Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseX-rays, U-rays, and cosmic rays! Hear the story for how we came to understand that our world is filled with invisible dangers.
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Hey Daniel, would you risk your life for science?
It might depend on the science we're talking about.
Would you risk getting eaten if you got to meet adiens? For example?
Tempting, but I'll pass.
How about would you risk spec getification if you got to see the inside of a black hole.
You know, I might actually take that trip?
Or would you risk deadly radiation to understand the nature of matter?
Actually, I've kind of already done that one.
Oh, really, does it a large hadron collider generate deadly radiation?
It does, But that's not how I've been exposed.
Oh how have you been exposed to radiation?
Well, flying the Switzerland and back like a thousand times, you get a lot more radiation at high altitude. Really, yep, every transatlantic trip is like a chest X ray.
I thought you said you've been been by a radioactive Swiss spider.
And I gained that spider's proportional physics, smarts.
And chocolate making ability. I am Horhem, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I like to think of myself as radioactive.
Are you technically radioactive? Are most people radioactive at some level? Like bananas are radioactive?
Yeah, so you're probably more radioactive than most people. But I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where we like to say we all glow in the dark. Really, uh, I did grow up in Los Alamos, but we don't actually like to say that.
Well, I do eat a lot of bananas, and I do have a certain glow about me, I like to think, but yeah, Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the university production of iHeartRadio.
In which we shine a radioactive glow into all the mysteries of the universe, the big, crazy things that are out there tearing universe apart, the powerful forces that are holding it together, the things far from home, and the things right here in our backyard. All the mysteries of physics revealed and explained to you.
That's right, we radiate knowledge and give you an X ray view of all of the amazing secrets that are out there to discover in the universe, and all of the secrets that are yet to be discovered.
And all the while you can stay home and safe, tucked into your couch, sipping that mug of tea and learning about the universe.
No tinfoil hat needed or leadline hats.
That's right. This counts exactly zero as part of your annual dose of radiation, even though you'll be learning all about it.
That's right. Well, we're technically getting to people through sound waves, not lightweights or radiation.
That's right. But actually radiation is sort of any sort of energetic particle or wave. So sound is technically speaking a kind of radiation. So we are irradiating your ears with our voices.
What no, you get to say a limit? Can't you like, if I throw a baseball, I'm radiating a baseball.
Baseballs are radiation? Yes, absolutely, Now, the technical definition of radiation is sort of weirdly broad. Any kind of light, any kind of particle, any kind of way that transmits energy is radiation. But practically speaking, when we talk about radiation, we mean very high energy particles or higher energy waves that are going to deposit a significant amount of energy. And so a flashlight or this podcast are not typically categorized as radiation, even though technically, according to physicists it is.
Well, it's a very loaded word, isn't it. I mean, especially like in the eighties. I feel in the nineties, you know, radiation was such a negative thing, and know what they wanted, radiation and the thing that made you sick.
Yeah, exactly. Radiation can be pretty dangerous. They are basically these little invisible bullets flying through the universe, and they can do real damage. They can fly through your cells, they can bust up your DNA, they can cause you cancer. And so radiation definitely is something to think about and worry about. These things in the world that's not visible to our naked eye yet turns out to be pretty important. So it's a key that tells us that there's a lot going on in the universe that we can't directly see.
Yeah, so a big question is how do we even discover radiation or even come to believe it exists if it is in fact the invisible.
Yeah, it's part of this story of peeling back the nature of reality and figuring out that the universe has a lot of stuff going on. But to me, it's always fascinating to figure out how that came to be, how that understanding sort of filtered into human minds, because here we are standing on the shoulders of giants, understanding all these things about the way the world works. But this required a real shift in people's understanding of the nature of the universe. So I'm always super interested in those moments, like what was it that convinced people? What experiments did people do that revealed that, because I hope that will help us understand what experiments in the future might again change the way we think about the universe.
Yeah. So usually people assign the discovered to Madame Cirie and her experiments, But there's actually more to the story.
Right there is she did not, in fact discover radiation. She won a couple of Nobel prizes. She was quite a genius. She discovered a lot of stuff, but you can't give her credit for discovering radiation. It's a fascinating story.
Well you can't even define it. I mean, sure, then nobody discovered her radiation or everyone discovered radiation.
That's right. The first little swimming organism that developed an eyeball, I suppose discovered radiation when it used photons to guide itself around the primordial soup on Earth.
I suppose, yeah, right, like the first organism to use or detect light.
Right, that definitely predates humanity. But I think we should focus on the kind of radiation we're talking about, which is, you know, high energy particles or waves that come from like radioactive decay, things that are different from the normal kinds of radiation we used to live our lives. We're talking about a change in how we've understood the universe.
Okay, so it's invisible, potentially dangerous, and obviously very scientifically significant. But how was radiation discovered? That's a big question, and that's the question we're exploring today. So to the end of the program, we'll be talking about how was radiation discovered? So, as usually, we were wondering how many people out there knew how radiation was discovered?
So thank you to everybody who volunteered their answers to these tricky physics questions without referring to any reference materials, Google or bing or ask Jeeves. And if you would like to participate in future Baseless Speculations for the podcast, please write to us to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Maybe that should be the name of that website, Daniel Baseless Speculation dot com. You might get a lot of hits.
Yeah exactly. We just pointed to our book every single time. We have no idea dot com is the answer to all these questions.
Oh interesting, interesting marketing technique. Lure people in with a juicy website and then sell them a book.
Yeah exactly. I think they call that clickbait.
So think about it for a second. If someone approached you and asks you if you knew how radiation was discovered. What would you say here? What people had to say? I have no idea, but I think it has something to do with Marie Currey playing around with some kind of radioactive substance and like X raying her hand or something like that.
Radiation was discovered by Madame Curie.
I just know that was discovered by Marie Currey.
I believe radiation was discovered by Marie Cury. I don't know how she did it. She was probably experimenting with what became known as radium and saw it glowing.
I think radiation was discovered in the eighteen hundreds when some radioactive material uranium was glowing in the dark or was unusually hot.
All right, it looks like Marie curriy and the Curris have a pretty good policies because most people went to them as the discoverers of radiation.
Yeah, she is definitely ensconced in popular colu cure as somebody deeply associated with radiation. And you know, she actually did have a good publicist late in her career. She did a whole tour of the United States giving talks all about radiation stuff. So she became quite famous and associated with radiation. So that has lasted up till the present day, almost one hundred years later.
Right, Well, we don't want to take away anything that she did or the decrease did. It's really more about definition. I think I think she discovered a particular type of radiation or I guess we'll get into that. But generally speaking, it kind of seems like radiation maybe is a broader concept than most people assume it is.
There's definitely that, and she made important contributions and discovered particular kinds of radioactive elopments. We'll dig into that. But you're right, radiation is sort of a broader set of things. Radiation is not just uranium decays and shoots out deadly particles. There's a broader set of things. We consider radiation not just ordinary light. But it starts, for example, with X rays. Like X rays are just hot energy photons, but we consider them radiation.
Yeah. I guess you were saying earlier that any light is considered radiation. Even sound is considered radiation. Yeah, even like heat, I guess heat is radiation.
Yeah, exactly, you radiate heat. You go run a lap and you get really hot, you are radiating heat out into the universe, and everything in the universe that has a temperature gives off heat, and so everything in the universe is radiating constantly. Radiation is everywhere. But that's sort of again the sort of technical physical term for it. When we talk about radiation, we think about sort of damaging radiation, radiation that's long been invisible to us and reveals something different about how the world works. And it was really crucial in understanding things like the nature of the atom and the deep structure of matter.
Right, Well, we knew about light for a long time. I mean it's kind of in the Bible, Daniel, let there be Light. It was like the first thing.
Is that a reference book? I wasn't familiar with that, Yeah, got it all. I think there's some rata for that one.
It's probably the most impact factor of all publications in the history of man.
Yeah.
I submitted something, but it got rejected by the referees.
So, I mean, of course we've known about light for a long time. So I guess when do you draw the line as us having discovered radiation, Like, is it X rays? Is that the first kind of you know, powerful kind of radiation invisible that we've discovered.
Yeah, I think the discovery of X rays really marked the turning point. It's the time we discover that there are ways to transmit energy or other kinds of light that are different from the kind of visible light we were familiar with. And this specifically was the kind of light that we saw could sort of pass through walls and pass through barriers, and so it really was doing something different from the kind of visible light we were familiar with. And that's exactly how it was discovered.
I see, like, if you shine a flashlight, it gets blocked by the wall, but if you shine an X ray tube at a wall, it will go right through.
It'll go through most of it. Yeah, exactly. And that's why we call it, you know, X raying something because X rays pass through the soft tissue of your body, but not your bones, and so they reveal what's going on inside. And so radiation is interesting because they can do these things that visible like can't do, but also because it has this power it penetrates and so what reveals what's inside?
All right, So then how do we discover X rays?
So X ray's discovered in eighteen ninety five by this guy Runken, and this guy was a character. I think you'd like this. He actually was kicked out of high school as a student because he drew a caricature of one of his teachers, which is not very flattering, and so he's sort of a physicist and a cartoonist.
Oh, I almost got exposed from high school for the exact same reason, actually, except I didn't just caricature one teacher. I did all of them.
Well, then maybe there's a Nobel prize in your future.
Yeah, stay tuned.
But he was doing experiments at the time with these things called Crooks tubes. We've talked about these before because they were how electrons were discovered. They're basically just these glass tubes that are mostly have vacuum in them, and then you have an anode and a cathode with voltage across them, and so you pull electrons off. People had seen these things before, and you get these beams, these glowing beams inside that look really cool because the electrons were like knocking off atoms and ionizing them, and people were doing lots of experiments with them trying to understand what they were. And again JJ Thompson used them to discover the electrons. But runkit was really interested in whether or not the rays that were being produced inside these tubes could pass through the glass. He was curious to see what they could get through.
But these rays were originally electrons, like a stream of electrons or were they light?
These were a stream of electrons and that's what JJ Thompson discovered. But the glow that you saw that was visible light. And so the electrons would knock into a few atoms inside the tube, ionize them, they would give off some light, and then they would decay back to their ground state. So what people were sort of oohing and aweing over were seeing a beam of electrons exciting the gas inside the tube.
Okay, but just to be clear that the X ray is not the electrons and X rays is a light beam, right.
That's right.
The X ray is not an electron. Electron is a particle. An X ray is a piece of light. Right, It's a photon of a specific energy. But this is what Runkin started with. He started with these tubes and he was playing around with them, and he accidentally discovered that they also generate X rays.
Mmm, like along with the electrons or when the electrons hit stuff.
Yes, so the electrons one of the things they do is they generated glow you can see with your naked eye. But they also sometimes generate X rays, and we can get into the whole details of exactly how that happens, how they're accelerated and radiated. But sometimes they generate visible light in our spectrum, and sometimes they generate photons that are higher energy than these are X rays. So he was interested in understanding, like, what is this thing generating? Can it pass through the glass walls of the tube. So what he did was he built a big black box, like a light proof box, and his idea was, I'm going to put this box around my tube. I'm going to see what light is shined on the inside of the box from this tube, so I can see sort of like you know, what light comes out of the tube and hits the side of the box.
Mmm.
So I guess he wanted to know. He thought he was trapping the light that was coming from the tube, but actually he saw that the light kind of leaked outside of it.
Yeah, exactly. He turned off the lights in his laboratory just to sort of like get things warmed up, and he was going to look inside the box to see if he could see like light on the inside walls of the box. But before he did that, he noticed that he saw this weird light outside the box on the wall of his laboratory, and he was like, what's that over there? And it turns out he had a special sort of screen over there just happened to be in the right location that can receive X rays and glows when it hits X rays. And so he discovered that the light doesn't just go through the glass. It also went through his box all the way out to the side of his lab and hit this special screen. So it was quite by accident that he discovered these X rays. WHOA, what was.
This special screen that he just had that it seems like such an accidental discovery.
It's totally an accidental discovery. And it's a special screen covered with a material that phosphoress, so it absorbs photons at one wavelength and then it gives off photons at a different wavelength, so it's a wavelength shifting effect. And this is the kind of thing we do all the time in physics these days. We absorb photons of one thing and give off photons of another color. So we happen to have a screen covered in this material. It was a barrio phosphorescent material that could absorb X rays and glow in the visible light. And he was like, what's that over there? And did a bunch of experiments and he discovered that it could pass through his box, and it could pass through lots of other things, but that it wouldn't pass through metal, for example.
Wow, Now, was this the first time that you know, humans kind of got the idea that light can go through things? Or did we already kind of know that there are things in nature that can go through things?
Now, this is the first time we understood that light could pass through something that we thought was otherwise solid. And famously, the first X ray picture he ever took was of his wife's hand, and you could see her hand with its wedding ring on it, and he showed it to her and he thought, this is gonna be so romantic and awesome, but she was actually really creeped out and she thought, oh my gosh, I've seen my own death, because she'd seemed like her own skeleton inside her hand. And I think it really changed the way people felt about like the solidity of stuff. Right, you think of yourself as solid and opaque but you're not. You're transparent in some wavelengths of light and you're opaque in other wavelengths of light.
Oh. So then from that day they invented X rays, you know, for medical purposes.
Yeah. Things happened really fast because people very quickly understood how powerful this was. Like you could see broken bones inside the body, or you could see if your child had swallowed something metal, and so just seeing inside the body without having it cut it open was immediately and enormously powerful. And within a year people were using it in hospitals. And it wasn't hard to make X rays Like Crook's tubes were a thing that already existed, and so the technology sort of was all around. It just took the right combination of knowing what to do and how to do it. And he went on to win the first Nobel Prize in physics just a few years later.
Really, the first one, Wow, the first one.
Yeah, exactly. And you know, it sort of satisfies all the requirements. It teaches you something deep about the universe. It also made a very big impact on humanity.
Wow. And it sounds like it was really more about discovering the screen.
Yeah, it's a combination. You have to have the radiation and you have to have a screen that can receive it. Right, X rays are invisible to us, and so if they can just fly through the universe and fly through a wall to see them, you have to put something in their path that they will interact with and transform that information into something your eyeballs can see.
All right, Well, that's X ray radiation, which is light radiation. But I guess the more popular kind of radiation, or at least in people's consciousness, is particle radiation. And that's where the curers come in. And so let's get into that kin radiation. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Com all right, we're talking about radiation and how it was discovered and how you should probably wear sunscreen when you're outside and near particle colliders. Would that helped Daniel and near physicist, probably because they're so shiny and beaming.
Yeah, well, they just had to do these crazy experiments which sometimes you know, do damage their own help.
All right, Well, I guess we talked about X ray radiation, which is really just light at higher frequencies that can pass through things, and some people associate that with radiation, but maybe the more common type of radiation that people think of is kind of the dangerous kind, I guess, the nuclear kind, and that's more like particle radiation.
Yeah, and X rays, of course also dangerous. They can deposit a lot of energy in your skin, and they can cause cancer and UV radiation all that stuff, So it's definitely dangerous. But particle radiation also very dangerous and more famous because I think of the radioactive decays involved in nuclear physics, for example. But particle radiation was discovered pretty soon after particles were discovered. Remember, the whole idea of a particle didn't really exist until JJ Thompson discovered the electron in the late eighteen hundreds. You know, this notion that everything was made out of tiny little bits, and we could find those things and we could associate like a tiny dot in space with mass and with other quantities. This is a whole new idea in physics at the time. It's not something which had existed for a long time.
Right before, Like light was just like a beam, right, like pure energy kind of.
Yeah, the wave properties of light were dominant, and people thought about light as a wave. They thought about matter and waves existing. But the whole idea that things were made out of tiny particles, or that these tiny particles could fly through space invisibly and hurt you, for example, this was brand new. But it was discovered pretty soon after the electron was discovered again in the late eighteen hundreds, yeah, like the next year. Yeah, And it was spurred by the discovery of X rays. Like everybody in the world was very excited about the X ray discovery made a huge wave in the world of physics. No pun intended, pun definitely intended.
Oh intended, all right, sorry and pause for it. So I thought me it was unintentional.
No, And this bit about the screen that you latched onto, this guy deckrel He also was really excited about that. He thought it's really cool for something to absorb energy in one wavelength and emit in another. To absorb one kind of energy and emit another kind of thing. It's called luminescence, and he thought it was really exciting and he wanted to follow up in this and make also some kind of crazy discovery. And he came from a long line of physicists people have been studying this sort of kind of thing of generation of heat and energy. So he did a series of experiments with uranium crystals and he was the first to discover particle radiation. So he actually came well before the curies.
Oh interesting, Well, apparently his father was also a physicist and a radiation physicist too.
That's right. He actually came from several generations of physicists and they all had the same job. They all had like the same chair in the head of the natural science department in Paris, and so it was sort of like a hereditary position almost. He's like a legacy physicist in France.
So his father looked into radiation, but he didn't discovery.
Yeah, his father also had been studying uranium crests and after Becherel discovered radiation, people went back and looked at his father's notebooks, and there was plenty of evidence in his father's notebooks to document evidence of radiation, but his father just sort of didn't put it together. And this is something you can do in physics. When people make a big discovery, you can look back at people who might have discovered it if they had only believed their results or followed up on something they didn't understand. It sort of missed opportunities in physics.
So I wonder if you want people to see that or if that's just kind of a little bit embarrassing from a physics point of view.
I think it's super fascinating from a sort of history of science point of view. You get a result that you don't understand or doesn't make sense, do you always follow up on it or do you sort of leave it behind? And those missed opportunities, you know, those times when science could have gone differently if somebody had taken a different path and thought about something different or had a different conversation at a conference. It's fascinating to me to imagine the sort of alternate universes in which we discovered things in different words.
Because that's what everyone wants in their tombstone, you know, could have won a Nobel prize.
Yeah, But they did these experiments with uranium crystals. So uranium was a thing, it was a known, it wasn't understood what it was doing, but they were doing early studies with it. And essentially what they did basically is they just put it next to photographic plates, like photographs were a thing back then, So they just wrapped them in paper and put them next to photographic plates and they wanted to see what would happen.
Oh, right, because they had photographs at that time. And that is also kind of like magic, like light hits it or not hits it, and it changes color.
Yeah, exactly. It's a special process that absorbs photons and develops in a different way based on, you know, the amount of photons that hit it. To really sort of awesome chemical process for absorbing things and taking data. And back before we had computers and digital cameras and stuff, everything was analog. This was a powerful way to do science experiments. But Beckerel sort of started off on the wrong track. Remember, he was interested in luminescence. He thought, if you took these uranium crystals and you left them in the sun, that they would absorb a bunch of energy from the sun and then they might glow in some new invisible way. So he put these uranium crystals in the sun, then he wrapped them in paper to block in the invisible light, and he put them next to these photographic plates. So he was hoping maybe he would like spind a new way to make X rays, or that they would admit in the X ray because X rays had just been discovered.
All right, So he saw radiation and X rays and he thought, hey, I wonder if that works for everything. So do you think he tried a bunch of different materials, not just these uranium crystals.
Yeah, he tried a bunch of different materials wondering what would glow. But these uranium salts, these uranium crystals were the things that gave him the best results. But that's not actually the most interesting part of his discovery. I mean, first he did that, he said, I'm gonna put these things out in the sun. Then I'm going to wrap them in paper to block in the invisible light and see if they make an impact on the photographic plates. And they did, so he thought, ooh, that's cool. But then he accidentally left a bunch of them a drawer next to these photographic plates without shining them in the sun. Mmm, so he sort of messed up his experiment. He thought it was necessary to leave it in the sun to absorb energy and then it would give off this radiation. But he accidentally left over the weekend a bunch of uranium crystals next to one of these photographic plates and came back the next week and said, hmm, oops, for guys, will leave this stuff in the sun. But let's just develop this film and see what it says.
Woad seriously, total accident.
Total accident. And he thought, well, you know, I guess I did this weird experiment where I skipped the step with the sun. Let's see what happens. And he developed it and the picture looked exactly the same, which tells him that it didn't need to absorb energy from the sun. It wasn't luminescence where it was slurping in energy from the sun and then changing it into X rays or something. It was different. The uranium crystals were just giving off energy on their own. They were just like a source of some new kind of.
Radiation, some new kind of invisible ray. Right, really what he thought, right, something invisible was coming out of this and this invisible thing somehow had energy.
Yeah, and you didn't have to put in energy. It's not like with the Crooks too, where you had to apply electricity and it generated energy for the electrons which generated the X rays. And it wasn't like phosphorescence where you had to sit out in the sun and absorb the energy and then give it off. It was just like pumping out this invisible energy. And now we know that it was alpha radiation and beta radiation, but he didn't know that at the time. He just knew he was emitting some crazy new rays.
And then he also won a Nobel Prize for it, right, he won like the third one.
He did, He won the third one, but just barely. He discovered this. And the day after he made this discovery, he gave a presentation at like the local Scientific society, and he beat out some English physicists who made the discovery like later that week.
What but if he gave the presentation, then the other one technically didn't discovery or I guess he wasn't at the presentation.
He wasn't there yet, because you know, the world was much smaller, so you could give a whole presentation and a society in France and nobody would hear about it in England until weeks later or so. And so Sylvanis Thompson made very very similar experiments, very similar discoveries just a few days later and lost out on the Nobel Prize because Beckerell made this discovery and was very quick to report it.
Oh, I see Bekerel was in another country.
Yes, this is in France.
Oh interesting, Wow, that's crazy. Two people in two different countries make the same fundamental discovery almost a week apart. Yeah, and there was no internet.
There was no internet. But this is all spurred by Runkid's discovery of X rays and like cracked open whole new area of research. People looking for these invisible rays? How can we find them? What's making them? What kinds are out there? And it really did sparkle, you know, a whole new field of research.
All right. So then that's where we get to Madame Currie and Pierre Currie, and that this is kind of where their story starts, right like the year after.
Yeah, exactly, this is where their story starts. So they came in after Becharel had already discovered radiation and Runken had discovered X rays, and they were really interested in this. And Curie herself has a really fascinating backstory. Remember, it's very difficult for women in science to have any position and to have any engagement. To even get an education. She and her sister, for example, had to take turns working and going to school. They had this deal where one of them would work and the other one would go to school, and then they took turns. Wow, and you had to be really dedicated and sort of fend off a lot of societal pressure even to get to have an education, not to mention be a scientist at the leading edge of physics knowledge.
Oh yeah, it's amazing, a pretty powerful story. So she was in France and she I guess she knew about Bequerel's discovery.
She knew about Beckerreil's discovery, but most of the world was more excited about the X rays, like these new uranium rays that they called them U rays. People are like, Okay, that's cool, but X rays are better because they're easier to use, they're faster, they're cheaper, they make sharper images. But she was really interested in these us She was like, what are these what's making them? What does it tell us about the atom that these things are just being created out of there. And she was working with her husband, Pierre, and they had this really cool device, this thing called an electrometer, and it could basically measure very sensitively how well things could conduct electricity. And Pierre had developed this technology from his earlier research which was into piezo electronics, these little devices which create electricity if you squeeze them or move if you apply electrical voltage across them. So we had this technology and they applied it to the study of these urrays and they found something pretty cool, which is that if you have a bunch of uranium, the air around the uranium tends to get ionized. They can conduct electricity more easily than if you don't have uranium around.
Oh I see. And that was a big clue that it was maybe giving off some kind of energy.
Yeah, that was a big clue that it was shooting out something because it was like changing the air, right, This energy was coming out, It was changing the air around the uranium. And Pierre and Marie they took like no safety precautions. They got to read it so much in their research. There are all these moments you can read about in their lab notebooks where they're like, Pierre has been sick every single day for the last three months. I wonder if it's coinciding with all these experiments we've done whatever, my goodness, and they just kept going. It was pretty incredible. They were really pretty sick during this whole period, like nineteen hundred to nineteen ten, which is a very intense period of their research and discoveries. They're basically sick the whole time, and they never really associated like all this illness with the research they were doing. I'm not sure if that was like a cognitive choice, like let's not influence our research with these petty details of life, or if they knew and they just sort of didn't care because they just were so hungry to reveal the knowledge.
Well, technically, we don't know. I mean, they could have just been, you know, on a rash of eating bad s cargoers.
I suppose so. But you know, you look at the pattern of damage to their bodies, like their fingertips had the really terrible damage to them, you know. Murray Curie. She's now like a hero in France. Of course, they moved her ashes from wherever they had been born just about twenty years ago. They moved them to the Pantheon in Paris, which is where you know, France ters the ashes and the remains of its most highly revered citizens. And those ashes were still radioactive. This is like, you know, seventy years later what, yeah, exactly. She definitely hurt herself for science, he lives. She was really fascinated with this fact that the uranium, the U rays could change the air around them, and this is what led her to this hypothesis that it wasn't like chemical, It's not like the electron is giving off some energy that it's absorbed from some other way. She thought it was something deep in the atom, that the atoms themselves are maybe not stable, that there was something changing internally and it was giving off this energy. And of course now we know she's right, it was radioactive decay. But this was a really big and sort of bold idea at the time.
Well, at this point in our history, we knew about the atom, and we knew about the kind of the structure of it.
We knew about the electron, but we hadn't yet even discovered the nucleus of the atom. It wasn't until Rutherford bombarded gold foil with radiation later that we understood that there was like a hard center to the atom that had a nucleus. God forbid, you know, understanding the proton and the neutron inside of it. At the time, after JJ Thompson discovered the electron, he thought that matter was like a bunch of electrons sort of floating in a positively charged jelly. And so we didn't really even understand the structure of the atom. So this is a really big leap for anybody to make.
Yeah, I mean, she's saying that it comes from deep within the atom, but we didn't even know there was an atom.
Well, we knew there were atoms, we just didn't really know like what was going on inside there. We didn't really understand there was a hard nucleus that was made out of these smaller particles. So yeah, it's a pretty big leap.
All right, Let's get into her actual experiment in which she discovered this nuclear radiation and what that means and what other types of radiation were surrounded. But first let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the discovery of radiation, and we're up to Marie Crie and her discovery that the nuclei of atoms also radiate things. Because we knew about X ray radiation, but we didn't know about this particular kind which is coming from the nucleus.
Yeah, and we didn't even really know about the nucleus yet. So this is giving us an insight that there's something inside the atom, some mechanism which is capable of generating powerful particle radiation. And so this is discovered originally in urine. Beccarell saw that it happened, but what the curis did was that they sort of refined it. They discovered that uranium itself was radioactive, but that there were variations of uranium or that was even more radioactive than pure uranium itself, which suggested that there might be something else in there, even more radioactive.
Oh, I see interesting, like it's possible to make an element like an atom the extra radioactive.
Yeah, exactly. They were working with this material called pitch blend, which is a version of uranium ore, and they discovered that before you purified it, before you purified it to make just pure uranium, it was actually more radioactive. So they had this hypothesis that there was something else in there, a new element that was even more radioactive than uranium. So they developed this technique to purify it, and a lot of the time they spent, a lot of their actual science was in this process of isolating this bit. It took them, for example, three years of work on pitch blend just isolate a tenth of a gram of this new substance.
That's crazy. I imagine most people think of radioactive things as like rocks or something, but for them, this is probably like a powder or something.
Right, Yeah, these are like salts.
Right.
They're grinding them up, they're purifying it, they're doing chemistry to try to separate the bits from the other, like does this dissolve in that? How do we pull this thing apart? So it really is sort of chemical, and what they discovered is that there really is something in there that's more radioactive than uranium. Yeah, and so their big discovery was the discovery of a new element, which Marie called polonium after her native poland mm.
I see, because like if you take a uranium atom and you give it extra protons and neutrons, then it becomes a different element.
Yeah.
Actually, uranium breaks down, right, it splits open, it's unstable, and it turns into other stuff now we know, into thorium, and into radium and eventually into polonium and all sorts of stuff. So if you have a bunch of uranium, it eventually turns into this combination of elements. It breaks open and turns into smaller, lighter elements, some of which are more radioactive than uranium itself.
So I guess you could say her discovery was kind of about nuclear physics, right, even before we knew there was a nucleus, she sort of maybe intuited that, you know, there's something going on here inside of matter and atoms that can somehow, you know, give off energy and change into different elements. Right, that's maybe it was sort of a big contribution. And yeah, not so much about the radiation, but just kind of about the nature of the insides of atoms.
Yeah, exactly what the radiation reveals about the structure of atoms and the structure of matter itself. And you're right, it's totally fascinating to see one element turn into another element. And if it does that by giving off a particle, that tells you that what defines an element must be something related to its particle content. Right, you're giving off a piece and you turn into something else. That tells you that piece was essential for you to be uranium or for you to be re So that was pretty fascinating clue into the structure of the atom itself. He had early nuclear physics. And so she went on to win the Nobel Prize in nineteen oh three, same year she got her pH d thesis.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, pretty awesome. Not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, but the first woman in France to receive a PhD.
Wow. I wonder which one's more significant in a way. So she was also in on the third Nobel Prize ever.
Yeah, she and her husband Pierre and Becquerel all won the Nobel Prize in nineteen oh three. But you know, obviously she was very deserving, but the initial nomination was only for Pierre and Becquerel. They excluded her, probably because she was a woman, but Pierre insisted that, hey, look, Marie has done at least as much work as anybody else. She's very deserving. So she ended up being included in the Nobel Prize.
Wow, that's a great great husband there.
Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately he died tragically. He was hit by a horse cart filled with heavy equipment and was crushed one day.
No way, after all this, so he was killed by horse radiation.
Anyway, exactly. Horses are an energetic particle. I suppose. No, we shouldn't laugh over anybody's death. It was tragic and it was very difficult for Marie, but she persevered and she did a bunch more chemistry and isolated another element, radium, for which she won the nineteen eleven Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry.
Also, it's rare. How many people get a Nobel Prize for their PhD work? Almost nobody, right.
Not very many. There was the guy who got the Nobel Prize for his PhD work. He discovered the binary pulsars, which were an excellent test of general relativity. A fascinating story there is that he did this work as a PhD student. It wasn't really understood or appreciated at the time, so he actually left the field, then won the Nobel Prize and ended up coming back and getting to do more research. So that's pretty fun.
He was like selling cars and then he suddenly gets a call.
Not quite that far. He was working in the computing division, I think at Princeton, and then he won the Nobel Prize and they called them up and they were like, so, how big an office would you like?
Yeah, it's weird to kind of peak that early in your career, right, Although Marie kept going. She won a second Nobel Prize, and even her daughter won one too.
Yes, her daughter and her daughter's husband worked together again on radiation and they induced artificial radioactivity. They took an element which was not radioactive, a lunum, and then bombarded it with radiation and they made it radioactive. And so that was a pretty interesting discovery and they won the Nobel Prize in nineteen thirty five. So there's a lot of Nobel Prizes in the Curee family, all right.
Well, then at this point, I guess radiation is pretty much discovered. I mean we sort of that point. They knew about X rays and then also about kind of particle radiation coming from the nucleus.
Yeah, and everybody thought that radiation came from stuff, right. We had found it in ores from metals deep within the earth, and so people thought, well, if there's radiation around from the ground beneath us. So people thought if you went higher up, like higher altitude, the radiation should decrease, right because you're further away from the Earth and all these sources of radiation. But people who did measurements found something really strange. They found that as you went up to the tops of mountains, the amount of radiation seemed to be increasing, and that was weird and surprising to people.
Right, Yeah, that's when we discovered cosmic radiation.
Yeah, exactly. So there's this wonderfully hilarious pioneering physicist named Victor Hess. This guy was born in a castle and his father was a royal forester to a prince, and he did these amazing experiments where he went up on a balloon with his equipment. He improved on Pierre's electroscope to measure like ionization due to radiation, and he went up on balloons. But you couldn't just like send up the balloon and then get the data later right like the way we do now, because there's no way to record this information. So he actually went on these balloon ships himself, like sometimes up at night, really high in the atmosphere, a great personal risk. But he discovered that as you went up higher and higher, even above mountaintops, the amount of radiation increased dramatically. So this point is something really new and interesting that most of the radiation that we were feeling around us wasn't coming from the earth beneath us, but from the skies above us. Wow.
I guess once you sort of understand that there are invisible you know, things flying around you coming from the earth, and kind of makes you wonder where else are these things coming from? Or where else can you find them exactly?
And every time you discover a new way to look at the universe, you are bound to find something surprising. So discovery of radiation not just showed us what was inside the atom and helped us see inside our bodies, it also helped us see the universe in a new way and to see really really bright sources of this new kind of information, and most of it was coming from space, and so that was a big question mark for decades, like what is making radiation out in space and shooting it at us? And that's an area of research still today, Like we understand a lot of the source of that cosmic radiation now, but not all of it.
Right, Yeah, it's a big mystery. It's like it could be anything.
Yeah, at the time, people really didn't understand. Now we know that a lot of that radiation comes from the Sun, it's the solar wind, and it also comes from outside our solar system, from the galaxy, from the black hole at the center of the Milky Wave, for example, emits a lot of radiation, and other crazy stuff out there emits radiation. But there's still a lots of this radiation from space that we do not understand. The very very high energy particles very tip of that spectrum are higher energy than anything we understand can make. So radiation is still telling us about the universe and giving us clues about things out there that we don't know about.
I'm guessing the scientist just wanted a better view out of his lab, so he's like, I'm gonna put it out a balloon.
Yeah, I don't know. Or maybe he needed a break from whatever was going on in his life and he just needed an excuse to take a flight.
In this castle. Too much castle drama. It's I'm hoping on my balloon to do signs.
As we all do. If they ad made a reality show about it, that would have been the dramatic ending to an episode as he floats away in his balloon.
All right. Well, I think it's just a really interesting kind of view into how we came to see that there are a lot of things that we can see, right, because how else would you know that there's things there if you can't see them or hear them.
Yeah, And this is a pattern in physics that we keep discovering that their entire segments of the universe we didn't know anything about because for a long time they were invisible to us. The discovery of dark matter, for example, we know that dark matter is out there, it's all around us, it's streaming everywhere. It contains vast amounts of information about what's going on in the universe and how it was born and how it came to be, and we only recently discovered it exists and that tells us that there's almost certainly more stuff going on that we haven't yet cracked open and we haven't discovered that will tell future physicists crazy things about the universe that we cannot yet even anticipate.
Yeah, and it kind of also reminds you that physics can be dangerous, you know, like you're probing the unknown, you're exposing yourself to things yet you don't know whether or not they exist or not or what through drink your body.
Right, that's right. I've eaten a lot of very dangerous airline food and all of my trips to the Large Hadron Collider.
So yeah, your ashes were probably glow too, Daniel. All that Swiss teas that you're eating, it's probably redoactive.
Yes, fondue is probably not good for you, Yeah, but it's delicious. Yeah.
All right. Well, that's a pretty fascinating trip down science history lane.
And I hope it encourages all of you who are curious about things we don't understand, things we have not yet unraveled, to follow up those threads. If you see something you don't understand, try to figure it out. Something doesn't make sense to you, ask yourself questions until it does. Because remember that the history of science is just people being curious, trying to figure stuff out, and pushing forward on the envelope of human knowledge.
Right, yeah, you too can win a Nobel Prize even if you get kicked out of high school for drawing cartoons.
That's not an exaggeration.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
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