One Small Step for Woman: Probing the Depths of Inner Space Marie Curie and the Revolution in Our Concept of Matter

1. One Small Step for Woman:Probing the Depths of Inner SpaceMarie Curie and the Revolution in Our Concept of Matter David Banach Department of Philosophy

2. Introduction: Curie's Greatness as a Discoverer. Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgment--all these were of a kind seldom found joined in a single individual . . . The greatest scientific deed of her life--proving the existence of radioactive elements and isolating them--owes its accomplishment not merely to bold intuition but to a devotion and tenacity in execution under the most extreme hardships imaginable, such as the history of experimental science has not often witnessed. (Albert Einstein (Out of My Later Years

3. The Atom is Your Friend

4. Introduction: Curie's Greatness as a Discoverer. A.Discovery requires great and courageous shifts in how we see the world. B.Curie's discovery of radiation was the beginning of a revolution in how we see the world, one that undermined the comfortable, ordered world of the Enlightenment.

5. Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science • The Paradigm: the context of scientific inquiry. Science goes on within a constellation of beliefs, practices, habits, and values that determines how the scientist sees the world. • Normal Science is science that is guided and defined by a paradigm. • Paradigm Shifts: In order to make a really new discovery, the scientist must break free from the paradigm into a new mode of scientific inquiry that Kuhn calls revolutionary science.

6. J.J. Thomsons Apparatus

7. J.J. Thomson discovers the Electron1897

8. Rutherford Discovers the Nucleus1911

9. Rutherford, Geiger, and Marsden’s Experiment

23. What are these?

24. Which are the subatomic particles?

25. What is it?

26. Stars through a telescope?

34. Necker cube

35. Reversing Staircase

37. "Saturn is not alone but is composed of three, which almost touch one another and never move nor change with respect to one another. They are arranged in a line parallel to the zodiac, and the middle one [Saturn itself] is about three times the size of the lateral ones [the edges of the rings].“ Galileo 1610

38. Huygens 1655

39. Saturn

40. Saturn’s Rings

41. Preformationism (circa 1700)

43. Questions • 1. Can Scientists in different paradigms talk to each other, or are the worlds they see so different that their paradigms are incommensurable? • 2. Is there a bedrock of objective fact, outside of our paradigms, that scientists can use to judge which paradigm is most true?

44. Part Two: What is Matter? • A Mechanical Universe. The Universe was a vast machine populated by indivisible tiny hunks of matter called atoms. Mathematical laws of motion governed the workings of the little billiard ball like projectiles that made up the vast machine of the universe. The world was composed of smaller versions of the familiar types of objects and forces that make up the macroscopic world.

45. “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” Sir James Jeans • 1. Waves!: Light, Electricity and Magnetism are unified in Maxwell’s wave equations. (1873) • 2. The Atom is not atomic! (1897-1911) • 3. The Atom grows up: The Bohr model (1913) and Quantum Mysteries! (1925)

46. 1867 Marie Curie Born • 1873 Maxwell formulates wave equations linking light, electricity and magnetism. • 1895 X-rays discovered by Wilhem Röntgen • 1896 Discovery of Radioactivity by French Physicist Antoine Becquerel • 1897 English Physicist J.J. Thomson discovers the electron. • 1898 Marie and Pierre Curie discover new radioactive element in pitchblende ores and announce existence of polonium and radium • 1902 Marie Curie isolates pure samples of the radioactive elements Radium and Polonium. • 1905 Albert Einstein publishes his Special Theory of Relativity and paper on quantum radiation of energy. • 1911 Ernest Rutherford discovers the atomic nucleus. • 1913 Danish physicist Neils Bohr formulates the theory of the atom with small central nucleus and orbiting electrons. • 1916 Albert Einstein publishes his General Theory of Relativity • 1925 Heisenberg formulates Quantum mechanics for atoms. • Schrodinger's wave equation for particles.

47. The Bohr Model of the Atom

48. A Familiar Model

49. The New Model of the Atom

50. And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes‑how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which the planets gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know . . . . That science that was to teach me everything ends up in hypothesis, that lucidity founders in a metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. • Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus