marie would often refuse awards and medals.
Albert Einstein has said that she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame.
In 1995 her remains (she died of aplastic anemia in 1934 and interred in a cemetery in Sceaux), and that if her husband's were transferred to Pantheon in Paris.
Pantheon was originally meant to celebrate gods, but thankfully wisdom of rational thinking prevailed, and now it serves as a secular mausoleum celebrating distinguished French citizens.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the chimpanzee who will now explore the lives of fantastic people around Marie Curie.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/18/2016
Marie Curie's death was not the end.
Her elder daughter Irene would continue her legacy, not merely in genetic terms which nearly every living thing on this planet does, but conceptually as well.
She was 10 years old when Marie and Pierre realized that their daughter had obvious mathematical talent.
So they planned for a more challenging environment for her education.
Marie Curie gathered some of the most distinguished French scholars including Paul Langevin who would become her future lover.
This she called "The Cooperative".
The curriculum of The Cooperative (where professors educated one another's children in their respective homes) was not only principles of science and scientific research but also diverse subjects such as Chinese and sculpture.
Great emphasis was placed on self expression and play.
This is the top notch and most elite form of education that a child can be gifted with.
Marie saw to it that her 2 daughters got that which, to my mind, makes her the greatest mother ever.
Later of course, Irene reentered a more orthodox education at the faculty of science at the Sorbonne.
After the world war I (where she worked with her mother as a nurse radiographer and where both were exposed to large doses of radiation), she returned to study at the Radium Institute that had been built by her parents.
She got her doctorate in 1925 at the age of 28.
She met her life partner in a young chemical engineer who she was asked to teach precise laboratory techniques for radio chemical research.
She married Frederic Joliot and together they began to study atomic nuclei (fascinating couple indeed)!
By then, in 1897, the great J.J. Thomson had discovered the electrons.
But atoms were still considered as solid spherical particles as proposed by John Dalton in 1805 or so.
We shall take up the work of Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband in the following bed-time story.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape with catarrhine nose (Greek kata - down and rhin - nose, meaning nostrils facing down instead of sideways).
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin catarrhine ape.
6/19/2016
Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie began to build on the work of Marie and Pierre Curie.
This couple for sake of experimentation decide to bombard naturally available elements with alpha particles.
Alpha particles consist of 2 protons and 2 neutrons;
They are Helium atoms albeit without its 2 electrons.
Alpha particles were discovered by another remarkable scientific pezzonovante Ernest Rutherford in 1900 or so.
To their surprise, the Joliot-Curie couple found that such bombardments caused aluminum to turn into unstable isotope of phosphorus.
Similarly boron could be transformed to radioactive nitrogen and radioactive silicon from magnesium.
This was an alchemist's dream come true (even the great Newton had tried his hand on it) of turning one element into another.
They in fact had gone one step further and had discovered induced or man-made radioactivity.
This discovery stimulated people like Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner (woman) and Fritz Strassmann (all were Germans who opposed the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime) to discover nuclear fission.
For this, the Joliot-Curie couple were bestowed the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 which brought them fame and recognition.
Thus the Curie family shared 5 Nobel Prizes among themselves!
Irene's younger sister Eve did not choose a career as a scientist but rather worked as a journalist (her husband incredibly was awarded Nobel Peace Prize for his work with UNICEF).
She authored her mother's biography "Madame Curie".
She sometimes joked that she bought shame on her family.
"There were 5 Nobel Prizes in my family, 2 for my mother, one for my father, one for sister and brother-in-law and one for my husband.
Only I was not successful..."
This shame I can understand.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans (just to let you know, that the Great Ape Project argues that the nonhuman great apes are persons and deserve basic human rights).
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
If the Bernoulli family of Basel, Switzerland had mathematics running in them, then
The Becquerel family of Paris, France had physics going for them.
Into this wealthy and learned family was born Henri Becquerel in 1852.
It was a time when France was moving from being a Second Republic to Second Empire after the 1848 revolution and 1851 coup by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.
Remember mon ami, Europe of those times was far more violent and bloody than today's South Asia.
Henri Becquerel became the third person in his family to occupy the physics chair at Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
(You must visit this wonderful museum if you ever happen to be on the river Seine in Paris.
One entire gallery is devoted to evolution of life on planet earth).
Becquerel was primarily interested in phosphorescence which I had differentiated it from fluorescence in one of my recent bed-time story as an evidence of atomic theory.
Roentgen had already sent a wave of excitement in the world of physics in 1895-96 with his discovery of x-rays that could penetrate objects.
Becquerel was studying some uranium salts for their "phosphorescent" properties.
He assumed that these uranium salts emit some kind of penetrating radiation AFTER they have been illuminated by bright sunlight.
On February 24, 1896 (when x-rays were getting splashed over the print media) Becquerel presented his findings to the French Academy of Sciences.
What did he present?
Let us keep the excitement for tomorrow.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, narrator of exciting stories of excited atoms.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/9/2016
Tasteless cereals
6/9/2016" One wraps a Lumiere (famous brothers) plate with a bromide emulsion in 2 sheets of very thick black paper, such that the plate does not become clouded upon being exposed to the sun for a day (very slow speed films).
One places on the sheet of paper, on the outside, a slab of the phosphorescent substance, and one exposes the whole to the sun for several hours.
When one then develops the photographic plate, one recognizes the silhouette of the phosphorescent substance appears in black on the negative.
If one places between the phosphorescent substance and the plate a piece of money, one sees the image of this on the negative...
One must conclude from these experiments that the phosphorescent substance in question emits rays which pass through the opaque paper and reduces silver salt."
Becquerel still thought that the phenomenon he was observing was phosphorescence which required sunlight to excite the material.
He could not have been more wrong mon ami.
But what happened next?
We shall have to wait for the planet earth to make yet another rotation to get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the chimpanzee who probably started chattering and jabbering some 14 million years ago.
As it was then that our family of the great apes of Hominidae (chimpanzees, bonobos, humans, gorillas and orangutans) branched away from the family of lesser apes or Hylobatidae.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/10/2016
Henri Becquerel was experimenting in the wintery month of February in France.
In some of those days sun was seen only intermittently (u have to live "abroad" to really understand this).
Remember, to Becquerel it was the sunlight that was doing the excitation work on his potassium uranyl sulphate crystals that was resulting in the emission of some kind of penetrating rays based on phosphorescence.
So he kept his photographic Lumiere plates along with crystalline crusts of potassium uranyl sulphate in the darkness of his bureau drawer.
That was February 27, 1896 (120 years ago).
There was no sun for several days.
For some reason, on March the 1st, he decided to develop the Lumiere plates which he had kept in the bureau drawer in darkness.
Much to his surprise, the silhouettes he got were very intense.
For the first time then it dawned upon this investigator that this phenomenon was not phosphorescence.
He further conducted similar investigations, but this time with uranium salts that were known to be non phosphorescent.
This clinched the argument that the penetrating rays or radiation was coming from the uranium itself, without any need for excitation by external energy source.
Becquerel inadvertently had discovered what would go on to revolutionize atomic physics.
But mon ami, all these developments that took place in particle physics rested on the discovery of chemical elements starting in 1700s and almost over by 1800s end.
By then, quantitative chemical analysis was already an established and maybe even a classical field (remember the messy titration experiments we were made to do in our high schools?)
The story of 118 elements that makes up everything in our universe, including the microbes, the mighty stars and galaxies and even your humble storytelling chimpanzee is another fascinating saga that has to be narrated some night.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape that is merely 200,000 years old, a blink in the history of our planet.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape (each word verified and justified).
6/11/2016
Becquerel had merely scratched the surface of something novel and exotic.
His work was to be taken up by a remarkable woman, perhaps the most outstanding since Hypatia.
I hope you have not forgotten this singular mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who lived 1666 years ago in Alexandria and was murdered by a Christian mob of sick zealots.
Marie Curie was born in 1867 Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland under the yolk of the Russian Empire.
Her original name is Maria Salomea Sklodowska.
Her both the parent families were national patriots, loosing all their property and fortunes in seeking national independence from Russian Empire (think about Indians and the British Empire).
Her father Wladyslaw Sklodowski was a teacher of mathematics and physics, subjects that Maria would ultimately pursue.
She and her 4 elder siblings had a difficult childhood because their father was fired by his Russian bosses for harbouring pro Polish sentiments.
Because of poverty, Maria lost her mother and eldest sister to the infectious diseases of tuberculosis and typhus (not to be mistaken with typhoid.
Typhus is caused by Rickettsia which is an obligate intracellular parasitic bacteria) at the age of ten.
This loss led Maria to give up her belief in Catholicism and she became an agnostic (her father was, like me, already an atheist).
She finished her schooling from a gymnasium for girls (not to be confused with modern meaning of gymnasium or gym),
But was unable to enroll in a regular institution of higher education.
Can u guess why?
No Sir, not for monetary reasons.
Higher institutions those days simply did not allow women to pursue higher studies.
So to make a living she took a position of a governess and a home tutor first in Warsaw and later in the village of Szczuki (a classical East European name with multiple Zs attached to C and S).
She landed up working with the Zorawskis, a wealthy family related to her father.
Maria was a passionate woman and there she fell in love with their son Kazimierz Zorawski, a man who in future would become an eminent mathematician (he was a student of another great Norwegian professor of mathematics Sophus Lie of the famed Lie algebra).
As it often happens, his parents rejected the very idea of their son marrying to a penniless relative.
It was a tragic loss for both of them.
Even as an old man and a professor of mathematics at Warsaw Polytechnic, he would sit before the statue of Maria Sklodowska which was erected in 1935.
We shall continue this fascinating story of an astounding mind and a passionate women over few nights mon ami for such a person deserves at least this much.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
(Just remember, we all would never be here without incest...
In fact a lot of incest).
6/12/2016
Interestingly, at the age of 23, with no prospect of getting admitted into an institute of higher education, Maria started working in a chemical laboratory run by her cousin in Warsaw.
She continued to educate herself by reading books, exchanging letters and making a living by working as a governess.
When she was 23, one of her surviving sister Bronislawa had managed to pursue her medical studies at the Sorbonne, Paris.
Maria, amazingly enough, had helped her sister financially through her medical school (it was a promise made by Maria to Bronislawa when they were very little).
Bronislawa later graduated as a gynecologist and married a fellow physician and political exile Kazimierz Dluski.
In return, the grateful Bronislawa invited Maria to join her in Paris.
Maria left for Paris in late 1891 at the age of 24, living initially with her sister and brother in law before renting a small, dismal, damp attic or garret on top of a house.
Almost immediately she enrolled at the University of Paris or the Sorbonne (metonymy) for physics, chemistry and mathematics (remarkable subjects for a young lady).
Maria lived dismally with meager resources, suffering the cold bleak winters and sometimes even fainting from hunger!
After her college, she tutored in the evenings, barely to sustain her survival.
In 2 years she was awarded a degree in physics and then started working in an industrial laboratory under Professor Gabriel Lippmann (another great mind worth devoting a story on).
It was at this stage of her life that she met Pierre Curie, a Frenchman and a physicist.
Pierre Curie is another remarkable mind who earned his math degree at the age of 16.
In fact, it seems that most people who crossed the life Maria Sklodowska were extraordinary in their own ways.
Let us take this extraordinariness slowly and over few nights.
It is people like these who actually convince me that we have come a long way from our ancestor Homo habilis who were one of the first members of the genus Homo to appear in East Africa.
Mind you, the separation of genus Homo and Pan is very very blurry and it is simply a matter of nomenclature and human ego.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape with the FOXP2 gene.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/13/2016
Some of the greatest friendships have been built on common interests and shared passion.
So it was with Maria Sklodowska and Pierre Curie.
Their mutual passion for sciences, specially chemistry and physics brought them increasingly closer.
Pierre proposed to her but she hesitated as she wanted to return back to Poland.
She even applied for a position at the Krakow University in Poland (today it is the best Polish university).
Yet again she was denied a position simply because she was not a man.
Pierre then convinced her to return back to Paris and pursue her PhD (he himself had got his doctorate recently on his work on magnetism).
In 1895, at the age of 28 Maria Sklodowska married Pierre Curie and thus became Marie Curie as we all know her to be.
Neither of them wanted a religious service (one important aspect of critical thinkers).
Marie Curie wore a dark blue outfit in her wedding instead of a white bridal gown (a total and a proud iconoclast).
This dark blue dress would serve her for many years as a laboratory garb.
Besides the passion for science, they both loved long bicycle trips and journeys to foreign lands which brought them all the more closer.
In Pierre, Marie Curie had found a new love, partner and a scientific collaborator on whom she could depend.
In Marie, Pierre had made his biggest discovery.
With the groundwork been laid, the stage is set to narrate the scientific achievements of this perfect couple and this amazing woman.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, whose ancestors the Homo habilis (the handy man) some 2.5 million years ago survived on dirty leaves and uncooked meat cleaved off carrion using primitive tools.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/14/2016
Marie Curie (this is how I will be calling her now), soon thereafter started to work on her thesis.
Inspired by the discoveries of Roentgen and Becquerel, she chose to work on uranium salt and the penetrating rays that it emitted.
She used a device called electrometer which measures electric charge (it is yet another cunning device) in her investigations.
She found that uranium rays caused air around a it to conduct electricity.
Second, this activity of uranium depended solely on the quantity of uranium present.
Based on these findings, she made a tentative hypothesis that the mysterious rays was NOT due to molecular interaction but something coming from the atoms itself.
This was absolutely revolutionary.
From a conceptual point of view, it is her most important contribution to the development of physics.
Now please note mon ami, how a hypothesis differs from a theory.
Hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon that cannot satisfactorily be explained with the available scientific theories.
The Curies did not have a dedicated laboratory.
They were conducting all their experiments (which most likely would appear useless and weird to any ordinary woman even of today's world) in a converted shed next to School of Physics and Chemistry.
The shed was once a medical school dissecting room;
It was poorly ventilated and it even leaked.
These pioneers had no idea of the biological deleterious effects of the uranium radiation.
Her school was not sponsoring her research.
She was buying two uranium minerals, pitchblende or uraninite (uranium dioxide) and torbernite from various metallurgical and mining companies (chemistry was always ahead of physics).
Her electrometer showed that the pitchblende was 4 times more active than uranium and torbernite twice as active.
Then these 2 minerals must contain something else also radiating waves besides uranium!
Marie was not only great thinker, but also streetwise; she was acutely aware of the importance of publishing her discoveries.
Had Becquerel just 2 years ago not presented his discovery to the French Academy of Sciences the day after he made it, credit for discovery of radioactivity and even the Nobel would have gone to the Englishman Silvanus Thompson.
Thus on April 12, 1898 Marie published her first paper at the age of 31 to the academy through her former professor Gabriel Lippmann.
This was to be just the beginning of the many scientific feats that awaited this wonderful mind.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/15/2016
After this publication, Marie went through the periodic table.
She found that the only known elements known to emit mysterious rays were uranium and thorium (just published 2 months earlier by Gerhard Schmidt).
Marie was certain that there was something new in the pitchblende ore akin to Bismuth.
Why similar to Bismuth?
Marie and Pierre had started their arduous and painstaking analytical work of separation and fractionation.
Marie would process as much as 20 kilos of ore per day, first clearing away debris and pine needles and later boiling and stirring them with a rod as big her.
She found that closer she fractionated closer to Bismuth, the stronger the radioactivity she got.
She named the new element Polonium (on her homeland Poland) whose atomic number is 84 (that of Bismuth is 83).
After another few months of insufferable work, they came across another very active substance that was chemically very similar to Barium.
They named it radium from the word ray.
Radium has the atomic number 88 and lies in the second group (vertical row) of the periodic table called alkaline earth metals having 2 electrons in the outermost shell (remember electron configuration?).
Between 1898 and 1902, the Curies published a total of 32 scientific papers, almost all original (a remarkable feat)!
1903 brought to them all the glories that a scientist can hope for:
1. Marie received her doctorate
2. She was made the first woman faculty member of Ecole Normale Superieure (French grande ecole, a higher education establishment like the Royal College).
3. Invitation to speak at the Royal Institution where yet again she was prevented from speaking
(I hope you know why. She did not carry a pair of testicles and a penis).
4. Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity (shared with Becquerel).
And if you think this is the end of the story, you could not possibly me more wrong.
This is where the twists and turns begin to start.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the narrator of the lives of few rare apes.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/16/2016
The Curies were called to go to Stockholm to receive the prize in person and deliver the routine speech.
Both declined as they were busy with their work and Pierre being an extremely private idealistic person who disliked pomp and ceremonies (again a hallmark of great man).
By now, they had reproduced (like any ape would) and that too twice.
They had two daughters Irene and Eve.
It all seemed so perfect when tragedy struck.
Just 3 years from all the heady successes, in 1906 Pierre was run over by a horse-drawn wagon in Paris and killed (basically a road traffic accident).
Marie was devastated and completely broken down.
When offered pension this tough and courageous lady declined:
I am 38 and able to support myself (and 2 daughters) was her reply.
She was given the chair of the department of physics at the Sorbonne which was originally meant for Pierre.
Marie also had definite ideas about upbringing and education of children.
She took the view that scientific subjects should be taught at an early age but not following a rigid curriculum (exactamente my view).
She organized a private school of 10 children (including her own) with the parents themselves (her circle of friends as we know were all professors and scientists) acting as teachers.
Games, physical activities and travel was also stressed as it was necessary for children to develop freely.
For Irene the elder daughter, it was these years that laid the foundation for her future in research.
In 1910, Marie succeeded in isolating radium (which was earlier only theorized) and defined the international standard for radioactive emissions rightfully named after her ( 1 Curie or Ci = 3.7 x 10^10 decays per second).
In 1911, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (overcoming a stupid "scandal" of her love affair with the physicist Paul Langevin, another great mind), bestowed upon her the honor for the second time.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and remains alone with Linus Pauling as Nobel laureates in 2 fields.
Oddly enough, soon after the award she was hospitalized with depression and renal disease.
There is more to come on this incredible woman and a fantastic mind.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape who can work with fine instruments and can type as well.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/17/2016
After 1911, when Europe broke out into madness of butchery and bloodshed, Marie Curie after a quick study of radiology and anatomy (What a woman!), set up France's first military radiology center at the front lines.
She became the director of the Red Cross Radiology Service helping in set up of over 200 radiological units and training other women as aids.
She even tried to donate her Nobel Prize gold medals to the wat effort but the French National Bank refused to accept them.
To my mind, the greatest acceptance of her intellect came when she was invited to the First (1911) and the Fifth (1927) Solvay Conferences.
This landmark conference was started by the industrialist Ernest Solvay in 1911 which became the turning point for physics.
It was an all elite white boys club which included stellar luminaries like Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré (of the famous Poincaré conjecture which my greatest friend introduced this average ape to), and of course, our dear old Albert Einstein (then only 32 years old).
The only exception was this slight, very humble lady, who alone among these giants, had won Nobel Prizes in 2 separate scientific disciplines!
In 1921, after the first bloody world war, when she visited or rather toured the United States to raise funds for research (America by then had started to be the wealthy nation as we know it to be), the US President Warren Harding received her at the White House to present her with the 1 gram of radium collected in the United States.
Yet, inspite of her fame, she remained honest and lived a simple life.
She did not patent the radium isolating process.
She gave much of her prize money to friends, family, students and research associates.
In fact, both Pierre and Marie would often refuse awards and medals.
Albert Einstein has said that she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame.
In 1995 her remains (she died of aplastic anemia in 1934 and interred in a cemetery in Sceaux), and that if her husband's were transferred to Pantheon in Paris.
Pantheon was originally meant to celebrate gods, but thankfully wisdom of rational thinking prevailed, and now it serves as a secular mausoleum celebrating distinguished French citizens.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the chimpanzee who will now explore the lives of fantastic people around Marie Curie.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/18/2016
Marie Curie's death was not the end.
Her elder daughter Irene would continue her legacy, not merely in genetic terms which nearly every living thing on this planet does, but conceptually as well.
She was 10 years old when Marie and Pierre realized that their daughter had obvious mathematical talent.
So they planned for a more challenging environment for her education.
Marie Curie gathered some of the most distinguished French scholars including Paul Langevin who would become her future lover.
This she called "The Cooperative".
The curriculum of The Cooperative (where professors educated one another's children in their respective homes) was not only principles of science and scientific research but also diverse subjects such as Chinese and sculpture.
Great emphasis was placed on self expression and play.
This is the top notch and most elite form of education that a child can be gifted with.
Marie saw to it that her 2 daughters got that which, to my mind, makes her the greatest mother ever.
Later of course, Irene reentered a more orthodox education at the faculty of science at the Sorbonne.
After the world war I (where she worked with her mother as a nurse radiographer and where both were exposed to large doses of radiation), she returned to study at the Radium Institute that had been built by her parents.
She got her doctorate in 1925 at the age of 28.
She met her life partner in a young chemical engineer who she was asked to teach precise laboratory techniques for radio chemical research.
She married Frederic Joliot and together they began to study atomic nuclei (fascinating couple indeed)!
By then, in 1897, the great J.J. Thomson had discovered the electrons.
But atoms were still considered as solid spherical particles as proposed by John Dalton in 1805 or so.
We shall take up the work of Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband in the following bed-time story.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape with catarrhine nose (Greek kata - down and rhin - nose, meaning nostrils facing down instead of sideways).
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin catarrhine ape.
6/19/2016
Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie began to build on the work of Marie and Pierre Curie.
This couple for sake of experimentation decide to bombard naturally available elements with alpha particles.
Alpha particles consist of 2 protons and 2 neutrons;
They are Helium atoms albeit without its 2 electrons.
Alpha particles were discovered by another remarkable scientific pezzonovante Ernest Rutherford in 1900 or so.
To their surprise, the Joliot-Curie couple found that such bombardments caused aluminum to turn into unstable isotope of phosphorus.
Similarly boron could be transformed to radioactive nitrogen and radioactive silicon from magnesium.
This was an alchemist's dream come true (even the great Newton had tried his hand on it) of turning one element into another.
They in fact had gone one step further and had discovered induced or man-made radioactivity.
This discovery stimulated people like Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner (woman) and Fritz Strassmann (all were Germans who opposed the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime) to discover nuclear fission.
For this, the Joliot-Curie couple were bestowed the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 which brought them fame and recognition.
Thus the Curie family shared 5 Nobel Prizes among themselves!
Irene's younger sister Eve did not choose a career as a scientist but rather worked as a journalist (her husband incredibly was awarded Nobel Peace Prize for his work with UNICEF).
She authored her mother's biography "Madame Curie".
She sometimes joked that she bought shame on her family.
"There were 5 Nobel Prizes in my family, 2 for my mother, one for my father, one for sister and brother-in-law and one for my husband.
Only I was not successful..."
This shame I can understand.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans (just to let you know, that the Great Ape Project argues that the nonhuman great apes are persons and deserve basic human rights).
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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