The Marvelous Marie Curie

The New Atlantis ^ | Fall 2012 | Algis Valiunas

[Wonder Warthog]

"We hype the early industrial revolution and the later information revolution, but electric power and the internal combustion engine may have determined the way we live as much as any other single technological breakthrough."

I think one has to rank the fractional horsepower induction motor among them...probably before the IC engine. Without Tesla, that might not have happened as soon as it did, or at all....Edison was certainly trying to prevent it from happening. It isn't small IC engines that power our appliances. Pretty much everything that MOVES in our houses today uses them, as does much of industry.

Certainly the theorists deserve a great deal of credit...but I don't think the experimentalists get their due share.

Kind of like the guy who actually did the first PC (and no, that wasn't Wozniak).

"It is who is the most important scientist since Darwin. I don’t think anything Tesla invented, or all his inventions put together, can stand for significance in our understanding of the natural world, alongside the establishment of relativity, quantum theory, the standard model of particle physics, etc."

Well, I wouldn't put Darwin at that spot anyway. And as I recall, D wasn't actually the first to put forth the "theory of evolution"....he just was the one who got the credit.

[fidelis]

Lots of heavy hitters in this group photo from the 1927 Solvay Conference, including Madame Curie.

[mosesdapoet]

Thanks FRs. I knew if I posted that suggestion about posting pix of this lady Poles pride in fellow FRs would come through. These pictures complete a solid biography.

[Former Fetus]

I was a teenager when I read the biography written by her daughter Eva. It became my inspiration. Years later I left my country and came to the US as a graduate student, lived in a basement where the rats frolicked at night and the rain caused the kitchen to flood... but I was pretty sure that it was better than wherever she had had to live. I remembered reading in the biography that, as a student, Marie Curie lived for a long time on cheese and grapes (when available); I lived on plain white rice, cheese and cheap vitamins. She was my heroine, and I thought it was so romantic to endure hardships as a future scientist!