Chapter 12 DS summary

Science has always been inextricably tied to politics. Poland is one example - a political pawn across the centuries and often swallowed up by other countries. It was during one of these periods, when Poland wasn't even technically a country, the Marie Curie was born. Curie was one of the first people to begin to make the distinction between chemistry in physics, although she ended up winning Nobel prizes in both. The Nobel she won in chemistry was was for two new elements she had discovered. She named polonium after the latin word for Poland and hoped that it would cause a scandal, but the element itself was a dud as well as its interest to the media. She also discovered radium which did cause a big fuss because it was radioactive and it glowed. Ironically, her daughter, Irene Juliot-Curie, later died because of exposure to it during her experimenting with making artificially radioactive substances. Hevesy was another well known chemist during this time that after having first gone to work under the supervision of Rutherford and being given the impossible assignment of separating the radioactive tracers from the non-radioactive particles, went to work with Bohr. Bohr had determined that the at-the-time undiscovered element 72 was not a lutetium-like rare earth metal and Hevesy and his partner Coster found it on their first try. These new discoveries made chemistry seem quaint compared to quantum mechanics. Another successful pair was Meitner and Hahn that maintained their partnership even through threats from the Nazis. Fermi had just discovered what he claimed was a transuranic element, and even Irene remarked that it was a lot like lanthanum, but only Meitner was bold enough to suggest the possibility of fission. Despite their long relationship, though, the Nobel prize for discovering fission wen exclusively to Hahn although in an ironic twist of justice only Meitner had an element named after her.