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Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, would you risk your life for science? It

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Speaker 1: might depend on the science we're talking about. Would you

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Speaker 1: risk getting eaten if you've got to meet Adians for example? Tempting,

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Speaker 1: but I'll pass. How about would you risk speghettification if

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Speaker 1: you got to see the inside of a black hole?

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Speaker 1: You know, I might actually take that trip. Or would

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Speaker 1: you risk deadly radiation to understand the nature of matter? Actually,

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Speaker 1: I've kind of already done that. One really does a

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Speaker 1: large hadron collider generate deadly radiation? It does, But that's

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Speaker 1: not how I've been exposed. How have you been exposed

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Speaker 1: to radiation? Well, flying the switzerlanded back like a thousand times,

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Speaker 1: you get a lot more radiation at high altitude, really

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Speaker 1: you have. Every Transatlantic trip is like a chest X ray.

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Speaker 1: I thought you said you've been been by a radioactive

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Speaker 1: Swiss spider, and I gained that spider's proportional physics, smart

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Speaker 1: and chocolate making ability. I am jorhandmade cartoonists and the

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Speaker 1: creator of PhD comics. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,

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Speaker 1: and I like to think of myself as radioactive. Are

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Speaker 1: you technically radioactive? Are most people radioactive? At some level,

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Speaker 1: like bananas are radioactive. Yeah, so you're probably more radioactive

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Speaker 1: than most people. But I grew up in Los Almos,

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Speaker 1: New Mexico, where we like to say we all glow

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Speaker 1: in the dark. Really, I did grow up in Los Almos,

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Speaker 1: but we don't actually like to say that. Well, I

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Speaker 1: do eat a lot of bananas, and I do have

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Speaker 1: a certain glow about me, i'd like to think, but yeah,

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Speaker 1: Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the university

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Speaker 1: production of our Heart Radio, in which we shine a

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Speaker 1: radioactive glow into all the mysteries of the universe, the big,

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Speaker 1: crazy things that are out there tearing the universe apart,

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Speaker 1: the powerful forces that are holding it together, the things

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Speaker 1: far from home, and the things right here in our backyard.

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Speaker 1: All the mysteries of physics revealed and explained to you.

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Speaker 1: That's right, we radiate knowledge and give you an X

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Speaker 1: ray view of all of the amazing secrets that are

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Speaker 1: out there to discover in the universe, and all of

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Speaker 1: the secrets that are yet to be discovered. And all

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Speaker 1: the while you can stay home and safe, tucked into

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Speaker 1: your couch, sipping that mug of tea and learning about

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Speaker 1: the universe. No tinfoil hat needed or leadline hats. That's right.

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Speaker 1: This counts exactly zero as part of your annual dose

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Speaker 1: of radiation, even though you'll be learning all about it.

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Speaker 1: It's right. Well, we're technically getting to people through sound waves,

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Speaker 1: not light weights or radiation. That's right. But actually radiation

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Speaker 1: is sort of any sort of energetic particle or wave.

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Speaker 1: So sound is technically speaking a kind of radiation. So

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Speaker 1: we are radiating your ears with our voices. What no it,

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Speaker 1: I said a limit? Get you like, if I throw

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Speaker 1: a baseball, I'm radiating a baseball. Baseballs are radiation, yes, absolutely, Now,

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Speaker 1: the technical definition of radiation is sort of weirdly broad.

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Speaker 1: Any kind of light, any kind of particle, any kind

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Speaker 1: of way that transmits energy is radiation. But practically speaking,

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Speaker 1: when we talk about radiation, we mean very high energy

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Speaker 1: particles or higher energy waves that are going to deposit

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Speaker 1: a significant amount of energy. And so a flashlight or

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Speaker 1: this podcast are not typically categorized as radiation, even though technically,

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Speaker 1: according to physicists it is. Well it's a very loaded word,

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Speaker 1: isn't it. I mean, especially like in the eighties. I

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Speaker 1: feel in the nineties, you know, radiation was such a

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Speaker 1: negative thing, and nobody wanted radiation and the thing that

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Speaker 1: made you sick. Yeah, exactly. Radiation can be pretty dangerous.

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Speaker 1: They're basically these little invisible bullets flying through the universe,

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Speaker 1: and they can do real damage. They can fly through

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Speaker 1: your cells, they can bust up your DNA, they can

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Speaker 1: cause you cancer. And so radiation definitely is something to

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Speaker 1: think about and worry about. And it's one of these

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Speaker 1: things in the world that's not visible to our naked

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Speaker 1: eye yet turns out to be pretty important. So it's

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Speaker 1: a key that tells us that there's a lot going

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Speaker 1: on in the universe that we can't directly see. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: So a big question is how do we even discover

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Speaker 1: radiation or even come to believe it exists if it

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Speaker 1: is in fact invisible. Yeah, it's part of this story

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Speaker 1: of peeling back the nature of reality and figuring out

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Speaker 1: that the universe has a lot of stuff going on.

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Speaker 1: But to me, it's always fascinating to figure out how

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Speaker 1: that came to be, how that understanding sort of filtering

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Speaker 1: into human minds, because here we are standing on the

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Speaker 1: shoulders of giants, understanding all these things about the way

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Speaker 1: the world works. But this required a real shift in

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Speaker 1: people's understanding of the nature of the universe. So I'm

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Speaker 1: always super interested in those moments, like what was it

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Speaker 1: to convinced people? What experiments did people do that revealed that,

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Speaker 1: because I hope that will help us understand what experiments

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Speaker 1: in the future might again change the way we think

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Speaker 1: about the universe. Yeah. So usually people assign this discovery

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Speaker 1: to Madame Curie and her experiments, but there's actually more

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Speaker 1: to the story, right there is she did not, in

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Speaker 1: fact discover radiation. She won a couple of Nobel prizes.

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Speaker 1: She was quite a genius. She discovered a lot of stuff,

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Speaker 1: but you can't give her credit for discovering radiation. It's

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Speaker 1: a fascinating story. Well you can't even define it. I mean, sure,

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Speaker 1: then nobody discovered radiation or everyone discovered that's right. The

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Speaker 1: first little swimming organism that developed an eyeball, I supposed

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Speaker 1: discovered radiation when it used photons to guide itself around

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Speaker 1: the primordial soup on Earth. I suppose, yeah, right, like

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Speaker 1: the first organism to use or detect light. Right, that

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Speaker 1: definitely predates humanity. But I think we should focus on

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Speaker 1: the kind of radiation we're talking about, which is you know,

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Speaker 1: high energy particles or waves that come from like radioactive decay,

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Speaker 1: things that are different from the normal kinds of radiation

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Speaker 1: we used to live our lives. We're talking about a

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Speaker 1: change in how we've understood the universe. Okay, so it's

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Speaker 1: a invisible well, potentially dangerous and obviously very scientifically significant.

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Speaker 1: But how was radiation discovered? That's a big question, and

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Speaker 1: that's the question we're exploring today. So to the end

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Speaker 1: the program, we'll be talking about how was radiation discovered? So,

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Speaker 1: as usually, we were wondering how many people out there

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Speaker 1: knew how radiation was discovered? So thank you to everybody

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Speaker 1: who have volunteered their answers to these tricky physics questions

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Speaker 1: without referring to any reference materials, Google or Being or

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Speaker 1: ask Jeeves. And if you would like to participate in

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Speaker 1: future Baseless Speculations for the podcast, please write to us

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Speaker 1: two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Maybe that

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Speaker 1: should be the name of that website, Daniel Baseless speculation

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Speaker 1: dot com. You might get a lot of hits. Yeah, exactly.

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Speaker 1: We just pointed to our book every single time we

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Speaker 1: have no idea. Dot com is the answer to all

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Speaker 1: these questions. Oh, interesting, interesting marketing technique. Lure people in

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Speaker 1: with a juicy website and then sell them a book.

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Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. I think they call that click bait. So

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Speaker 1: think about it for a second. If someone approached you

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Speaker 1: and asked you if you knew how radiation was discovered,

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Speaker 1: what would you say. Here's what people had to say.

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Speaker 1: I have no idea, but I think it has something

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Speaker 1: to do with Marie Curry playing around with some kind

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Speaker 1: of radioactive substance and like X raying her hand or

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Speaker 1: something like that. Radiation was discovered by Madame Cury. I

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Speaker 1: just know that was discovered Marie Cury. I believe radiation

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Speaker 1: was discovered by Marie Cury. I don't know how she

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Speaker 1: did it. She was probably experimenting with what became known

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Speaker 1: as radium and saw it glowing. I think radiation was

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Speaker 1: discovered in the eighteen hundreds when some radioactive material uranium

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Speaker 1: was glowing in the dark or was unusually hot. All right,

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Speaker 1: it looks like Marie Curry and the Curys have a

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Speaker 1: pretty good policies because most people went to them as

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Speaker 1: the discoverers of radiation. Yeah, she definitely ensconced in popular

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Speaker 1: culture as somebody deeply associated with radiation. And you know,

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Speaker 1: she actually did have a good publicist late in her career.

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Speaker 1: She did a whole tour of the United States giving

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Speaker 1: talks all about radiation stuff. So she became quite famous

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Speaker 1: and associated with radiation. So that has lasted up to

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Speaker 1: the present day, almost a hundred years later. Right, Well,

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Speaker 1: we don't want to take away anything that she did

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Speaker 1: or that the Crease did. It's really more about definition.

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Speaker 1: I think I think she discovered a particular type of

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Speaker 1: radiation or I guess we'll get into that, but generally speaking,

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Speaker 1: it kind of seems like radiation maybe is a broader

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Speaker 1: concept than most people assume it is. There's definitely that,

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Speaker 1: and she made important contributions and discovered particular kinds of

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Speaker 1: radioactive elopments. Will dig into that, but you're right, radiation

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Speaker 1: is a sort of a broader set of things. Radiation

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Speaker 1: is not just uranium decays and shoots out deadly particles.

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Speaker 1: There's a broader set of things. We consider radiation not

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Speaker 1: just ordinary light. But it starts, for example, with X rays,

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Speaker 1: Like X rays are just high energy photons, but we

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Speaker 1: consider them radiation. Yeah, I guess you're saying earlier that

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Speaker 1: any light is considered radiation. Even sound is considered radiation,

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Speaker 1: even like heat, I guess heat is radiation. Yeah, exactly,

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Speaker 1: you radiate heat. You run a lap and you get

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Speaker 1: really hot, you are radiating heat out into the universe.

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Speaker 1: And everything in the universe that has a temperature gives

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Speaker 1: off heat, and so everything in the universe is radiating constantly.

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Speaker 1: Radiation is everywhere. But that's sort of again the sort

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Speaker 1: of technical physical term for it. When we talk about radiation,

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Speaker 1: we think about sort of damaging radiation, radiation that's long

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Speaker 1: been invisible to us and reveals something different about how

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Speaker 1: the world works. And it was really crucial in understanding

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Speaker 1: things like the nature of the atom and the deep

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Speaker 1: structure of matter. Right, Well, we knew about light for

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Speaker 1: a long time. I mean, it's it's kind of in

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Speaker 1: the Bible, Daniel, that they'll be light. It was like

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Speaker 1: the first thing is that a reference book. I wasn't

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Speaker 1: familiar with that, you know, God at all. I think

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Speaker 1: there's some rata for that one. It's probably the most

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Speaker 1: impact factor of wall puplications in the history of man. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I submitted something, but it got rejected by the referees.

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Speaker 1: So I mean of course, we've known about light for

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Speaker 1: a long time, So I guess when when do you

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Speaker 1: draw the line as us having discovered radiation, Like, is

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Speaker 1: it x rays? Is that the first kind of you know,

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Speaker 1: powerful kind of radiation invisible that we've discovered. Yeah, I

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Speaker 1: think the discovery of X rays really marked the turning point.

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Speaker 1: It's the time we discovered that there are ways to

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Speaker 1: transmit energy or other kinds of light that are different

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Speaker 1: from the kind of visible light we were familiar with.

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Speaker 1: And this specifically was a kind of light that we

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Speaker 1: saw could sort of pass through walls and pass through barriers,

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Speaker 1: and so it really was doing something different from the

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Speaker 1: kind of visible light we were familiar with. And that's

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Speaker 1: exactly how it was discovered. I see, like, if you're

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Speaker 1: shine a flashlight, it gets blocked by the wall. But

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Speaker 1: if you shine an X ray tube at at a wall,

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Speaker 1: it will go right through. It will go through most

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Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, exactly. And that's why we call it,

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Speaker 1: you know, X raying something because X rays passed through

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Speaker 1: the soft tissue of your body, but not your bones,

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Speaker 1: and so they reveal what's going on inside. And so

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Speaker 1: radiation is interesting because they can do these things in

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Speaker 1: visible light can't do. But also because it has this power,

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Speaker 1: it penetrates and so it reveals what's the inside, all right,

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Speaker 1: So then how do we discover X rays? So X

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Speaker 1: rays discovered by this guy Runken. And this guy was

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Speaker 1: a character. I think you'd like this. He actually was

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Speaker 1: kicked out of high school as a student because he

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Speaker 1: drew a caricature of one of his teachers, which is

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Speaker 1: not very flattering, and so he's sort of a physicist

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Speaker 1: and a cartoonist. I almost got exposed from my school

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Speaker 1: for the exact same reason, actually exactly. I didn't this

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Speaker 1: caricature one teacher, I did all of them. Well then

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Speaker 1: maybe there's a Nobel prize in your future. Yeah, stay tuned.

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Speaker 1: But he was doing experiments at the time with these

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Speaker 1: things called Crooks tubes. We talked about these before because

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Speaker 1: they were how electrons were discovered. They're basically just these

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Speaker 1: glass tubes that are mostly have vacuum in them. You

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Speaker 1: have an anode and a cathode with voltage across them,

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Speaker 1: and so you pull electrons off. People have seen these

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Speaker 1: seeing before and you get these beams, these glowing beams

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Speaker 1: inside that look really cool because the electrons were like

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Speaker 1: knocking off atoms and ionizing them, and people were doing

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Speaker 1: lots of experiments with them trying to understand what they were.

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Speaker 1: And again J. J. Thompson used them to discover the electrons.

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Speaker 1: But Runkin was really interested in whether or not the

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Speaker 1: rays that were being produced inside these tubes could pass

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Speaker 1: through the glass. He was curious to see what they

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Speaker 1: could get through. But these rays were originally electrons, like

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Speaker 1: like a stream of electrons or or were they light?

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Speaker 1: These were a stream of electrons and that's what J. J.

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Speaker 1: Thompson discovered. But the glow that you saw that was

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Speaker 1: visible light. And so the electrons would knock into a

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Speaker 1: few atoms inside the tube, ionized them, they would give

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Speaker 1: off some light, and then they would decay back to

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Speaker 1: their ground state. So what people were sort of ooing

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Speaker 1: and aweing over, we're seeing a beam of electrons exciting

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Speaker 1: the gas inside the tube. Okay, but just clear the

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Speaker 1: the X ray is not the electrons and X rays

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Speaker 1: is a light beam, right, that's right. The X ray

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Speaker 1: is not an electron electron as a particle, and X

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Speaker 1: ray is a piece of light. Right, It's a photon

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Speaker 1: of a specific energy. But this is what Runkin started

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Speaker 1: with He started with these tubes and he was playing

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Speaker 1: around with them, and he accidentally discovered that they also

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Speaker 1: generate X rays, like along with the electrons or when

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Speaker 1: the electrons hit stuff. So the electrons, one of the

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Speaker 1: things they do is they generate a glow that you

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Speaker 1: can see with your naked eye, but they also sometimes

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Speaker 1: generate X rays, and we can get into the whole

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Speaker 1: details of exactly how that happens, how they're accelerated and radios.

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Speaker 1: But sometimes they generate visible light in our spectrum, and

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Speaker 1: sometimes they generate photons that are higher energy, and these

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Speaker 1: are X rays. So he was interested in understanding, like

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Speaker 1: what is this thing generating? Can it pass through the

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Speaker 1: glass walls of the tube. So what he did was

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Speaker 1: he built a big black box, like a light proof box.

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Speaker 1: And his idea was, I'm gonna put this box around

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Speaker 1: my tube. I'm gonna see what light is show mind,

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Speaker 1: and the inside of the box from this tube, so

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Speaker 1: I can see sort of like you know what, light

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Speaker 1: comes out of the tube and hits the side of

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Speaker 1: the box. So I guess he wanted to know. He

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Speaker 1: thought he was trapping the light that was coming from

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Speaker 1: the Catherine tube, but actually he saw that the light

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Speaker 1: kind of leaked outside of it. Yeah, exactly, he turned

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Speaker 1: off the lights in his laboratory just to sort of

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Speaker 1: like get things warmed up, and he was going to

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Speaker 1: look inside the box to see if he could see

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Speaker 1: like light on the inside walls of the box. But

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Speaker 1: before he did that, he noticed that he saw this

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Speaker 1: weird light outside the box on the wall of his laboratory,

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Speaker 1: and he was like, what's that over there? And it

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Speaker 1: turns out he had a special sort of screen over

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Speaker 1: there just happened to be in the right location that

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Speaker 1: can receive X rays and glows when it hits X rays,

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Speaker 1: And so he discovered that the light doesn't just go

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Speaker 1: through the glass. It also went through his box all

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Speaker 1: the way out to the side of his lab and

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Speaker 1: hit this special screen. So it was quite by accident

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Speaker 1: that he discovered these X rays. Whoa was a special

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Speaker 1: screen that he just had that that seems like such

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Speaker 1: an accidental discovery. It's totally an accidental discovery. And it's

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Speaker 1: a special screen covered with a material that phosphoresces, so

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Speaker 1: it absorbs photons at one wavelength and then it gives

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Speaker 1: off photons at a different wavelength. So it's a wavelength

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Speaker 1: shifting effect. And this is the kind of thing we

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Speaker 1: do all the time in physics these days. We absorb

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Speaker 1: photons of one thing and it give off photons of

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Speaker 1: another color. So he happened to have a screen covered

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Speaker 1: in this material. It was a barrio phosphorescent material that

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Speaker 1: could absorb X rays and glow in the visible light.

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Speaker 1: And he was like, what's that over there, and did

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Speaker 1: a bunch of experiments, and he discovered that it could

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Speaker 1: pass through his box, and it could pass through lots

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Speaker 1: of other things, but that it wouldn't pass through metal,

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Speaker 1: for example. Now, was this the first time that, you know,

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Speaker 1: humans kind of got the idea that light can go

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Speaker 1: through things, or did we already kind of know that

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Speaker 1: there are things in nature that can go through things? Now,

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Speaker 1: this is the first time we understood that light could

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Speaker 1: pass through something that we thought was the wise solid.

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Speaker 1: And famously, the first X ray picture he ever took

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Speaker 1: was of his wife's hand, and you could see her

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Speaker 1: hand with its wedding ring on it, and he showed

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Speaker 1: it to her and he thought, this is gonna be

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Speaker 1: so romantic and awesome. She was actually really creeped out,

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Speaker 1: and she thought oh my gosh, I've seen my own death,

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Speaker 1: because she'd seemed like her own skeleton inside her hand.

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Speaker 1: And I think it really changed the way people felt

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Speaker 1: about like the solidity of stuff. Right, you think of

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Speaker 1: yourself as solid and opaque, but you're not. You're transparent

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Speaker 1: in some wavelengths of light, in your opaque in other

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Speaker 1: wavelengths of light. So then from that they they invented

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Speaker 1: X rays, you know, for medical purposes. Yeah, things happened

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Speaker 1: really fast because people very quickly understood how powerful this was.

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Speaker 1: Like you could see broken bones inside the body, or

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Speaker 1: you could see if you're tiled, it's swallowed something metal,

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Speaker 1: and so just seeing inside the body without having to

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Speaker 1: cut it open was immediately and enormously powerful. And within

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Speaker 1: a year people were using it in hospitals. And it

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Speaker 1: wasn't hard to make X rays, like Crookes tubes were

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Speaker 1: a thing that already existed, and so the technology sort

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Speaker 1: of was all around. It just took the right combination

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Speaker 1: of knowing what to do and how to do it.

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Speaker 1: And he went on to win the first Nobel Prize

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Speaker 1: in physics just a few years later. Really the first one,

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Speaker 1: the first one, yeah, exactly, and you know it sort

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Speaker 1: of satisfies all the requirements. It teaches you something deep

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Speaker 1: about the universe and also made a very big impact

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Speaker 1: on humanity. Wo and it sounds like it was really

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Speaker 1: more about discovering the screen is a combination. You have

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Speaker 1: to have the radiation and you have to have a

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Speaker 1: screen that can receive it. Right, X rays are invisible

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Speaker 1: to us, and so if they can just fly through

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Speaker 1: the universe and fly through a wall to see them,

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Speaker 1: you have to put something in their path that they

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Speaker 1: will interact with and that transform that information into something

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Speaker 1: your eyeballs can see. All right, Well, that's X ray radiation,

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Speaker 1: which is light radiation. But I guess the more popular

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Speaker 1: kind of radiation, or at least in people's consciousness, is

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Speaker 1: particle radiation. And that's where the curies come in. And

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Speaker 1: so let's get into that kind of radiation. But first,

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Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. All right, we're talking about

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Speaker 1: radiation and how it was discovered and how you should

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Speaker 1: probably wear sunscreen when you're outside and near particle colliders?

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Speaker 1: Would that help Daniel and near physicists? Probably because they

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Speaker 1: they're so shiny and beaming. Well, they just had to

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Speaker 1: do these crazy experiments which sometimes you know, do damage

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Speaker 1: their own help. All right, Well, I guess we talked

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Speaker 1: about X ray radiation, which which is really just light

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Speaker 1: at higher frequencies that can pass through things, and some

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Speaker 1: people associate that with radiation. But maybe the more common

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Speaker 1: type of radiation that people think of is kind of

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Speaker 1: the dangerous kind, I guess, the nuclear kind, and that's

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Speaker 1: more like particle radiation. Yeah, and X rays, of course

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Speaker 1: also dangerous. They can deposit a lot of energy in

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Speaker 1: your skin, and they can cause cancer and UV radiation

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Speaker 1: all that stuff, So it's definitely dangerous. But particle radiation

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Speaker 1: also very dangerous and more famous because I think of

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Speaker 1: the radioactive decays involved in nuclear physics, for example. But

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Speaker 1: particle radiation was discovered pretty soon after particles were discovered. Remember,

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Speaker 1: the whole idea of a particle didn't really exist until J. J.

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Speaker 1: Thompson discovered the electron in the late eighteen hundreds. You know,

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Speaker 1: this notion that everything was made out of tiny little bits,

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Speaker 1: and we could find those things and we could associate

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Speaker 1: like a tiny dot in space with mass and with

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Speaker 1: other quantities. This is a whole new idea in physics

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Speaker 1: at the time. It's not something which had existed for

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Speaker 1: a long time right before, Like light was just like

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Speaker 1: a beam, right, like pure energy kind of. Yeah, the

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Speaker 1: wave properties of light were dominant, and people thought about

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Speaker 1: light as a wave. They thought about matter and waves existing.

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Speaker 1: But the whole idea that things were made out of

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Speaker 1: tiny particles, or that these tiny particles could fly through

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Speaker 1: space invisibly and hurt you, for example, this was brand new,

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Speaker 1: but it was discovered pretty soon after the electron was

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Speaker 1: discovered again in the late eighteen hundreds, like the next year. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and it was spurred by the discovery of X rays.

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Speaker 1: Like everybody in the world was very excited about the

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Speaker 1: X ray discovery made a huge wave in the world

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Speaker 1: of physics. Pun definitely intended and I thought it was unintentional. No,

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Speaker 1: And this bit about the screen that you latched onto.

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Speaker 1: This guy Beck Carrell, he also was really excited about that.

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Speaker 1: He thought it's really cool for something to absorb energy

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Speaker 1: in one wavelength and emit in another. To absorb one

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Speaker 1: kind of energy and emit another kind of thing. It's

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Speaker 1: called luminescence. And he thought he was really exciting and

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Speaker 1: he wanted to follow up in this and make also

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Speaker 1: some kind of crazy discovery and he came from a

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Speaker 1: long line of physicists people have been studying this sort

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Speaker 1: of kind of thing of generation of heat and energy.

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Speaker 1: So he did a series of experiments with uranium crystals

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Speaker 1: and he was the first to discover particle radiation. So

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Speaker 1: he actually came well before the curies. So interesting. Well,

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Speaker 1: apparently his father was also a physicist and a radiation

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Speaker 1: physicist too. That's right. He actually came from several generations

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Speaker 1: of physicists and they all had the same job. They

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Speaker 1: all had like the same chair in the head of

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Speaker 1: the natural science department in Paris, and so it was

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Speaker 1: sort of like a hereditary position almost. He's like a

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Speaker 1: legacy physicist in France. So his father looked into radiation,

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Speaker 1: but he didn't discover it. His father also had been

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Speaker 1: studying uranium crystals, and after Beccarel discovered radiation, people went

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Speaker 1: back and looked at his father's notebooks and there was

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Speaker 1: plenty of evidence in his father's notebooks to document evidence

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Speaker 1: of radiation, but his father just sort of didn't put

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Speaker 1: it together. And this is something you can do in physics.

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Speaker 1: When people make a big discovery, you can look back

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Speaker 1: at people who might have discovered it. If they had

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Speaker 1: only believed their results or followed up on something they

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Speaker 1: didn't understand. It sort of missed opportunities in physics. I

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Speaker 1: one know, if you want people to see that or

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Speaker 1: it's just kind of a little bit embarrassing from a

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Speaker 1: physics point of view. I think it's super fascinating from

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Speaker 1: a sort of history of science point of view. You

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Speaker 1: get a result that you don't understand or doesn't make sense,

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Speaker 1: do you always follow up on it or do you

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Speaker 1: sort of leave it behind? And those missed opportunities, you know,

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Speaker 1: those times when signs could have gone differently if somebody

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Speaker 1: had taken a different path and thought about something different

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Speaker 1: or had a different conversation at a conference. It's fascinating

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Speaker 1: to me to imagine the sort of alternate universes in

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Speaker 1: which we discovered things in different orders, because that's what

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Speaker 1: everyone wants in their tombstone, you know. Could have won

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Speaker 1: a Nobel prize. Yeah, But they did these experiments with

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Speaker 1: uranium crystals. So uranium was a thing, it was known,

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Speaker 1: it wasn't understood what it was doing, but they were

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Speaker 1: doing early studies with it. And essentially what they did

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Speaker 1: basically is they just put it next to photographic plates,

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Speaker 1: Like photographs were a thing back then, so they just

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Speaker 1: wrapped them in paper and put them next to photographic plates,

430
00:22:56,359 --> 00:22:58,879
Speaker 1: and they wanted to see what would happen. Oh right,

431
00:22:58,920 --> 00:23:02,320
Speaker 1: because they had photo grass at that time, and that

432
00:23:02,400 --> 00:23:04,360
Speaker 1: it is also kind of like magic, like light hits

433
00:23:04,400 --> 00:23:07,119
Speaker 1: it and or not hit it and it changes color. Yeah, exactly.

434
00:23:07,160 --> 00:23:10,800
Speaker 1: It's a special process that absorbs photons and develops in

435
00:23:10,840 --> 00:23:13,119
Speaker 1: a different way based on you know, the amount of

436
00:23:13,119 --> 00:23:15,680
Speaker 1: photons that hit it. To really sort of awesome chemical

437
00:23:15,760 --> 00:23:19,560
Speaker 1: process for absorbing things and taking data. And back before

438
00:23:19,560 --> 00:23:22,800
Speaker 1: we had computers and digital cameras and stuff, everything was analog.

439
00:23:23,160 --> 00:23:26,000
Speaker 1: This was a powerful way to do science experiments. But

440
00:23:26,080 --> 00:23:29,040
Speaker 1: Beckerel sort of started off on the wrong track. Remember

441
00:23:29,080 --> 00:23:31,720
Speaker 1: he was interested in luminescence. He thought if you took

442
00:23:31,760 --> 00:23:34,320
Speaker 1: these uranium crystals and you left them in the sun,

443
00:23:34,720 --> 00:23:36,800
Speaker 1: that they would absorb a bunch of energy from the

444
00:23:36,840 --> 00:23:40,080
Speaker 1: sun and then they might glow in some new invisible way.

445
00:23:40,480 --> 00:23:42,880
Speaker 1: So he put these uranium crystals in the sun, then

446
00:23:42,880 --> 00:23:45,440
Speaker 1: he wrapped them in paper to block an invisible light,

447
00:23:45,720 --> 00:23:48,119
Speaker 1: and he put them next to these photographic plates. So

448
00:23:48,160 --> 00:23:50,199
Speaker 1: he was hoping maybe he would like find a new

449
00:23:50,240 --> 00:23:52,280
Speaker 1: way to make X rays, or that they would admit

450
00:23:52,320 --> 00:23:54,840
Speaker 1: in the X ray because X rays had just been discovered,

451
00:23:54,840 --> 00:23:58,760
Speaker 1: all right, So he saw radiation and X rays and

452
00:23:58,800 --> 00:24:00,919
Speaker 1: he thought, hey, I wonder if that works everything. So

453
00:24:00,960 --> 00:24:03,120
Speaker 1: do do you think he tried a bunch of different materials,

454
00:24:03,119 --> 00:24:05,640
Speaker 1: not just these uranium crystals. Yeah, he tried a bunch

455
00:24:05,680 --> 00:24:09,359
Speaker 1: of different materials wondering what would glow. But these uranium salts,

456
00:24:09,400 --> 00:24:11,919
Speaker 1: these uranium crystals were the things that gave him the

457
00:24:12,000 --> 00:24:15,200
Speaker 1: best results. But that's not actually the most interesting part

458
00:24:15,200 --> 00:24:17,800
Speaker 1: of his discovery. I mean, first he did that, he said,

459
00:24:17,800 --> 00:24:20,000
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put these things out in the sun. Then

460
00:24:20,040 --> 00:24:21,879
Speaker 1: I'm gonna wrap them in paper to block in a

461
00:24:21,960 --> 00:24:24,439
Speaker 1: visible light and see if they make an impact on

462
00:24:24,480 --> 00:24:27,200
Speaker 1: the photographic plates. And they did so he thought, oh,

463
00:24:27,280 --> 00:24:31,280
Speaker 1: that's cool. But then he accidentally left a bunch of

464
00:24:31,320 --> 00:24:35,280
Speaker 1: them in a drawer next to these photographic plates without

465
00:24:35,359 --> 00:24:38,399
Speaker 1: shining them in the sun, so he sort of messed

466
00:24:38,480 --> 00:24:40,400
Speaker 1: up his experiment. He thought it was necessary to leave

467
00:24:40,440 --> 00:24:42,240
Speaker 1: it in in the sun to absorb energy and then it

468
00:24:42,280 --> 00:24:45,480
Speaker 1: would give off this radiation, but he accidentally left over

469
00:24:45,480 --> 00:24:48,600
Speaker 1: the weekend a bunch of iranium crystals next to one

470
00:24:48,640 --> 00:24:51,440
Speaker 1: of these photographic plates and came back the next week

471
00:24:51,720 --> 00:24:54,080
Speaker 1: and said, m oops for guys to leave this stuff

472
00:24:54,080 --> 00:24:56,480
Speaker 1: in the sun. But let's just develop this film and

473
00:24:56,520 --> 00:25:02,600
Speaker 1: see what it says. What seriously, seriously, total accident, total accident.

474
00:25:02,840 --> 00:25:04,360
Speaker 1: And he thought, well, you know, I guess I did

475
00:25:04,400 --> 00:25:06,720
Speaker 1: this weird experiment where I skipped the step with the sun.

476
00:25:07,080 --> 00:25:09,320
Speaker 1: Let's see what happens. And he developed it and the

477
00:25:09,400 --> 00:25:12,359
Speaker 1: picture looked exactly the same, which tells him that it

478
00:25:12,400 --> 00:25:15,240
Speaker 1: didn't need to absorb energy from the sun. It wasn't

479
00:25:15,480 --> 00:25:18,400
Speaker 1: luminescence where it was slurping in energy from the sun

480
00:25:18,440 --> 00:25:21,000
Speaker 1: and then changing it into X rays or something. It

481
00:25:21,119 --> 00:25:24,359
Speaker 1: was different. The uranium crystals were just giving off energy

482
00:25:24,520 --> 00:25:26,840
Speaker 1: on their own. They were just like a source of

483
00:25:26,880 --> 00:25:31,480
Speaker 1: some new kind of radiation, some new kind of invisible ray. Right,

484
00:25:31,680 --> 00:25:34,440
Speaker 1: that's really what he thought, Right, something invisible is coming

485
00:25:34,440 --> 00:25:37,840
Speaker 1: out of this, and this invisible thing somehow had energy. Yeah,

486
00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:40,800
Speaker 1: and you didn't have to put in energy. It's not

487
00:25:40,840 --> 00:25:43,200
Speaker 1: like with the Crooks too, where you have to apply electricity.

488
00:25:43,400 --> 00:25:46,199
Speaker 1: And it generated energy for the electrons which generated the

489
00:25:46,359 --> 00:25:48,960
Speaker 1: X rays. And it wasn't like phosphorescence where you have

490
00:25:49,040 --> 00:25:50,960
Speaker 1: to sit out in the sun and absorb the energy

491
00:25:51,000 --> 00:25:53,200
Speaker 1: and then give it off. It was just like pumping

492
00:25:53,240 --> 00:25:56,399
Speaker 1: out this invisible energy. And now we know that it

493
00:25:56,480 --> 00:25:59,439
Speaker 1: was alpha radiation and beta radiation, but he didn't know

494
00:25:59,480 --> 00:26:00,960
Speaker 1: that at the time, and he just knew he was

495
00:26:01,000 --> 00:26:04,040
Speaker 1: admitting some crazy new rays. And then he also won

496
00:26:04,119 --> 00:26:05,960
Speaker 1: a Nobel Prize for it, right, he won like the

497
00:26:05,960 --> 00:26:08,320
Speaker 1: third one he did, he won the third one, but

498
00:26:08,520 --> 00:26:12,280
Speaker 1: just barely. He discovered this, and the day after he

499
00:26:12,400 --> 00:26:15,720
Speaker 1: made this discovery he gave a presentation at like the

500
00:26:15,800 --> 00:26:19,640
Speaker 1: local scientific society, and he beat out some English physicists

501
00:26:19,640 --> 00:26:23,480
Speaker 1: who made the discovery like later that week. What we what?

502
00:26:23,480 --> 00:26:25,360
Speaker 1: But if he gave the presentation, then the other one

503
00:26:25,720 --> 00:26:29,239
Speaker 1: technically didn't the discovery or I guess he wasn't at

504
00:26:29,240 --> 00:26:31,320
Speaker 1: the presentation. He wasn't there yet, because you know the

505
00:26:31,320 --> 00:26:33,680
Speaker 1: world was much smaller, so you could give a whole

506
00:26:33,680 --> 00:26:36,360
Speaker 1: presentation and a society and friends, and nobody would hear

507
00:26:36,359 --> 00:26:39,439
Speaker 1: about it in England until weeks later or so. And

508
00:26:39,480 --> 00:26:43,240
Speaker 1: so Sylvanis Thompson made very very similar experiments, very similar

509
00:26:43,240 --> 00:26:46,159
Speaker 1: discoveries just a few days later and lost out on

510
00:26:46,200 --> 00:26:49,520
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize because Beckerel made this discovery and was

511
00:26:49,640 --> 00:26:52,080
Speaker 1: very quick to report it. Oh, I see Beckrell was

512
00:26:52,119 --> 00:26:56,400
Speaker 1: in another country. Yes, this is in France. Interesting. Wow,

513
00:26:56,440 --> 00:26:59,480
Speaker 1: that's crazy. Two people in two different countries make the

514
00:26:59,560 --> 00:27:03,800
Speaker 1: same fundamental discovery almost a week apart, and there was

515
00:27:03,840 --> 00:27:06,840
Speaker 1: no internet. There was no internet. But this is all

516
00:27:06,920 --> 00:27:10,080
Speaker 1: spurred by Runkin's discovery of X rays and like cracked

517
00:27:10,119 --> 00:27:12,480
Speaker 1: open a whole new area of research. People looking for

518
00:27:12,520 --> 00:27:15,080
Speaker 1: these invisible rays. How can we find them, what's making them?

519
00:27:15,080 --> 00:27:17,680
Speaker 1: What kinds are out there? And it really did sparkle,

520
00:27:17,920 --> 00:27:20,359
Speaker 1: you know, a whole new field of research, all right.

521
00:27:20,480 --> 00:27:24,240
Speaker 1: So then that's where we get to Madame Curie and

522
00:27:24,480 --> 00:27:26,840
Speaker 1: Pierre Curie and that that this is kind of where

523
00:27:26,880 --> 00:27:30,000
Speaker 1: their story starts, right like the year after, Yeah, exactly,

524
00:27:30,000 --> 00:27:31,920
Speaker 1: this is where their story starts. So they came in

525
00:27:32,400 --> 00:27:35,880
Speaker 1: after Beckarel had already discovered radiation and Runkin had discovered

526
00:27:36,000 --> 00:27:38,920
Speaker 1: X rays, and they were really interested in this. And

527
00:27:39,000 --> 00:27:42,760
Speaker 1: Curie herself has a really fascinating backstory. Remember it's very

528
00:27:42,800 --> 00:27:47,159
Speaker 1: difficult for women in science to have any position and

529
00:27:47,200 --> 00:27:50,320
Speaker 1: to have any engagement, to even get an education. She

530
00:27:50,480 --> 00:27:53,280
Speaker 1: and her sister, for example, had to take turns working

531
00:27:53,520 --> 00:27:55,600
Speaker 1: and going to school. They had this deal where one

532
00:27:55,640 --> 00:27:56,960
Speaker 1: of them would work and the other one would go

533
00:27:56,960 --> 00:27:59,240
Speaker 1: to school, and then they took turns. And you have

534
00:27:59,359 --> 00:28:02,399
Speaker 1: to be really dedicated and sort of fend off all

535
00:28:02,400 --> 00:28:05,000
Speaker 1: out of societal pressure even to get to have an education,

536
00:28:05,040 --> 00:28:07,520
Speaker 1: not to mention be a scientist at the leading edge

537
00:28:07,520 --> 00:28:11,639
Speaker 1: of physics knowledge. Yeah, it's amazing, pretty powerful story. So

538
00:28:11,720 --> 00:28:13,880
Speaker 1: she was in France and she I guess she knew

539
00:28:13,920 --> 00:28:17,560
Speaker 1: about Beckarel's discovery. She knew about Beckarel's discovery, but most

540
00:28:17,600 --> 00:28:19,880
Speaker 1: of the world was more excited about the X rays,

541
00:28:20,000 --> 00:28:23,000
Speaker 1: like these new uranium rays that they called them you raise.

542
00:28:23,359 --> 00:28:25,399
Speaker 1: People are like, Okay, that's cool, but X rays are

543
00:28:25,440 --> 00:28:28,359
Speaker 1: better because they're easier to use, they're faster, they're cheaper

544
00:28:28,359 --> 00:28:31,520
Speaker 1: than make sharper images. But she was really interested in

545
00:28:31,560 --> 00:28:33,640
Speaker 1: these you rays. She was like, what are these? What's

546
00:28:33,720 --> 00:28:36,840
Speaker 1: making them? What does it tell us about the atom

547
00:28:37,160 --> 00:28:39,840
Speaker 1: that these things are just being created out of there?

548
00:28:40,120 --> 00:28:43,000
Speaker 1: And she was working with her husband, Pierre, and they

549
00:28:43,040 --> 00:28:45,880
Speaker 1: had this really cool device, this thing called an electrometer,

550
00:28:46,240 --> 00:28:49,680
Speaker 1: and he could basically measure very sensitively how well things

551
00:28:49,760 --> 00:28:53,200
Speaker 1: could conduct electricity. And Pierre had developed this technology from

552
00:28:53,200 --> 00:28:56,800
Speaker 1: his earlier research, which was into pezo electronics, these little

553
00:28:56,840 --> 00:29:00,200
Speaker 1: devices which create electricity if you squeeze them or move

554
00:29:00,240 --> 00:29:03,000
Speaker 1: if you apply electrical voltage across them. So we had

555
00:29:03,000 --> 00:29:05,880
Speaker 1: this technology and they applied it to the study these

556
00:29:05,880 --> 00:29:08,840
Speaker 1: you rays, and they found something pretty cool, which is

557
00:29:08,880 --> 00:29:11,200
Speaker 1: that if you have a bunch of uranium, the air

558
00:29:11,400 --> 00:29:14,800
Speaker 1: around the uranium tends to get ionized. They can conduct

559
00:29:14,920 --> 00:29:18,680
Speaker 1: electricity more easily than if you don't have uranium around

560
00:29:19,200 --> 00:29:21,320
Speaker 1: I see. And that was a big clue that it

561
00:29:21,400 --> 00:29:23,680
Speaker 1: was maybe giving all some kind of energy. Yeah, that

562
00:29:23,760 --> 00:29:26,160
Speaker 1: was a big clue that it was shooting out something

563
00:29:26,200 --> 00:29:28,800
Speaker 1: because it was like changing the air, right, This energy

564
00:29:28,880 --> 00:29:31,120
Speaker 1: was coming out and it was changing the air around

565
00:29:31,120 --> 00:29:34,400
Speaker 1: the uranium. And Pierre and Marie they took like no

566
00:29:34,600 --> 00:29:38,520
Speaker 1: safety precautions. They gotta readiated so much in their research.

567
00:29:38,840 --> 00:29:40,640
Speaker 1: There are all these moments you can read about in

568
00:29:40,680 --> 00:29:43,080
Speaker 1: their lab notebooks where they're like, Pierre has been sick

569
00:29:43,120 --> 00:29:45,720
Speaker 1: every single day for the last three months. I wonder

570
00:29:45,720 --> 00:29:48,959
Speaker 1: if it's coinciding with all these experiments we've done, whatever,

571
00:29:50,360 --> 00:29:53,640
Speaker 1: And they just kept going. It was pretty incredible. They

572
00:29:53,680 --> 00:29:57,440
Speaker 1: were really pretty sick during this whole period. Like nine ten,

573
00:29:57,680 --> 00:29:59,600
Speaker 1: which is a very intense period of their research, and

574
00:29:59,600 --> 00:30:03,000
Speaker 1: discover they're basically sick the whole time. And they never

575
00:30:03,040 --> 00:30:06,880
Speaker 1: really associated like all this illness with the research they

576
00:30:06,920 --> 00:30:08,960
Speaker 1: were doing. I'm not sure if that was like a

577
00:30:09,040 --> 00:30:12,880
Speaker 1: cognitive choice, like let's not influence our research with these

578
00:30:12,920 --> 00:30:15,920
Speaker 1: petty details of life, or if they knew and they

579
00:30:15,960 --> 00:30:18,280
Speaker 1: just sort of didn't care because it just we're so

580
00:30:18,360 --> 00:30:21,280
Speaker 1: hungry to reveal the knowledge. Well, technically, we don't know.

581
00:30:21,360 --> 00:30:23,080
Speaker 1: I mean, they could have just been, you know, on

582
00:30:23,120 --> 00:30:28,000
Speaker 1: a rash of eating badgers. I suppose so, but you know,

583
00:30:28,080 --> 00:30:30,040
Speaker 1: you look at the pattern of damage to their bodies,

584
00:30:30,080 --> 00:30:33,360
Speaker 1: like their fingertips had the really terrible damage to them.

585
00:30:33,560 --> 00:30:36,360
Speaker 1: You know, Murray Curie, she's now like a hero in France.

586
00:30:36,400 --> 00:30:39,440
Speaker 1: Of course, they moved her ashes from wherever they had

587
00:30:39,440 --> 00:30:42,000
Speaker 1: been born just about twenty years ago. They moved them

588
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:44,240
Speaker 1: to the Pantheon in Paris, which is where you know,

589
00:30:44,320 --> 00:30:47,120
Speaker 1: France inters the ashes and the remains of its most

590
00:30:47,200 --> 00:30:51,640
Speaker 1: highly revered citizens. And those ashes were still radioactive. This

591
00:30:51,720 --> 00:30:57,240
Speaker 1: is like, you know, seventy years later, Yeah, exactly. She

592
00:30:57,360 --> 00:31:01,680
Speaker 1: definitely hurt herself for science, Her legacy lives. She was

593
00:31:01,720 --> 00:31:05,080
Speaker 1: really fascinated with this fact that the uranium the U

594
00:31:05,200 --> 00:31:08,280
Speaker 1: raise could change the air around them, and this is

595
00:31:08,320 --> 00:31:10,880
Speaker 1: what led her to this hypothesis that it wasn't like chemical,

596
00:31:11,240 --> 00:31:13,920
Speaker 1: It's not like the electron is giving off some energy

597
00:31:14,000 --> 00:31:16,360
Speaker 1: that it's absorbed from some other way. She thought it

598
00:31:16,400 --> 00:31:19,400
Speaker 1: was something deep in the atom, that the atoms themselves

599
00:31:19,480 --> 00:31:22,920
Speaker 1: or maybe not stable, that there was something changing internally

600
00:31:22,920 --> 00:31:25,000
Speaker 1: and it was giving off this energy. And of course

601
00:31:25,040 --> 00:31:28,120
Speaker 1: now we know she's right, it was radioactive to Kay,

602
00:31:28,160 --> 00:31:30,440
Speaker 1: but this was a really big and sort of bold

603
00:31:30,520 --> 00:31:33,200
Speaker 1: idea at the time. Right well, at this point in

604
00:31:33,240 --> 00:31:35,840
Speaker 1: our history, we knew about the atom, and we knew

605
00:31:35,880 --> 00:31:38,320
Speaker 1: about the kind of structure of it. We knew about

606
00:31:38,320 --> 00:31:41,480
Speaker 1: the electron, but we hadn't yet even discovered the nucleus

607
00:31:41,480 --> 00:31:45,000
Speaker 1: of the atom. It wasn't ntil Rutherford bombarded gold foil

608
00:31:45,160 --> 00:31:47,960
Speaker 1: with radiation later that we understood that there was like

609
00:31:48,000 --> 00:31:50,600
Speaker 1: a hard center to the atom that had a nucleus.

610
00:31:50,840 --> 00:31:53,400
Speaker 1: God forbid, you know, understanding the proton and the neutron

611
00:31:53,440 --> 00:31:56,000
Speaker 1: inside of it. At the time, after J. J. Thompson

612
00:31:56,040 --> 00:31:59,000
Speaker 1: discovered the electron, he thought that matter was like a

613
00:31:59,000 --> 00:32:03,560
Speaker 1: bunch of electrons floating in a positively charged jelly, and

614
00:32:03,640 --> 00:32:06,320
Speaker 1: so we didn't really even understand the structure of the atom.

615
00:32:06,400 --> 00:32:09,080
Speaker 1: So this is a really big leap for anybody to make. Yeah,

616
00:32:09,080 --> 00:32:10,920
Speaker 1: I mean, she's saying that it comes from deep within

617
00:32:10,960 --> 00:32:13,000
Speaker 1: the atom, but we didn't even know there was an atom. Well,

618
00:32:13,000 --> 00:32:14,760
Speaker 1: we knew there were atoms, we just didn't really know

619
00:32:14,840 --> 00:32:17,360
Speaker 1: like what was going on inside there. We didn't really

620
00:32:17,440 --> 00:32:20,200
Speaker 1: understand there was a hard nucleus that was made out

621
00:32:20,240 --> 00:32:23,400
Speaker 1: of these smaller particles. So yeah, it's a pretty big leap.

622
00:32:23,680 --> 00:32:26,600
Speaker 1: All right, let's get into her actual experiment in which

623
00:32:26,600 --> 00:32:30,000
Speaker 1: he discovered this nuclear radiation and what that means and

624
00:32:30,040 --> 00:32:33,120
Speaker 1: what other types of radiation were surrounded by. But first

625
00:32:33,200 --> 00:32:48,000
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break. All Right, we're talking about

626
00:32:48,000 --> 00:32:51,920
Speaker 1: the discovery of radiation, and we're up to Marie Currey

627
00:32:52,080 --> 00:32:58,560
Speaker 1: and her discovery that the nuclei of atoms also radiate things,

628
00:32:59,000 --> 00:33:01,360
Speaker 1: because we knew about X ray radiation, but we didn't

629
00:33:01,360 --> 00:33:05,360
Speaker 1: know about this particular kind which is coming from the nucleus. Yeah,

630
00:33:05,360 --> 00:33:07,400
Speaker 1: and we didn't even really know about the nucleus yet.

631
00:33:07,440 --> 00:33:09,920
Speaker 1: So this is giving us an inside that there's something

632
00:33:10,040 --> 00:33:13,280
Speaker 1: inside the atom, some mechanism which is capable of generating

633
00:33:13,360 --> 00:33:18,680
Speaker 1: powerful particle radiation. And so this was discovered originally in uranium, right,

634
00:33:18,720 --> 00:33:21,440
Speaker 1: Beckarel saw that it happened. But what the curious did

635
00:33:21,480 --> 00:33:24,360
Speaker 1: was that they sort of refined it. They discovered that

636
00:33:24,560 --> 00:33:28,400
Speaker 1: uranium itself was radioactive, but that there were variations of

637
00:33:28,560 --> 00:33:33,280
Speaker 1: uranium or that was even more radioactive than pure uranium itself,

638
00:33:33,480 --> 00:33:36,000
Speaker 1: which suggested that there might be something else in there,

639
00:33:36,120 --> 00:33:40,000
Speaker 1: even more radioactive. Oh, I see interesting, Like it's possible

640
00:33:40,040 --> 00:33:44,560
Speaker 1: to make an element like an atom the extra radioactive. Yeah, exactly.

641
00:33:44,600 --> 00:33:47,400
Speaker 1: They were working with this material called pitch blend, which

642
00:33:47,440 --> 00:33:50,400
Speaker 1: is a version of uranium ore, and they discovered that

643
00:33:50,480 --> 00:33:53,240
Speaker 1: before you purified it, before you purified it to make

644
00:33:53,320 --> 00:33:57,400
Speaker 1: just pure uranium, it was actually more radioactive. So they

645
00:33:57,400 --> 00:34:00,000
Speaker 1: had this hypothesis that there was something else in there,

646
00:34:00,040 --> 00:34:04,040
Speaker 1: a new element that was even more radioactive than uranium.

647
00:34:04,120 --> 00:34:07,280
Speaker 1: So they developed this technique to purify it, and a

648
00:34:07,320 --> 00:34:09,359
Speaker 1: lot of the time they spent, a lot of their

649
00:34:09,400 --> 00:34:13,480
Speaker 1: actual science was in this process of isolating this bit.

650
00:34:13,760 --> 00:34:16,799
Speaker 1: It took them, for example, three years of work on

651
00:34:16,880 --> 00:34:19,960
Speaker 1: pitch blend just to isolate a tenth of a gram

652
00:34:20,000 --> 00:34:24,239
Speaker 1: of this new substance. That's crazy. I imagine most people

653
00:34:24,280 --> 00:34:26,600
Speaker 1: think of radioactive things is like rocks or something, but

654
00:34:26,760 --> 00:34:29,520
Speaker 1: for them, this is probably like a powder or something. Right, Yeah,

655
00:34:29,560 --> 00:34:32,120
Speaker 1: these are like salts, right. They're grinding them up, they're

656
00:34:32,120 --> 00:34:34,840
Speaker 1: purifying that. They're doing chemistry to try to separate the

657
00:34:34,840 --> 00:34:36,920
Speaker 1: bits from the other, like does this dissolve in that?

658
00:34:37,239 --> 00:34:39,279
Speaker 1: How do we pull this thing apart? So it really

659
00:34:39,320 --> 00:34:42,319
Speaker 1: is sort of chemical. And what they discovered is that

660
00:34:42,360 --> 00:34:46,440
Speaker 1: there really is something in there that's more radioactive than uranium,

661
00:34:46,840 --> 00:34:48,719
Speaker 1: and so they're big discovery was the discovery of a

662
00:34:48,800 --> 00:34:53,000
Speaker 1: new element, which Marie called polonium after her native Poland.

663
00:34:54,600 --> 00:34:56,840
Speaker 1: I see, because like if you take a uranium atom

664
00:34:56,880 --> 00:35:00,480
Speaker 1: and you give it extra protons and new tron's, then

665
00:35:00,520 --> 00:35:04,160
Speaker 1: it becomes a different element. Yeah. Actually, uranium breaks down, right,

666
00:35:04,160 --> 00:35:07,120
Speaker 1: It splits open, it's unstable, and it turns into other

667
00:35:07,160 --> 00:35:11,400
Speaker 1: stuff now we know, into thorium and into radium and

668
00:35:11,440 --> 00:35:14,600
Speaker 1: eventually into polonium and all sorts of stuff. So if

669
00:35:14,600 --> 00:35:16,799
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of uranium, it eventually turns into

670
00:35:16,800 --> 00:35:20,560
Speaker 1: this combination of other elements. It breaks open and turns

671
00:35:20,600 --> 00:35:24,200
Speaker 1: into smaller, lighter elements, some of which are more radioactive

672
00:35:24,200 --> 00:35:27,200
Speaker 1: than uranium itself. So I guess you could say her

673
00:35:27,280 --> 00:35:31,040
Speaker 1: discovery was kind of about nuclear physics, right, even before

674
00:35:31,040 --> 00:35:33,280
Speaker 1: we knew there was a nucleus. She sort of maybe

675
00:35:33,320 --> 00:35:36,600
Speaker 1: intuited that, you know, there's something going on here inside

676
00:35:36,600 --> 00:35:40,399
Speaker 1: of matter and atoms that can somehow, you know, give

677
00:35:40,400 --> 00:35:45,040
Speaker 1: off energy and change into different elements. Right, that's maybe

678
00:35:45,120 --> 00:35:47,440
Speaker 1: was sort of a big contribution, and not so much

679
00:35:47,440 --> 00:35:50,000
Speaker 1: about the radiation, but just kind of about the nature

680
00:35:50,360 --> 00:35:54,000
Speaker 1: of the insides of atoms. Yeah, exactly what the radiation

681
00:35:54,080 --> 00:35:56,520
Speaker 1: reveals about the structure of atoms and the structure of

682
00:35:56,560 --> 00:35:59,960
Speaker 1: matter itself. And you're right, it's totally fascinating to see

683
00:36:00,000 --> 00:36:03,160
Speaker 1: one element turned into another element, and if it does

684
00:36:03,200 --> 00:36:06,399
Speaker 1: that by giving off a particle, that tells you that

685
00:36:06,480 --> 00:36:09,640
Speaker 1: what defines an element must be something related to its

686
00:36:09,680 --> 00:36:12,560
Speaker 1: particle content. Right, You're giving off a piece and you

687
00:36:12,640 --> 00:36:15,040
Speaker 1: turn into something else. That tells you that peace was

688
00:36:15,120 --> 00:36:17,520
Speaker 1: essential for you to be uranium or for you to

689
00:36:17,600 --> 00:36:20,920
Speaker 1: be radium. So that was pretty fascinating clue into the

690
00:36:20,960 --> 00:36:24,279
Speaker 1: structure of the atom itself yet early nuclear physics. And

691
00:36:24,360 --> 00:36:27,200
Speaker 1: so she went on to win the Nobel Prize in

692
00:36:27,280 --> 00:36:30,760
Speaker 1: nineteen o three, same year she got her pH d thesis.

693
00:36:30,800 --> 00:36:34,080
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, yeah, pretty awesome. Not only the first

694
00:36:34,120 --> 00:36:36,440
Speaker 1: woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, but the

695
00:36:36,480 --> 00:36:40,239
Speaker 1: first woman in France to receive a PhD. Wow, I

696
00:36:40,280 --> 00:36:43,759
Speaker 1: wonder which one is more significant in a way. So

697
00:36:43,800 --> 00:36:46,760
Speaker 1: she was also in on the third Nobel Prize ever. Yeah,

698
00:36:47,000 --> 00:36:50,279
Speaker 1: she and her husband, Pierre and Beckerel all won the

699
00:36:50,280 --> 00:36:53,120
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize in nineteen o three. But you know, obviously

700
00:36:53,160 --> 00:36:56,399
Speaker 1: she was very deserving, but the initial nomination was only

701
00:36:56,440 --> 00:36:59,800
Speaker 1: for Pierre and Bequerel. They excluded her, probably because she

702
00:37:00,000 --> 00:37:03,200
Speaker 1: as a woman. But Pierre insisted that, hey, look Marie

703
00:37:03,239 --> 00:37:05,200
Speaker 1: has done at least as much work as anybody else.

704
00:37:05,200 --> 00:37:07,600
Speaker 1: She's very deserving. So she ended up being included in

705
00:37:07,600 --> 00:37:12,120
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize. Great husband there, yeah exactly. Unfortunately he

706
00:37:12,280 --> 00:37:15,560
Speaker 1: died tragically. He was hit by a horse cart filled

707
00:37:15,600 --> 00:37:19,200
Speaker 1: with heavy equipment and was crushed one day, no way

708
00:37:19,239 --> 00:37:22,080
Speaker 1: after all this, so he was killed by horse radiation

709
00:37:22,200 --> 00:37:27,080
Speaker 1: a way exactly. Horses are an energetic particle. I suppose.

710
00:37:27,520 --> 00:37:29,960
Speaker 1: Now we shouldn't laugh over anybody's death. It was tragic

711
00:37:29,960 --> 00:37:32,719
Speaker 1: and it was very difficult for Marie, but she persevered

712
00:37:33,040 --> 00:37:36,880
Speaker 1: and she did a bunch more chemistry and isolated another element, radium,

713
00:37:37,239 --> 00:37:39,840
Speaker 1: for which she won the nineteen eleven Nobel Prize, this

714
00:37:39,880 --> 00:37:43,480
Speaker 1: time in chemistry. Also, it's rare how many people get

715
00:37:43,520 --> 00:37:46,799
Speaker 1: a Nobel Prize for their PhD work. Almost nobody, right,

716
00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:49,160
Speaker 1: not very many. There was the guy who got the

717
00:37:49,160 --> 00:37:52,719
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize for his pH d work. He discovered the

718
00:37:52,800 --> 00:37:56,560
Speaker 1: binary pulsars, which were an excellent test of general relativity.

719
00:37:57,120 --> 00:37:59,640
Speaker 1: Fascinating story there is that he did this work as

720
00:37:59,640 --> 00:38:02,160
Speaker 1: a p h d student. It wasn't really understood or

721
00:38:02,239 --> 00:38:05,240
Speaker 1: appreciated at the time, so he actually left the field

722
00:38:05,400 --> 00:38:07,640
Speaker 1: and then won the Nobel Prize and ended up coming

723
00:38:07,640 --> 00:38:10,200
Speaker 1: back and getting to do more research. So that's pretty fun.

724
00:38:10,400 --> 00:38:12,640
Speaker 1: He was like selling cars and then he gets a

725
00:38:12,680 --> 00:38:15,680
Speaker 1: call not quite that far. He was working in the

726
00:38:15,680 --> 00:38:18,279
Speaker 1: computing division, I think at Princeton, and then he won

727
00:38:18,320 --> 00:38:19,799
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize and they called him up and they

728
00:38:19,840 --> 00:38:23,120
Speaker 1: were like, so, how big an office would you like? Yeah,

729
00:38:23,160 --> 00:38:26,560
Speaker 1: it's weird to kind of peak that early in your career, right,

730
00:38:27,120 --> 00:38:30,280
Speaker 1: Although Marie kept going. She won a second Nobel Prize,

731
00:38:30,280 --> 00:38:33,280
Speaker 1: and even her daughter won one. Two. Yes, her daughter

732
00:38:33,320 --> 00:38:37,000
Speaker 1: and her daughter's husband worked together again. On radiation and

733
00:38:37,040 --> 00:38:40,759
Speaker 1: they induced artificial radioactivity. They took an element which was

734
00:38:40,800 --> 00:38:45,279
Speaker 1: not radioactive, alunium, and then bombarded it with radiation and

735
00:38:45,320 --> 00:38:48,240
Speaker 1: they made it radioactive. And so that was a pretty

736
00:38:48,280 --> 00:38:52,160
Speaker 1: interesting discovery and they won the Nobel Prize in so

737
00:38:52,239 --> 00:38:54,520
Speaker 1: there's a lot of Nobel Prizes in the Curie family.

738
00:38:55,160 --> 00:38:58,560
Speaker 1: All Right, Well, then at this point, I guess radiation

739
00:38:58,640 --> 00:39:00,600
Speaker 1: is pretty much discovered. I mean, and we sort of

740
00:39:01,080 --> 00:39:03,560
Speaker 1: at that point they knew about X rays and then

741
00:39:03,600 --> 00:39:08,319
Speaker 1: also about kind of particle radiation coming from the nu kids. Yeah,

742
00:39:08,320 --> 00:39:11,080
Speaker 1: and everybody thought that radiation came from stuff, right. We

743
00:39:11,120 --> 00:39:14,680
Speaker 1: had found it in oars, from metals deep within the earth,

744
00:39:15,080 --> 00:39:17,919
Speaker 1: and so people thought, well, if there's radiation around, it's

745
00:39:17,920 --> 00:39:20,799
Speaker 1: coming from the ground beneath us. So people thought if

746
00:39:20,800 --> 00:39:24,360
Speaker 1: you went higher up, like higher altitude, the radiation should decrease,

747
00:39:24,440 --> 00:39:26,359
Speaker 1: right because you're further away from the Earth and all

748
00:39:26,440 --> 00:39:30,000
Speaker 1: these sources of radiation. But people who did measurements found

749
00:39:30,040 --> 00:39:32,520
Speaker 1: something really strange. They found it as you went up

750
00:39:32,560 --> 00:39:35,680
Speaker 1: to the tops of mountains, the amount of radiation seemed

751
00:39:35,719 --> 00:39:39,359
Speaker 1: to be increasing, and that was weird and surprising to people. Right. Yeah,

752
00:39:39,480 --> 00:39:42,919
Speaker 1: that's when we discovered cosmic radiation. Yeah, exactly. So there's

753
00:39:42,920 --> 00:39:47,640
Speaker 1: this wonderfully hilarious pioneering physicist named Victor Hess. This guy

754
00:39:47,800 --> 00:39:50,320
Speaker 1: was born in the castle and his father was a

755
00:39:50,440 --> 00:39:53,880
Speaker 1: royal forester to a prince, and he did these amazing

756
00:39:53,920 --> 00:39:57,319
Speaker 1: experiments where he went up on a balloon with his

757
00:39:57,400 --> 00:40:01,440
Speaker 1: equipment he improved on Pierre's electroscope to measure like ionization

758
00:40:01,520 --> 00:40:03,880
Speaker 1: due to radiation, and he went up on balloons. But

759
00:40:03,920 --> 00:40:05,759
Speaker 1: you couldn't just like send up the balloon and then

760
00:40:05,800 --> 00:40:07,839
Speaker 1: get the data later right like the way we do now,

761
00:40:07,920 --> 00:40:10,360
Speaker 1: because there's no way to record this information. So he

762
00:40:10,400 --> 00:40:13,719
Speaker 1: actually went on these balloon chips himself, like sometimes up

763
00:40:13,719 --> 00:40:17,319
Speaker 1: at night, really high in the atmosphere, a great personal risk.

764
00:40:17,760 --> 00:40:20,640
Speaker 1: But he discovered that as you went up higher and higher,

765
00:40:20,680 --> 00:40:24,920
Speaker 1: even above mountaintops, the amount of radiation increased dramatically. So

766
00:40:25,040 --> 00:40:27,600
Speaker 1: this pointed to something really new and interesting that most

767
00:40:27,640 --> 00:40:30,600
Speaker 1: of the radiation that we were feeling around us wasn't

768
00:40:30,640 --> 00:40:33,160
Speaker 1: coming from the earth beneath us, but from the skies

769
00:40:33,200 --> 00:40:36,480
Speaker 1: above us. I guess once you sort of understand that

770
00:40:36,520 --> 00:40:40,240
Speaker 1: there are invisible, you know, things flying around you coming

771
00:40:40,239 --> 00:40:42,279
Speaker 1: from the earth, and kind of makes you wonder where

772
00:40:42,280 --> 00:40:44,520
Speaker 1: else are these things coming from, or where else can

773
00:40:44,560 --> 00:40:47,000
Speaker 1: you find them exactly? And every time you discover a

774
00:40:47,040 --> 00:40:49,600
Speaker 1: new way to look at the universe, you are bound

775
00:40:49,600 --> 00:40:53,000
Speaker 1: to find something surprising. So discovery of radiation not just

776
00:40:53,040 --> 00:40:55,200
Speaker 1: showed us what was inside the atom and helped us

777
00:40:55,200 --> 00:40:57,920
Speaker 1: see inside our bodies. It also helped us see the

778
00:40:58,040 --> 00:41:00,640
Speaker 1: universe in a new way and to see really really

779
00:41:00,680 --> 00:41:04,240
Speaker 1: bright sources of this new kind of information. And most

780
00:41:04,239 --> 00:41:06,560
Speaker 1: of it was coming from space, and so that was

781
00:41:06,560 --> 00:41:09,760
Speaker 1: a big question mark for decades, like what is making

782
00:41:09,920 --> 00:41:13,160
Speaker 1: radiation out in space and shooting it at us? And

783
00:41:13,200 --> 00:41:15,680
Speaker 1: that's an area of research still today, Like we understand

784
00:41:15,719 --> 00:41:17,879
Speaker 1: a lot of the source of that cosmic radiation now,

785
00:41:17,880 --> 00:41:20,240
Speaker 1: but not all of it, right, Yeah, it's a big mystery.

786
00:41:20,320 --> 00:41:22,520
Speaker 1: It's like it could be anything. Yeah, at the time,

787
00:41:22,520 --> 00:41:24,799
Speaker 1: people really didn't understand. Now we know that a lot

788
00:41:24,840 --> 00:41:27,280
Speaker 1: of that radiation comes from the Sun, it's the solar wind,

789
00:41:27,520 --> 00:41:30,320
Speaker 1: and also comes from outside our solar system, from the galaxy,

790
00:41:30,600 --> 00:41:32,759
Speaker 1: from the black hole at the center of the Milky Way,

791
00:41:32,760 --> 00:41:35,080
Speaker 1: for example, emits a lot of radiation, and other crazy

792
00:41:35,080 --> 00:41:37,680
Speaker 1: stuff out there emits radiation. But there's still a lots

793
00:41:37,719 --> 00:41:40,320
Speaker 1: of this radiation from space that we do not understand.

794
00:41:40,320 --> 00:41:43,440
Speaker 1: The very very high energy particles very tip of that

795
00:41:43,520 --> 00:41:46,960
Speaker 1: spectrum are higher energy than anything we understand can make.

796
00:41:47,480 --> 00:41:50,600
Speaker 1: So radiation is still telling us about the universe and

797
00:41:50,600 --> 00:41:52,759
Speaker 1: giving us clues about things out there that we don't

798
00:41:52,760 --> 00:41:55,640
Speaker 1: know about. I'm guessing the scientists just wanted a better

799
00:41:55,719 --> 00:41:57,359
Speaker 1: view out of his lab. So he's like, I mighta

800
00:41:57,360 --> 00:42:00,400
Speaker 1: put it on a balloon. Yeah, I don't know. Or

801
00:42:00,440 --> 00:42:02,239
Speaker 1: maybe he needed a break from whatever was going on

802
00:42:02,280 --> 00:42:04,319
Speaker 1: in his life and you just need an excuse to

803
00:42:04,320 --> 00:42:08,120
Speaker 1: take a flight this castle to watch castle drama. It's

804
00:42:08,160 --> 00:42:10,480
Speaker 1: like I'm hopping down my balloon to do signs as

805
00:42:10,520 --> 00:42:12,399
Speaker 1: we all do. If they ad made a reality show

806
00:42:12,440 --> 00:42:14,360
Speaker 1: about it, that would have been the dramatic ending to

807
00:42:14,400 --> 00:42:17,680
Speaker 1: an episode as he floats away in his balloon. All right, Well,

808
00:42:17,719 --> 00:42:20,880
Speaker 1: I think that's just a really interesting kind of view

809
00:42:20,920 --> 00:42:24,239
Speaker 1: into how we came to see that there are a

810
00:42:24,239 --> 00:42:27,040
Speaker 1: lot of things that we can't see, right, because how

811
00:42:27,040 --> 00:42:28,920
Speaker 1: else would you know that there's things there if we

812
00:42:28,960 --> 00:42:31,160
Speaker 1: can't see them or hear them. Yeah, and this is

813
00:42:31,200 --> 00:42:34,319
Speaker 1: a pattern in physics that we keep discovering that their

814
00:42:34,560 --> 00:42:37,800
Speaker 1: entire segments of the universe we didn't know anything about

815
00:42:37,880 --> 00:42:40,480
Speaker 1: because for a long time they were invisible to us.

816
00:42:40,840 --> 00:42:43,360
Speaker 1: The discovery of dark matter, for example, we know that

817
00:42:43,440 --> 00:42:46,520
Speaker 1: dark matters out there. It's all around us, it's streaming everywhere.

818
00:42:46,520 --> 00:42:49,759
Speaker 1: It contains vast amounts of information about what's going on

819
00:42:49,840 --> 00:42:51,920
Speaker 1: in the universe and how it was born and how

820
00:42:51,920 --> 00:42:54,880
Speaker 1: it came to be, and we only recently discovered it exists.

821
00:42:55,280 --> 00:42:58,440
Speaker 1: And that tells us that there's almost certainly more stuff

822
00:42:58,480 --> 00:43:00,560
Speaker 1: going on that we haven't yet to open and we

823
00:43:00,600 --> 00:43:04,359
Speaker 1: haven't discovered. That will tell a future physicists crazy things

824
00:43:04,360 --> 00:43:07,320
Speaker 1: about the universe that we cannot yet even anticipate. Yeah,

825
00:43:07,440 --> 00:43:09,920
Speaker 1: and it kind of also reminds you that physics can

826
00:43:09,960 --> 00:43:13,000
Speaker 1: be dangerous, you know, like you're probing the unknown, you're

827
00:43:13,040 --> 00:43:16,759
Speaker 1: exposing yourself to things, yet you don't know whether or

828
00:43:16,760 --> 00:43:18,680
Speaker 1: not the exist or not, or what they're doing to

829
00:43:18,719 --> 00:43:21,040
Speaker 1: your body. Right, that's right. I've eaten a lot of

830
00:43:21,120 --> 00:43:23,440
Speaker 1: very dangerous airline food and all of my trips to

831
00:43:23,440 --> 00:43:26,440
Speaker 1: the large hage On collider. So yeah, your ashes will

832
00:43:26,480 --> 00:43:30,080
Speaker 1: probably glow too, Daniel. All that swift that you're eating,

833
00:43:30,200 --> 00:43:34,080
Speaker 1: it's probably radioactive, Yes, fund is probably not good for you.

834
00:43:34,400 --> 00:43:36,960
Speaker 1: But it's delicious. Yeah, all right, Well that's a pretty

835
00:43:37,080 --> 00:43:40,239
Speaker 1: fascinating trip down science history lane, and I hope it

836
00:43:40,320 --> 00:43:42,560
Speaker 1: encourages all of you who are curious about things we

837
00:43:42,600 --> 00:43:46,320
Speaker 1: don't understand, things we have not yet unraveled, to follow

838
00:43:46,400 --> 00:43:48,800
Speaker 1: up those threads. If you see something you don't understand,

839
00:43:49,040 --> 00:43:51,160
Speaker 1: try to figure it out. If something doesn't make sense

840
00:43:51,200 --> 00:43:54,480
Speaker 1: to you, ask yourself questions until it does. Because remember

841
00:43:54,760 --> 00:43:57,840
Speaker 1: that the history of science is just people being curious,

842
00:43:57,880 --> 00:44:00,319
Speaker 1: trying to figure stuff out, and pushing full word on

843
00:44:00,360 --> 00:44:03,040
Speaker 1: the envelope of human knowledge. Right, yeah, you two can

844
00:44:03,080 --> 00:44:05,239
Speaker 1: win a Nobel prize even if you get kicked out

845
00:44:05,280 --> 00:44:10,200
Speaker 1: of high school for drawing cartoons. That's not an exaggeration.

846
00:44:10,280 --> 00:44:12,360
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for

847
00:44:12,440 --> 00:44:22,880
Speaker 1: joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening, and

848
00:44:22,920 --> 00:44:25,640
Speaker 1: remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a

849
00:44:25,680 --> 00:44:29,120
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio or more podcast for my

850
00:44:29,239 --> 00:44:32,799
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts,

851
00:44:32,920 --> 00:44:35,280
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.