Radioactive Substances - Kostenloses Hörbuch

Radioactive Substances is the English version of the doctoral thesis Marie Curie presented to the Faculty of Sciences in Paris in 1903, the same year she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel. An English translation appeared in 1904. It is a working scientist's report rather than a popular book, setting out several years of laboratory research in a plain, methodical style.

Curie begins with the rays given off by uranium, first noticed by Becquerel, and explains how she measured their strength with an electrometer and found that thorium behaved in the same way. That method led her to minerals more active than their uranium content could explain, and from there to the chemical work that isolated two new elements, polonium and radium. Later sections describe the long process of concentrating radium salts, the estimate of radium's atomic weight, and the properties of the radiation itself: how it is deflected by a magnet, how it makes nearby substances temporarily active, and the light, heat and chemical changes it produces.

The thesis matters as a first-hand record of the birth of a new field, written by the person who named it. It suits readers interested in the history of physics and chemistry, in Curie herself, or in how a major discovery was built step by careful step.