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How was radiation discovered? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, would you risk your life for science? It
0:12
Speaker 1: might depend on the science we're talking about. Would you
0:16
Speaker 1: risk getting eaten if you've got to meet Adians for example? Tempting,
0:19
Speaker 1: but I'll pass. How about would you risk speghettification if
0:23
Speaker 1: you got to see the inside of a black hole?
0:26
Speaker 1: You know, I might actually take that trip. Or would
0:29
Speaker 1: you risk deadly radiation to understand the nature of matter? Actually,
0:33
Speaker 1: I've kind of already done that. One really does a
0:35
Speaker 1: large hadron collider generate deadly radiation? It does, But that's
0:40
Speaker 1: not how I've been exposed. How have you been exposed
0:42
Speaker 1: to radiation? Well, flying the switzerlanded back like a thousand times,
0:46
Speaker 1: you get a lot more radiation at high altitude, really
0:49
Speaker 1: you have. Every Transatlantic trip is like a chest X ray.
0:52
Speaker 1: I thought you said you've been been by a radioactive
0:54
Speaker 1: Swiss spider, and I gained that spider's proportional physics, smart
1:00
Speaker 1: and chocolate making ability. I am jorhandmade cartoonists and the
1:19
Speaker 1: creator of PhD comics. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,
1:24
Speaker 1: and I like to think of myself as radioactive. Are
1:27
Speaker 1: you technically radioactive? Are most people radioactive? At some level,
1:30
Speaker 1: like bananas are radioactive. Yeah, so you're probably more radioactive
1:34
Speaker 1: than most people. But I grew up in Los Almos,
1:36
Speaker 1: New Mexico, where we like to say we all glow
1:38
Speaker 1: in the dark. Really, I did grow up in Los Almos,
1:44
Speaker 1: but we don't actually like to say that. Well, I
1:46
Speaker 1: do eat a lot of bananas, and I do have
1:48
Speaker 1: a certain glow about me, i'd like to think, but yeah,
1:50
Speaker 1: Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the university
1:53
Speaker 1: production of our Heart Radio, in which we shine a
1:56
Speaker 1: radioactive glow into all the mysteries of the universe, the big,
2:00
Speaker 1: crazy things that are out there tearing the universe apart,
2:03
Speaker 1: the powerful forces that are holding it together, the things
2:06
Speaker 1: far from home, and the things right here in our backyard.
2:09
Speaker 1: All the mysteries of physics revealed and explained to you.
2:12
Speaker 1: That's right, we radiate knowledge and give you an X
2:16
Speaker 1: ray view of all of the amazing secrets that are
2:19
Speaker 1: out there to discover in the universe, and all of
2:22
Speaker 1: the secrets that are yet to be discovered. And all
2:23
Speaker 1: the while you can stay home and safe, tucked into
2:26
Speaker 1: your couch, sipping that mug of tea and learning about
2:29
Speaker 1: the universe. No tinfoil hat needed or leadline hats. That's right.
2:34
Speaker 1: This counts exactly zero as part of your annual dose
2:37
Speaker 1: of radiation, even though you'll be learning all about it.
2:40
Speaker 1: It's right. Well, we're technically getting to people through sound waves,
2:44
Speaker 1: not light weights or radiation. That's right. But actually radiation
2:47
Speaker 1: is sort of any sort of energetic particle or wave.
2:50
Speaker 1: So sound is technically speaking a kind of radiation. So
2:55
Speaker 1: we are radiating your ears with our voices. What no it,
3:00
Speaker 1: I said a limit? Get you like, if I throw
3:02
Speaker 1: a baseball, I'm radiating a baseball. Baseballs are radiation, yes, absolutely, Now,
3:07
Speaker 1: the technical definition of radiation is sort of weirdly broad.
3:11
Speaker 1: Any kind of light, any kind of particle, any kind
3:13
Speaker 1: of way that transmits energy is radiation. But practically speaking,
3:18
Speaker 1: when we talk about radiation, we mean very high energy
3:21
Speaker 1: particles or higher energy waves that are going to deposit
3:24
Speaker 1: a significant amount of energy. And so a flashlight or
3:28
Speaker 1: this podcast are not typically categorized as radiation, even though technically,
3:32
Speaker 1: according to physicists it is. Well it's a very loaded word,
3:36
Speaker 1: isn't it. I mean, especially like in the eighties. I
3:39
Speaker 1: feel in the nineties, you know, radiation was such a
3:42
Speaker 1: negative thing, and nobody wanted radiation and the thing that
3:45
Speaker 1: made you sick. Yeah, exactly. Radiation can be pretty dangerous.
3:48
Speaker 1: They're basically these little invisible bullets flying through the universe,
3:52
Speaker 1: and they can do real damage. They can fly through
3:54
Speaker 1: your cells, they can bust up your DNA, they can
3:57
Speaker 1: cause you cancer. And so radiation definitely is something to
4:00
Speaker 1: think about and worry about. And it's one of these
4:02
Speaker 1: things in the world that's not visible to our naked
4:05
Speaker 1: eye yet turns out to be pretty important. So it's
4:08
Speaker 1: a key that tells us that there's a lot going
4:10
Speaker 1: on in the universe that we can't directly see. Yeah,
4:13
Speaker 1: So a big question is how do we even discover
4:16
Speaker 1: radiation or even come to believe it exists if it
4:20
Speaker 1: is in fact invisible. Yeah, it's part of this story
4:23
Speaker 1: of peeling back the nature of reality and figuring out
4:26
Speaker 1: that the universe has a lot of stuff going on.
4:28
Speaker 1: But to me, it's always fascinating to figure out how
4:31
Speaker 1: that came to be, how that understanding sort of filtering
4:34
Speaker 1: into human minds, because here we are standing on the
4:37
Speaker 1: shoulders of giants, understanding all these things about the way
4:40
Speaker 1: the world works. But this required a real shift in
4:42
Speaker 1: people's understanding of the nature of the universe. So I'm
4:46
Speaker 1: always super interested in those moments, like what was it
4:49
Speaker 1: to convinced people? What experiments did people do that revealed that,
4:53
Speaker 1: because I hope that will help us understand what experiments
4:55
Speaker 1: in the future might again change the way we think
4:58
Speaker 1: about the universe. Yeah. So usually people assign this discovery
5:02
Speaker 1: to Madame Curie and her experiments, but there's actually more
5:06
Speaker 1: to the story, right there is she did not, in
5:09
Speaker 1: fact discover radiation. She won a couple of Nobel prizes.
5:13
Speaker 1: She was quite a genius. She discovered a lot of stuff,
5:15
Speaker 1: but you can't give her credit for discovering radiation. It's
5:19
Speaker 1: a fascinating story. Well you can't even define it. I mean, sure,
5:23
Speaker 1: then nobody discovered radiation or everyone discovered that's right. The
5:27
Speaker 1: first little swimming organism that developed an eyeball, I supposed
5:30
Speaker 1: discovered radiation when it used photons to guide itself around
5:34
Speaker 1: the primordial soup on Earth. I suppose, yeah, right, like
5:36
Speaker 1: the first organism to use or detect light. Right, that
5:41
Speaker 1: definitely predates humanity. But I think we should focus on
5:44
Speaker 1: the kind of radiation we're talking about, which is you know,
5:47
Speaker 1: high energy particles or waves that come from like radioactive decay,
5:51
Speaker 1: things that are different from the normal kinds of radiation
5:53
Speaker 1: we used to live our lives. We're talking about a
5:55
Speaker 1: change in how we've understood the universe. Okay, so it's
5:59
Speaker 1: a invisible well, potentially dangerous and obviously very scientifically significant.
6:05
Speaker 1: But how was radiation discovered? That's a big question, and
6:08
Speaker 1: that's the question we're exploring today. So to the end
6:11
Speaker 1: the program, we'll be talking about how was radiation discovered? So,
6:20
Speaker 1: as usually, we were wondering how many people out there
6:22
Speaker 1: knew how radiation was discovered? So thank you to everybody
6:26
Speaker 1: who have volunteered their answers to these tricky physics questions
6:29
Speaker 1: without referring to any reference materials, Google or Being or
6:33
Speaker 1: ask Jeeves. And if you would like to participate in
6:36
Speaker 1: future Baseless Speculations for the podcast, please write to us
6:39
Speaker 1: two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Maybe that
6:42
Speaker 1: should be the name of that website, Daniel Baseless speculation
6:45
Speaker 1: dot com. You might get a lot of hits. Yeah, exactly.
6:48
Speaker 1: We just pointed to our book every single time we
6:51
Speaker 1: have no idea. Dot com is the answer to all
6:53
Speaker 1: these questions. Oh, interesting, interesting marketing technique. Lure people in
7:00
Speaker 1: with a juicy website and then sell them a book.
7:03
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. I think they call that click bait. So
7:05
Speaker 1: think about it for a second. If someone approached you
7:07
Speaker 1: and asked you if you knew how radiation was discovered,
7:10
Speaker 1: what would you say. Here's what people had to say.
7:13
Speaker 1: I have no idea, but I think it has something
7:15
Speaker 1: to do with Marie Curry playing around with some kind
7:17
Speaker 1: of radioactive substance and like X raying her hand or
7:20
Speaker 1: something like that. Radiation was discovered by Madame Cury. I
7:24
Speaker 1: just know that was discovered Marie Cury. I believe radiation
7:29
Speaker 1: was discovered by Marie Cury. I don't know how she
7:32
Speaker 1: did it. She was probably experimenting with what became known
7:37
Speaker 1: as radium and saw it glowing. I think radiation was
7:42
Speaker 1: discovered in the eighteen hundreds when some radioactive material uranium
7:47
Speaker 1: was glowing in the dark or was unusually hot. All right,
7:51
Speaker 1: it looks like Marie Curry and the Curys have a
7:53
Speaker 1: pretty good policies because most people went to them as
7:57
Speaker 1: the discoverers of radiation. Yeah, she definitely ensconced in popular
8:02
Speaker 1: culture as somebody deeply associated with radiation. And you know,
8:05
Speaker 1: she actually did have a good publicist late in her career.
8:08
Speaker 1: She did a whole tour of the United States giving
8:11
Speaker 1: talks all about radiation stuff. So she became quite famous
8:14
Speaker 1: and associated with radiation. So that has lasted up to
8:18
Speaker 1: the present day, almost a hundred years later. Right, Well,
8:20
Speaker 1: we don't want to take away anything that she did
8:23
Speaker 1: or that the Crease did. It's really more about definition.
8:26
Speaker 1: I think I think she discovered a particular type of
8:29
Speaker 1: radiation or I guess we'll get into that, but generally speaking,
8:33
Speaker 1: it kind of seems like radiation maybe is a broader
8:36
Speaker 1: concept than most people assume it is. There's definitely that,
8:39
Speaker 1: and she made important contributions and discovered particular kinds of
8:43
Speaker 1: radioactive elopments. Will dig into that, but you're right, radiation
8:46
Speaker 1: is a sort of a broader set of things. Radiation
8:48
Speaker 1: is not just uranium decays and shoots out deadly particles.
8:53
Speaker 1: There's a broader set of things. We consider radiation not
8:56
Speaker 1: just ordinary light. But it starts, for example, with X rays,
9:00
Speaker 1: Like X rays are just high energy photons, but we
9:04
Speaker 1: consider them radiation. Yeah, I guess you're saying earlier that
9:08
Speaker 1: any light is considered radiation. Even sound is considered radiation,
9:12
Speaker 1: even like heat, I guess heat is radiation. Yeah, exactly,
9:15
Speaker 1: you radiate heat. You run a lap and you get
9:17
Speaker 1: really hot, you are radiating heat out into the universe.
9:20
Speaker 1: And everything in the universe that has a temperature gives
9:23
Speaker 1: off heat, and so everything in the universe is radiating constantly.
9:27
Speaker 1: Radiation is everywhere. But that's sort of again the sort
9:30
Speaker 1: of technical physical term for it. When we talk about radiation,
9:33
Speaker 1: we think about sort of damaging radiation, radiation that's long
9:36
Speaker 1: been invisible to us and reveals something different about how
9:39
Speaker 1: the world works. And it was really crucial in understanding
9:42
Speaker 1: things like the nature of the atom and the deep
9:44
Speaker 1: structure of matter. Right, Well, we knew about light for
9:47
Speaker 1: a long time. I mean, it's it's kind of in
9:49
Speaker 1: the Bible, Daniel, that they'll be light. It was like
9:52
Speaker 1: the first thing is that a reference book. I wasn't
9:55
Speaker 1: familiar with that, you know, God at all. I think
9:59
Speaker 1: there's some rata for that one. It's probably the most
10:02
Speaker 1: impact factor of wall puplications in the history of man. Yeah,
10:06
Speaker 1: I submitted something, but it got rejected by the referees.
10:09
Speaker 1: So I mean of course, we've known about light for
10:12
Speaker 1: a long time, So I guess when when do you
10:14
Speaker 1: draw the line as us having discovered radiation, Like, is
10:18
Speaker 1: it x rays? Is that the first kind of you know,
10:21
Speaker 1: powerful kind of radiation invisible that we've discovered. Yeah, I
10:25
Speaker 1: think the discovery of X rays really marked the turning point.
10:28
Speaker 1: It's the time we discovered that there are ways to
10:30
Speaker 1: transmit energy or other kinds of light that are different
10:34
Speaker 1: from the kind of visible light we were familiar with.
10:37
Speaker 1: And this specifically was a kind of light that we
10:39
Speaker 1: saw could sort of pass through walls and pass through barriers,
10:43
Speaker 1: and so it really was doing something different from the
10:45
Speaker 1: kind of visible light we were familiar with. And that's
10:48
Speaker 1: exactly how it was discovered. I see, like, if you're
10:50
Speaker 1: shine a flashlight, it gets blocked by the wall. But
10:53
Speaker 1: if you shine an X ray tube at at a wall,
10:55
Speaker 1: it will go right through. It will go through most
10:57
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, exactly. And that's why we call it,
10:59
Speaker 1: you know, X raying something because X rays passed through
11:02
Speaker 1: the soft tissue of your body, but not your bones,
11:05
Speaker 1: and so they reveal what's going on inside. And so
11:08
Speaker 1: radiation is interesting because they can do these things in
11:11
Speaker 1: visible light can't do. But also because it has this power,
11:14
Speaker 1: it penetrates and so it reveals what's the inside, all right,
11:17
Speaker 1: So then how do we discover X rays? So X
11:19
Speaker 1: rays discovered by this guy Runken. And this guy was
11:24
Speaker 1: a character. I think you'd like this. He actually was
11:26
Speaker 1: kicked out of high school as a student because he
11:29
Speaker 1: drew a caricature of one of his teachers, which is
11:32
Speaker 1: not very flattering, and so he's sort of a physicist
11:35
Speaker 1: and a cartoonist. I almost got exposed from my school
11:38
Speaker 1: for the exact same reason, actually exactly. I didn't this
11:41
Speaker 1: caricature one teacher, I did all of them. Well then
11:44
Speaker 1: maybe there's a Nobel prize in your future. Yeah, stay tuned.
11:48
Speaker 1: But he was doing experiments at the time with these
11:50
Speaker 1: things called Crooks tubes. We talked about these before because
11:53
Speaker 1: they were how electrons were discovered. They're basically just these
11:56
Speaker 1: glass tubes that are mostly have vacuum in them. You
12:00
Speaker 1: have an anode and a cathode with voltage across them,
12:02
Speaker 1: and so you pull electrons off. People have seen these
12:05
Speaker 1: seeing before and you get these beams, these glowing beams
12:08
Speaker 1: inside that look really cool because the electrons were like
12:12
Speaker 1: knocking off atoms and ionizing them, and people were doing
12:15
Speaker 1: lots of experiments with them trying to understand what they were.
12:17
Speaker 1: And again J. J. Thompson used them to discover the electrons.
12:21
Speaker 1: But Runkin was really interested in whether or not the
12:24
Speaker 1: rays that were being produced inside these tubes could pass
12:28
Speaker 1: through the glass. He was curious to see what they
12:30
Speaker 1: could get through. But these rays were originally electrons, like
12:34
Speaker 1: like a stream of electrons or or were they light?
12:37
Speaker 1: These were a stream of electrons and that's what J. J.
12:39
Speaker 1: Thompson discovered. But the glow that you saw that was
12:42
Speaker 1: visible light. And so the electrons would knock into a
12:45
Speaker 1: few atoms inside the tube, ionized them, they would give
12:49
Speaker 1: off some light, and then they would decay back to
12:51
Speaker 1: their ground state. So what people were sort of ooing
12:53
Speaker 1: and aweing over, we're seeing a beam of electrons exciting
12:57
Speaker 1: the gas inside the tube. Okay, but just clear the
13:00
Speaker 1: the X ray is not the electrons and X rays
13:03
Speaker 1: is a light beam, right, that's right. The X ray
13:05
Speaker 1: is not an electron electron as a particle, and X
13:07
Speaker 1: ray is a piece of light. Right, It's a photon
13:10
Speaker 1: of a specific energy. But this is what Runkin started
13:13
Speaker 1: with He started with these tubes and he was playing
13:15
Speaker 1: around with them, and he accidentally discovered that they also
13:18
Speaker 1: generate X rays, like along with the electrons or when
13:22
Speaker 1: the electrons hit stuff. So the electrons, one of the
13:25
Speaker 1: things they do is they generate a glow that you
13:27
Speaker 1: can see with your naked eye, but they also sometimes
13:30
Speaker 1: generate X rays, and we can get into the whole
13:32
Speaker 1: details of exactly how that happens, how they're accelerated and radios.
13:35
Speaker 1: But sometimes they generate visible light in our spectrum, and
13:39
Speaker 1: sometimes they generate photons that are higher energy, and these
13:42
Speaker 1: are X rays. So he was interested in understanding, like
13:45
Speaker 1: what is this thing generating? Can it pass through the
13:47
Speaker 1: glass walls of the tube. So what he did was
13:50
Speaker 1: he built a big black box, like a light proof box.
13:54
Speaker 1: And his idea was, I'm gonna put this box around
13:57
Speaker 1: my tube. I'm gonna see what light is show mind,
14:00
Speaker 1: and the inside of the box from this tube, so
14:03
Speaker 1: I can see sort of like you know what, light
14:05
Speaker 1: comes out of the tube and hits the side of
14:07
Speaker 1: the box. So I guess he wanted to know. He
14:11
Speaker 1: thought he was trapping the light that was coming from
14:13
Speaker 1: the Catherine tube, but actually he saw that the light
14:16
Speaker 1: kind of leaked outside of it. Yeah, exactly, he turned
14:19
Speaker 1: off the lights in his laboratory just to sort of
14:21
Speaker 1: like get things warmed up, and he was going to
14:23
Speaker 1: look inside the box to see if he could see
14:26
Speaker 1: like light on the inside walls of the box. But
14:29
Speaker 1: before he did that, he noticed that he saw this
14:31
Speaker 1: weird light outside the box on the wall of his laboratory,
14:35
Speaker 1: and he was like, what's that over there? And it
14:38
Speaker 1: turns out he had a special sort of screen over
14:40
Speaker 1: there just happened to be in the right location that
14:43
Speaker 1: can receive X rays and glows when it hits X rays,
14:47
Speaker 1: And so he discovered that the light doesn't just go
14:49
Speaker 1: through the glass. It also went through his box all
14:53
Speaker 1: the way out to the side of his lab and
14:54
Speaker 1: hit this special screen. So it was quite by accident
14:57
Speaker 1: that he discovered these X rays. Whoa was a special
15:00
Speaker 1: screen that he just had that that seems like such
15:03
Speaker 1: an accidental discovery. It's totally an accidental discovery. And it's
15:06
Speaker 1: a special screen covered with a material that phosphoresces, so
15:10
Speaker 1: it absorbs photons at one wavelength and then it gives
15:13
Speaker 1: off photons at a different wavelength. So it's a wavelength
15:16
Speaker 1: shifting effect. And this is the kind of thing we
15:18
Speaker 1: do all the time in physics these days. We absorb
15:21
Speaker 1: photons of one thing and it give off photons of
15:23
Speaker 1: another color. So he happened to have a screen covered
15:26
Speaker 1: in this material. It was a barrio phosphorescent material that
15:29
Speaker 1: could absorb X rays and glow in the visible light.
15:33
Speaker 1: And he was like, what's that over there, and did
15:35
Speaker 1: a bunch of experiments, and he discovered that it could
15:38
Speaker 1: pass through his box, and it could pass through lots
15:40
Speaker 1: of other things, but that it wouldn't pass through metal,
15:43
Speaker 1: for example. Now, was this the first time that, you know,
15:46
Speaker 1: humans kind of got the idea that light can go
15:50
Speaker 1: through things, or did we already kind of know that
15:53
Speaker 1: there are things in nature that can go through things? Now,
15:56
Speaker 1: this is the first time we understood that light could
15:58
Speaker 1: pass through something that we thought was the wise solid.
16:01
Speaker 1: And famously, the first X ray picture he ever took
16:04
Speaker 1: was of his wife's hand, and you could see her
16:07
Speaker 1: hand with its wedding ring on it, and he showed
16:09
Speaker 1: it to her and he thought, this is gonna be
16:11
Speaker 1: so romantic and awesome. She was actually really creeped out,
16:14
Speaker 1: and she thought oh my gosh, I've seen my own death,
16:16
Speaker 1: because she'd seemed like her own skeleton inside her hand.
16:19
Speaker 1: And I think it really changed the way people felt
16:22
Speaker 1: about like the solidity of stuff. Right, you think of
16:25
Speaker 1: yourself as solid and opaque, but you're not. You're transparent
16:29
Speaker 1: in some wavelengths of light, in your opaque in other
16:32
Speaker 1: wavelengths of light. So then from that they they invented
16:36
Speaker 1: X rays, you know, for medical purposes. Yeah, things happened
16:39
Speaker 1: really fast because people very quickly understood how powerful this was.
16:42
Speaker 1: Like you could see broken bones inside the body, or
16:45
Speaker 1: you could see if you're tiled, it's swallowed something metal,
16:48
Speaker 1: and so just seeing inside the body without having to
16:50
Speaker 1: cut it open was immediately and enormously powerful. And within
16:54
Speaker 1: a year people were using it in hospitals. And it
16:57
Speaker 1: wasn't hard to make X rays, like Crookes tubes were
17:00
Speaker 1: a thing that already existed, and so the technology sort
17:02
Speaker 1: of was all around. It just took the right combination
17:05
Speaker 1: of knowing what to do and how to do it.
17:08
Speaker 1: And he went on to win the first Nobel Prize
17:11
Speaker 1: in physics just a few years later. Really the first one,
17:14
Speaker 1: the first one, yeah, exactly, and you know it sort
17:17
Speaker 1: of satisfies all the requirements. It teaches you something deep
17:20
Speaker 1: about the universe and also made a very big impact
17:23
Speaker 1: on humanity. Wo and it sounds like it was really
17:26
Speaker 1: more about discovering the screen is a combination. You have
17:31
Speaker 1: to have the radiation and you have to have a
17:32
Speaker 1: screen that can receive it. Right, X rays are invisible
17:36
Speaker 1: to us, and so if they can just fly through
17:38
Speaker 1: the universe and fly through a wall to see them,
17:40
Speaker 1: you have to put something in their path that they
17:42
Speaker 1: will interact with and that transform that information into something
17:46
Speaker 1: your eyeballs can see. All right, Well, that's X ray radiation,
17:50
Speaker 1: which is light radiation. But I guess the more popular
17:53
Speaker 1: kind of radiation, or at least in people's consciousness, is
17:57
Speaker 1: particle radiation. And that's where the curies come in. And
18:00
Speaker 1: so let's get into that kind of radiation. But first,
18:03
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. All right, we're talking about
18:19
Speaker 1: radiation and how it was discovered and how you should
18:22
Speaker 1: probably wear sunscreen when you're outside and near particle colliders?
18:26
Speaker 1: Would that help Daniel and near physicists? Probably because they
18:31
Speaker 1: they're so shiny and beaming. Well, they just had to
18:34
Speaker 1: do these crazy experiments which sometimes you know, do damage
18:37
Speaker 1: their own help. All right, Well, I guess we talked
18:40
Speaker 1: about X ray radiation, which which is really just light
18:43
Speaker 1: at higher frequencies that can pass through things, and some
18:46
Speaker 1: people associate that with radiation. But maybe the more common
18:51
Speaker 1: type of radiation that people think of is kind of
18:53
Speaker 1: the dangerous kind, I guess, the nuclear kind, and that's
18:57
Speaker 1: more like particle radiation. Yeah, and X rays, of course
18:59
Speaker 1: also dangerous. They can deposit a lot of energy in
19:02
Speaker 1: your skin, and they can cause cancer and UV radiation
19:06
Speaker 1: all that stuff, So it's definitely dangerous. But particle radiation
19:09
Speaker 1: also very dangerous and more famous because I think of
19:11
Speaker 1: the radioactive decays involved in nuclear physics, for example. But
19:16
Speaker 1: particle radiation was discovered pretty soon after particles were discovered. Remember,
19:21
Speaker 1: the whole idea of a particle didn't really exist until J. J.
19:25
Speaker 1: Thompson discovered the electron in the late eighteen hundreds. You know,
19:28
Speaker 1: this notion that everything was made out of tiny little bits,
19:31
Speaker 1: and we could find those things and we could associate
19:34
Speaker 1: like a tiny dot in space with mass and with
19:37
Speaker 1: other quantities. This is a whole new idea in physics
19:41
Speaker 1: at the time. It's not something which had existed for
19:43
Speaker 1: a long time right before, Like light was just like
19:45
Speaker 1: a beam, right, like pure energy kind of. Yeah, the
19:48
Speaker 1: wave properties of light were dominant, and people thought about
19:51
Speaker 1: light as a wave. They thought about matter and waves existing.
19:55
Speaker 1: But the whole idea that things were made out of
19:57
Speaker 1: tiny particles, or that these tiny particles could fly through
19:59
Speaker 1: space invisibly and hurt you, for example, this was brand new,
20:04
Speaker 1: but it was discovered pretty soon after the electron was
20:07
Speaker 1: discovered again in the late eighteen hundreds, like the next year. Yeah,
20:11
Speaker 1: and it was spurred by the discovery of X rays.
20:14
Speaker 1: Like everybody in the world was very excited about the
20:16
Speaker 1: X ray discovery made a huge wave in the world
20:18
Speaker 1: of physics. Pun definitely intended and I thought it was unintentional. No,
20:28
Speaker 1: And this bit about the screen that you latched onto.
20:30
Speaker 1: This guy Beck Carrell, he also was really excited about that.
20:33
Speaker 1: He thought it's really cool for something to absorb energy
20:37
Speaker 1: in one wavelength and emit in another. To absorb one
20:40
Speaker 1: kind of energy and emit another kind of thing. It's
20:43
Speaker 1: called luminescence. And he thought he was really exciting and
20:46
Speaker 1: he wanted to follow up in this and make also
20:49
Speaker 1: some kind of crazy discovery and he came from a
20:52
Speaker 1: long line of physicists people have been studying this sort
20:55
Speaker 1: of kind of thing of generation of heat and energy.
20:58
Speaker 1: So he did a series of experiments with uranium crystals
21:01
Speaker 1: and he was the first to discover particle radiation. So
21:04
Speaker 1: he actually came well before the curies. So interesting. Well,
21:07
Speaker 1: apparently his father was also a physicist and a radiation
21:11
Speaker 1: physicist too. That's right. He actually came from several generations
21:14
Speaker 1: of physicists and they all had the same job. They
21:16
Speaker 1: all had like the same chair in the head of
21:19
Speaker 1: the natural science department in Paris, and so it was
21:21
Speaker 1: sort of like a hereditary position almost. He's like a
21:25
Speaker 1: legacy physicist in France. So his father looked into radiation,
21:28
Speaker 1: but he didn't discover it. His father also had been
21:31
Speaker 1: studying uranium crystals, and after Beccarel discovered radiation, people went
21:35
Speaker 1: back and looked at his father's notebooks and there was
21:37
Speaker 1: plenty of evidence in his father's notebooks to document evidence
21:41
Speaker 1: of radiation, but his father just sort of didn't put
21:44
Speaker 1: it together. And this is something you can do in physics.
21:47
Speaker 1: When people make a big discovery, you can look back
21:50
Speaker 1: at people who might have discovered it. If they had
21:52
Speaker 1: only believed their results or followed up on something they
21:55
Speaker 1: didn't understand. It sort of missed opportunities in physics. I
21:59
Speaker 1: one know, if you want people to see that or
22:03
Speaker 1: it's just kind of a little bit embarrassing from a
22:05
Speaker 1: physics point of view. I think it's super fascinating from
22:08
Speaker 1: a sort of history of science point of view. You
22:10
Speaker 1: get a result that you don't understand or doesn't make sense,
22:13
Speaker 1: do you always follow up on it or do you
22:15
Speaker 1: sort of leave it behind? And those missed opportunities, you know,
22:18
Speaker 1: those times when signs could have gone differently if somebody
22:21
Speaker 1: had taken a different path and thought about something different
22:24
Speaker 1: or had a different conversation at a conference. It's fascinating
22:27
Speaker 1: to me to imagine the sort of alternate universes in
22:30
Speaker 1: which we discovered things in different orders, because that's what
22:33
Speaker 1: everyone wants in their tombstone, you know. Could have won
22:35
Speaker 1: a Nobel prize. Yeah, But they did these experiments with
22:39
Speaker 1: uranium crystals. So uranium was a thing, it was known,
22:43
Speaker 1: it wasn't understood what it was doing, but they were
22:45
Speaker 1: doing early studies with it. And essentially what they did
22:48
Speaker 1: basically is they just put it next to photographic plates,
22:51
Speaker 1: Like photographs were a thing back then, so they just
22:53
Speaker 1: wrapped them in paper and put them next to photographic plates,
22:56
Speaker 1: and they wanted to see what would happen. Oh right,
22:58
Speaker 1: because they had photo grass at that time, and that
23:02
Speaker 1: it is also kind of like magic, like light hits
23:04
Speaker 1: it and or not hit it and it changes color. Yeah, exactly.
23:07
Speaker 1: It's a special process that absorbs photons and develops in
23:10
Speaker 1: a different way based on you know, the amount of
23:13
Speaker 1: photons that hit it. To really sort of awesome chemical
23:15
Speaker 1: process for absorbing things and taking data. And back before
23:19
Speaker 1: we had computers and digital cameras and stuff, everything was analog.
23:23
Speaker 1: This was a powerful way to do science experiments. But
23:26
Speaker 1: Beckerel sort of started off on the wrong track. Remember
23:29
Speaker 1: he was interested in luminescence. He thought if you took
23:31
Speaker 1: these uranium crystals and you left them in the sun,
23:34
Speaker 1: that they would absorb a bunch of energy from the
23:36
Speaker 1: sun and then they might glow in some new invisible way.
23:40
Speaker 1: So he put these uranium crystals in the sun, then
23:42
Speaker 1: he wrapped them in paper to block an invisible light,
23:45
Speaker 1: and he put them next to these photographic plates. So
23:48
Speaker 1: he was hoping maybe he would like find a new
23:50
Speaker 1: way to make X rays, or that they would admit
23:52
Speaker 1: in the X ray because X rays had just been discovered,
23:54
Speaker 1: all right, So he saw radiation and X rays and
23:58
Speaker 1: he thought, hey, I wonder if that works everything. So
24:00
Speaker 1: do do you think he tried a bunch of different materials,
24:03
Speaker 1: not just these uranium crystals. Yeah, he tried a bunch
24:05
Speaker 1: of different materials wondering what would glow. But these uranium salts,
24:09
Speaker 1: these uranium crystals were the things that gave him the
24:12
Speaker 1: best results. But that's not actually the most interesting part
24:15
Speaker 1: of his discovery. I mean, first he did that, he said,
24:17
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put these things out in the sun. Then
24:20
Speaker 1: I'm gonna wrap them in paper to block in a
24:21
Speaker 1: visible light and see if they make an impact on
24:24
Speaker 1: the photographic plates. And they did so he thought, oh,
24:27
Speaker 1: that's cool. But then he accidentally left a bunch of
24:31
Speaker 1: them in a drawer next to these photographic plates without
24:35
Speaker 1: shining them in the sun, so he sort of messed
24:38
Speaker 1: up his experiment. He thought it was necessary to leave
24:40
Speaker 1: it in in the sun to absorb energy and then it
24:42
Speaker 1: would give off this radiation, but he accidentally left over
24:45
Speaker 1: the weekend a bunch of iranium crystals next to one
24:48
Speaker 1: of these photographic plates and came back the next week
24:51
Speaker 1: and said, m oops for guys to leave this stuff
24:54
Speaker 1: in the sun. But let's just develop this film and
24:56
Speaker 1: see what it says. What seriously, seriously, total accident, total accident.
25:02
Speaker 1: And he thought, well, you know, I guess I did
25:04
Speaker 1: this weird experiment where I skipped the step with the sun.
25:07
Speaker 1: Let's see what happens. And he developed it and the
25:09
Speaker 1: picture looked exactly the same, which tells him that it
25:12
Speaker 1: didn't need to absorb energy from the sun. It wasn't
25:15
Speaker 1: luminescence where it was slurping in energy from the sun
25:18
Speaker 1: and then changing it into X rays or something. It
25:21
Speaker 1: was different. The uranium crystals were just giving off energy
25:24
Speaker 1: on their own. They were just like a source of
25:26
Speaker 1: some new kind of radiation, some new kind of invisible ray. Right,
25:31
Speaker 1: that's really what he thought, Right, something invisible is coming
25:34
Speaker 1: out of this, and this invisible thing somehow had energy. Yeah,
25:38
Speaker 1: and you didn't have to put in energy. It's not
25:40
Speaker 1: like with the Crooks too, where you have to apply electricity.
25:43
Speaker 1: And it generated energy for the electrons which generated the
25:46
Speaker 1: X rays. And it wasn't like phosphorescence where you have
25:49
Speaker 1: to sit out in the sun and absorb the energy
25:51
Speaker 1: and then give it off. It was just like pumping
25:53
Speaker 1: out this invisible energy. And now we know that it
25:56
Speaker 1: was alpha radiation and beta radiation, but he didn't know
25:59
Speaker 1: that at the time, and he just knew he was
26:01
Speaker 1: admitting some crazy new rays. And then he also won
26:04
Speaker 1: a Nobel Prize for it, right, he won like the
26:05
Speaker 1: third one he did, he won the third one, but
26:08
Speaker 1: just barely. He discovered this, and the day after he
26:12
Speaker 1: made this discovery he gave a presentation at like the
26:15
Speaker 1: local scientific society, and he beat out some English physicists
26:19
Speaker 1: who made the discovery like later that week. What we what?
26:23
Speaker 1: But if he gave the presentation, then the other one
26:25
Speaker 1: technically didn't the discovery or I guess he wasn't at
26:29
Speaker 1: the presentation. He wasn't there yet, because you know the
26:31
Speaker 1: world was much smaller, so you could give a whole
26:33
Speaker 1: presentation and a society and friends, and nobody would hear
26:36
Speaker 1: about it in England until weeks later or so. And
26:39
Speaker 1: so Sylvanis Thompson made very very similar experiments, very similar
26:43
Speaker 1: discoveries just a few days later and lost out on
26:46
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize because Beckerel made this discovery and was
26:49
Speaker 1: very quick to report it. Oh, I see Beckrell was
26:52
Speaker 1: in another country. Yes, this is in France. Interesting. Wow,
26:56
Speaker 1: that's crazy. Two people in two different countries make the
26:59
Speaker 1: same fundamental discovery almost a week apart, and there was
27:03
Speaker 1: no internet. There was no internet. But this is all
27:06
Speaker 1: spurred by Runkin's discovery of X rays and like cracked
27:10
Speaker 1: open a whole new area of research. People looking for
27:12
Speaker 1: these invisible rays. How can we find them, what's making them?
27:15
Speaker 1: What kinds are out there? And it really did sparkle,
27:17
Speaker 1: you know, a whole new field of research, all right.
27:20
Speaker 1: So then that's where we get to Madame Curie and
27:24
Speaker 1: Pierre Curie and that that this is kind of where
27:26
Speaker 1: their story starts, right like the year after, Yeah, exactly,
27:30
Speaker 1: this is where their story starts. So they came in
27:32
Speaker 1: after Beckarel had already discovered radiation and Runkin had discovered
27:36
Speaker 1: X rays, and they were really interested in this. And
27:39
Speaker 1: Curie herself has a really fascinating backstory. Remember it's very
27:42
Speaker 1: difficult for women in science to have any position and
27:47
Speaker 1: to have any engagement, to even get an education. She
27:50
Speaker 1: and her sister, for example, had to take turns working
27:53
Speaker 1: and going to school. They had this deal where one
27:55
Speaker 1: of them would work and the other one would go
27:56
Speaker 1: to school, and then they took turns. And you have
27:59
Speaker 1: to be really dedicated and sort of fend off all
28:02
Speaker 1: out of societal pressure even to get to have an education,
28:05
Speaker 1: not to mention be a scientist at the leading edge
28:07
Speaker 1: of physics knowledge. Yeah, it's amazing, pretty powerful story. So
28:11
Speaker 1: she was in France and she I guess she knew
28:13
Speaker 1: about Beckarel's discovery. She knew about Beckarel's discovery, but most
28:17
Speaker 1: of the world was more excited about the X rays,
28:20
Speaker 1: like these new uranium rays that they called them you raise.
28:23
Speaker 1: People are like, Okay, that's cool, but X rays are
28:25
Speaker 1: better because they're easier to use, they're faster, they're cheaper
28:28
Speaker 1: than make sharper images. But she was really interested in
28:31
Speaker 1: these you rays. She was like, what are these? What's
28:33
Speaker 1: making them? What does it tell us about the atom
28:37
Speaker 1: that these things are just being created out of there?
28:40
Speaker 1: And she was working with her husband, Pierre, and they
28:43
Speaker 1: had this really cool device, this thing called an electrometer,
28:46
Speaker 1: and he could basically measure very sensitively how well things
28:49
Speaker 1: could conduct electricity. And Pierre had developed this technology from
28:53
Speaker 1: his earlier research, which was into pezo electronics, these little
28:56
Speaker 1: devices which create electricity if you squeeze them or move
29:00
Speaker 1: if you apply electrical voltage across them. So we had
29:03
Speaker 1: this technology and they applied it to the study these
29:05
Speaker 1: you rays, and they found something pretty cool, which is
29:08
Speaker 1: that if you have a bunch of uranium, the air
29:11
Speaker 1: around the uranium tends to get ionized. They can conduct
29:14
Speaker 1: electricity more easily than if you don't have uranium around
29:19
Speaker 1: I see. And that was a big clue that it
29:21
Speaker 1: was maybe giving all some kind of energy. Yeah, that
29:23
Speaker 1: was a big clue that it was shooting out something
29:26
Speaker 1: because it was like changing the air, right, This energy
29:28
Speaker 1: was coming out and it was changing the air around
29:31
Speaker 1: the uranium. And Pierre and Marie they took like no
29:34
Speaker 1: safety precautions. They gotta readiated so much in their research.
29:38
Speaker 1: There are all these moments you can read about in
29:40
Speaker 1: their lab notebooks where they're like, Pierre has been sick
29:43
Speaker 1: every single day for the last three months. I wonder
29:45
Speaker 1: if it's coinciding with all these experiments we've done, whatever,
29:50
Speaker 1: And they just kept going. It was pretty incredible. They
29:53
Speaker 1: were really pretty sick during this whole period. Like nine ten,
29:57
Speaker 1: which is a very intense period of their research, and
29:59
Speaker 1: discover they're basically sick the whole time. And they never
30:03
Speaker 1: really associated like all this illness with the research they
30:06
Speaker 1: were doing. I'm not sure if that was like a
30:09
Speaker 1: cognitive choice, like let's not influence our research with these
30:12
Speaker 1: petty details of life, or if they knew and they
30:15
Speaker 1: just sort of didn't care because it just we're so
30:18
Speaker 1: hungry to reveal the knowledge. Well, technically, we don't know.
30:21
Speaker 1: I mean, they could have just been, you know, on
30:23
Speaker 1: a rash of eating badgers. I suppose so, but you know,
30:28
Speaker 1: you look at the pattern of damage to their bodies,
30:30
Speaker 1: like their fingertips had the really terrible damage to them.
30:33
Speaker 1: You know, Murray Curie, she's now like a hero in France.
30:36
Speaker 1: Of course, they moved her ashes from wherever they had
30:39
Speaker 1: been born just about twenty years ago. They moved them
30:42
Speaker 1: to the Pantheon in Paris, which is where you know,
30:44
Speaker 1: France inters the ashes and the remains of its most
30:47
Speaker 1: highly revered citizens. And those ashes were still radioactive. This
30:51
Speaker 1: is like, you know, seventy years later, Yeah, exactly. She
30:57
Speaker 1: definitely hurt herself for science, Her legacy lives. She was
31:01
Speaker 1: really fascinated with this fact that the uranium the U
31:05
Speaker 1: raise could change the air around them, and this is
31:08
Speaker 1: what led her to this hypothesis that it wasn't like chemical,
31:11
Speaker 1: It's not like the electron is giving off some energy
31:14
Speaker 1: that it's absorbed from some other way. She thought it
31:16
Speaker 1: was something deep in the atom, that the atoms themselves
31:19
Speaker 1: or maybe not stable, that there was something changing internally
31:22
Speaker 1: and it was giving off this energy. And of course
31:25
Speaker 1: now we know she's right, it was radioactive to Kay,
31:28
Speaker 1: but this was a really big and sort of bold
31:30
Speaker 1: idea at the time. Right well, at this point in
31:33
Speaker 1: our history, we knew about the atom, and we knew
31:35
Speaker 1: about the kind of structure of it. We knew about
31:38
Speaker 1: the electron, but we hadn't yet even discovered the nucleus
31:41
Speaker 1: of the atom. It wasn't ntil Rutherford bombarded gold foil
31:45
Speaker 1: with radiation later that we understood that there was like
31:48
Speaker 1: a hard center to the atom that had a nucleus.
31:50
Speaker 1: God forbid, you know, understanding the proton and the neutron
31:53
Speaker 1: inside of it. At the time, after J. J. Thompson
31:56
Speaker 1: discovered the electron, he thought that matter was like a
31:59
Speaker 1: bunch of electrons floating in a positively charged jelly, and
32:03
Speaker 1: so we didn't really even understand the structure of the atom.
32:06
Speaker 1: So this is a really big leap for anybody to make. Yeah,
32:09
Speaker 1: I mean, she's saying that it comes from deep within
32:10
Speaker 1: the atom, but we didn't even know there was an atom. Well,
32:13
Speaker 1: we knew there were atoms, we just didn't really know
32:14
Speaker 1: like what was going on inside there. We didn't really
32:17
Speaker 1: understand there was a hard nucleus that was made out
32:20
Speaker 1: of these smaller particles. So yeah, it's a pretty big leap.
32:23
Speaker 1: All right, let's get into her actual experiment in which
32:26
Speaker 1: he discovered this nuclear radiation and what that means and
32:30
Speaker 1: what other types of radiation were surrounded by. But first
32:33
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break. All Right, we're talking about
32:48
Speaker 1: the discovery of radiation, and we're up to Marie Currey
32:52
Speaker 1: and her discovery that the nuclei of atoms also radiate things,
32:59
Speaker 1: because we knew about X ray radiation, but we didn't
33:01
Speaker 1: know about this particular kind which is coming from the nucleus. Yeah,
33:05
Speaker 1: and we didn't even really know about the nucleus yet.
33:07
Speaker 1: So this is giving us an inside that there's something
33:10
Speaker 1: inside the atom, some mechanism which is capable of generating
33:13
Speaker 1: powerful particle radiation. And so this was discovered originally in uranium, right,
33:18
Speaker 1: Beckarel saw that it happened. But what the curious did
33:21
Speaker 1: was that they sort of refined it. They discovered that
33:24
Speaker 1: uranium itself was radioactive, but that there were variations of
33:28
Speaker 1: uranium or that was even more radioactive than pure uranium itself,
33:33
Speaker 1: which suggested that there might be something else in there,
33:36
Speaker 1: even more radioactive. Oh, I see interesting, Like it's possible
33:40
Speaker 1: to make an element like an atom the extra radioactive. Yeah, exactly.
33:44
Speaker 1: They were working with this material called pitch blend, which
33:47
Speaker 1: is a version of uranium ore, and they discovered that
33:50
Speaker 1: before you purified it, before you purified it to make
33:53
Speaker 1: just pure uranium, it was actually more radioactive. So they
33:57
Speaker 1: had this hypothesis that there was something else in there,
34:00
Speaker 1: a new element that was even more radioactive than uranium.
34:04
Speaker 1: So they developed this technique to purify it, and a
34:07
Speaker 1: lot of the time they spent, a lot of their
34:09
Speaker 1: actual science was in this process of isolating this bit.
34:13
Speaker 1: It took them, for example, three years of work on
34:16
Speaker 1: pitch blend just to isolate a tenth of a gram
34:20
Speaker 1: of this new substance. That's crazy. I imagine most people
34:24
Speaker 1: think of radioactive things is like rocks or something, but
34:26
Speaker 1: for them, this is probably like a powder or something. Right, Yeah,
34:29
Speaker 1: these are like salts, right. They're grinding them up, they're
34:32
Speaker 1: purifying that. They're doing chemistry to try to separate the
34:34
Speaker 1: bits from the other, like does this dissolve in that?
34:37
Speaker 1: How do we pull this thing apart? So it really
34:39
Speaker 1: is sort of chemical. And what they discovered is that
34:42
Speaker 1: there really is something in there that's more radioactive than uranium,
34:46
Speaker 1: and so they're big discovery was the discovery of a
34:48
Speaker 1: new element, which Marie called polonium after her native Poland.
34:54
Speaker 1: I see, because like if you take a uranium atom
34:56
Speaker 1: and you give it extra protons and new tron's, then
35:00
Speaker 1: it becomes a different element. Yeah. Actually, uranium breaks down, right,
35:04
Speaker 1: It splits open, it's unstable, and it turns into other
35:07
Speaker 1: stuff now we know, into thorium and into radium and
35:11
Speaker 1: eventually into polonium and all sorts of stuff. So if
35:14
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of uranium, it eventually turns into
35:16
Speaker 1: this combination of other elements. It breaks open and turns
35:20
Speaker 1: into smaller, lighter elements, some of which are more radioactive
35:24
Speaker 1: than uranium itself. So I guess you could say her
35:27
Speaker 1: discovery was kind of about nuclear physics, right, even before
35:31
Speaker 1: we knew there was a nucleus. She sort of maybe
35:33
Speaker 1: intuited that, you know, there's something going on here inside
35:36
Speaker 1: of matter and atoms that can somehow, you know, give
35:40
Speaker 1: off energy and change into different elements. Right, that's maybe
35:45
Speaker 1: was sort of a big contribution, and not so much
35:47
Speaker 1: about the radiation, but just kind of about the nature
35:50
Speaker 1: of the insides of atoms. Yeah, exactly what the radiation
35:54
Speaker 1: reveals about the structure of atoms and the structure of
35:56
Speaker 1: matter itself. And you're right, it's totally fascinating to see
36:00
Speaker 1: one element turned into another element, and if it does
36:03
Speaker 1: that by giving off a particle, that tells you that
36:06
Speaker 1: what defines an element must be something related to its
36:09
Speaker 1: particle content. Right, You're giving off a piece and you
36:12
Speaker 1: turn into something else. That tells you that peace was
36:15
Speaker 1: essential for you to be uranium or for you to
36:17
Speaker 1: be radium. So that was pretty fascinating clue into the
36:20
Speaker 1: structure of the atom itself yet early nuclear physics. And
36:24
Speaker 1: so she went on to win the Nobel Prize in
36:27
Speaker 1: nineteen o three, same year she got her pH d thesis.
36:30
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, yeah, pretty awesome. Not only the first
36:34
Speaker 1: woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, but the
36:36
Speaker 1: first woman in France to receive a PhD. Wow, I
36:40
Speaker 1: wonder which one is more significant in a way. So
36:43
Speaker 1: she was also in on the third Nobel Prize ever. Yeah,
36:47
Speaker 1: she and her husband, Pierre and Beckerel all won the
36:50
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize in nineteen o three. But you know, obviously
36:53
Speaker 1: she was very deserving, but the initial nomination was only
36:56
Speaker 1: for Pierre and Bequerel. They excluded her, probably because she
37:00
Speaker 1: as a woman. But Pierre insisted that, hey, look Marie
37:03
Speaker 1: has done at least as much work as anybody else.
37:05
Speaker 1: She's very deserving. So she ended up being included in
37:07
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize. Great husband there, yeah exactly. Unfortunately he
37:12
Speaker 1: died tragically. He was hit by a horse cart filled
37:15
Speaker 1: with heavy equipment and was crushed one day, no way
37:19
Speaker 1: after all this, so he was killed by horse radiation
37:22
Speaker 1: a way exactly. Horses are an energetic particle. I suppose.
37:27
Speaker 1: Now we shouldn't laugh over anybody's death. It was tragic
37:29
Speaker 1: and it was very difficult for Marie, but she persevered
37:33
Speaker 1: and she did a bunch more chemistry and isolated another element, radium,
37:37
Speaker 1: for which she won the nineteen eleven Nobel Prize, this
37:39
Speaker 1: time in chemistry. Also, it's rare how many people get
37:43
Speaker 1: a Nobel Prize for their PhD work. Almost nobody, right,
37:47
Speaker 1: not very many. There was the guy who got the
37:49
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize for his pH d work. He discovered the
37:52
Speaker 1: binary pulsars, which were an excellent test of general relativity.
37:57
Speaker 1: Fascinating story there is that he did this work as
37:59
Speaker 1: a p h d student. It wasn't really understood or
38:02
Speaker 1: appreciated at the time, so he actually left the field
38:05
Speaker 1: and then won the Nobel Prize and ended up coming
38:07
Speaker 1: back and getting to do more research. So that's pretty fun.
38:10
Speaker 1: He was like selling cars and then he gets a
38:12
Speaker 1: call not quite that far. He was working in the
38:15
Speaker 1: computing division, I think at Princeton, and then he won
38:18
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize and they called him up and they
38:19
Speaker 1: were like, so, how big an office would you like? Yeah,
38:23
Speaker 1: it's weird to kind of peak that early in your career, right,
38:27
Speaker 1: Although Marie kept going. She won a second Nobel Prize,
38:30
Speaker 1: and even her daughter won one. Two. Yes, her daughter
38:33
Speaker 1: and her daughter's husband worked together again. On radiation and
38:37
Speaker 1: they induced artificial radioactivity. They took an element which was
38:40
Speaker 1: not radioactive, alunium, and then bombarded it with radiation and
38:45
Speaker 1: they made it radioactive. And so that was a pretty
38:48
Speaker 1: interesting discovery and they won the Nobel Prize in so
38:52
Speaker 1: there's a lot of Nobel Prizes in the Curie family.
38:55
Speaker 1: All Right, Well, then at this point, I guess radiation
38:58
Speaker 1: is pretty much discovered. I mean, and we sort of
39:01
Speaker 1: at that point they knew about X rays and then
39:03
Speaker 1: also about kind of particle radiation coming from the nu kids. Yeah,
39:08
Speaker 1: and everybody thought that radiation came from stuff, right. We
39:11
Speaker 1: had found it in oars, from metals deep within the earth,
39:15
Speaker 1: and so people thought, well, if there's radiation around, it's
39:17
Speaker 1: coming from the ground beneath us. So people thought if
39:20
Speaker 1: you went higher up, like higher altitude, the radiation should decrease,
39:24
Speaker 1: right because you're further away from the Earth and all
39:26
Speaker 1: these sources of radiation. But people who did measurements found
39:30
Speaker 1: something really strange. They found it as you went up
39:32
Speaker 1: to the tops of mountains, the amount of radiation seemed
39:35
Speaker 1: to be increasing, and that was weird and surprising to people. Right. Yeah,
39:39
Speaker 1: that's when we discovered cosmic radiation. Yeah, exactly. So there's
39:42
Speaker 1: this wonderfully hilarious pioneering physicist named Victor Hess. This guy
39:47
Speaker 1: was born in the castle and his father was a
39:50
Speaker 1: royal forester to a prince, and he did these amazing
39:53
Speaker 1: experiments where he went up on a balloon with his
39:57
Speaker 1: equipment he improved on Pierre's electroscope to measure like ionization
40:01
Speaker 1: due to radiation, and he went up on balloons. But
40:03
Speaker 1: you couldn't just like send up the balloon and then
40:05
Speaker 1: get the data later right like the way we do now,
40:07
Speaker 1: because there's no way to record this information. So he
40:10
Speaker 1: actually went on these balloon chips himself, like sometimes up
40:13
Speaker 1: at night, really high in the atmosphere, a great personal risk.
40:17
Speaker 1: But he discovered that as you went up higher and higher,
40:20
Speaker 1: even above mountaintops, the amount of radiation increased dramatically. So
40:25
Speaker 1: this pointed to something really new and interesting that most
40:27
Speaker 1: of the radiation that we were feeling around us wasn't
40:30
Speaker 1: coming from the earth beneath us, but from the skies
40:33
Speaker 1: above us. I guess once you sort of understand that
40:36
Speaker 1: there are invisible, you know, things flying around you coming
40:40
Speaker 1: from the earth, and kind of makes you wonder where
40:42
Speaker 1: else are these things coming from, or where else can
40:44
Speaker 1: you find them exactly? And every time you discover a
40:47
Speaker 1: new way to look at the universe, you are bound
40:49
Speaker 1: to find something surprising. So discovery of radiation not just
40:53
Speaker 1: showed us what was inside the atom and helped us
40:55
Speaker 1: see inside our bodies. It also helped us see the
40:58
Speaker 1: universe in a new way and to see really really
41:00
Speaker 1: bright sources of this new kind of information. And most
41:04
Speaker 1: of it was coming from space, and so that was
41:06
Speaker 1: a big question mark for decades, like what is making
41:09
Speaker 1: radiation out in space and shooting it at us? And
41:13
Speaker 1: that's an area of research still today, Like we understand
41:15
Speaker 1: a lot of the source of that cosmic radiation now,
41:17
Speaker 1: but not all of it, right, Yeah, it's a big mystery.
41:20
Speaker 1: It's like it could be anything. Yeah, at the time,
41:22
Speaker 1: people really didn't understand. Now we know that a lot
41:24
Speaker 1: of that radiation comes from the Sun, it's the solar wind,
41:27
Speaker 1: and also comes from outside our solar system, from the galaxy,
41:30
Speaker 1: from the black hole at the center of the Milky Way,
41:32
Speaker 1: for example, emits a lot of radiation, and other crazy
41:35
Speaker 1: stuff out there emits radiation. But there's still a lots
41:37
Speaker 1: of this radiation from space that we do not understand.
41:40
Speaker 1: The very very high energy particles very tip of that
41:43
Speaker 1: spectrum are higher energy than anything we understand can make.
41:47
Speaker 1: So radiation is still telling us about the universe and
41:50
Speaker 1: giving us clues about things out there that we don't
41:52
Speaker 1: know about. I'm guessing the scientists just wanted a better
41:55
Speaker 1: view out of his lab. So he's like, I mighta
41:57
Speaker 1: put it on a balloon. Yeah, I don't know. Or
42:00
Speaker 1: maybe he needed a break from whatever was going on
42:02
Speaker 1: in his life and you just need an excuse to
42:04
Speaker 1: take a flight this castle to watch castle drama. It's
42:08
Speaker 1: like I'm hopping down my balloon to do signs as
42:10
Speaker 1: we all do. If they ad made a reality show
42:12
Speaker 1: about it, that would have been the dramatic ending to
42:14
Speaker 1: an episode as he floats away in his balloon. All right, Well,
42:17
Speaker 1: I think that's just a really interesting kind of view
42:20
Speaker 1: into how we came to see that there are a
42:24
Speaker 1: lot of things that we can't see, right, because how
42:27
Speaker 1: else would you know that there's things there if we
42:28
Speaker 1: can't see them or hear them. Yeah, and this is
42:31
Speaker 1: a pattern in physics that we keep discovering that their
42:34
Speaker 1: entire segments of the universe we didn't know anything about
42:37
Speaker 1: because for a long time they were invisible to us.
42:40
Speaker 1: The discovery of dark matter, for example, we know that
42:43
Speaker 1: dark matters out there. It's all around us, it's streaming everywhere.
42:46
Speaker 1: It contains vast amounts of information about what's going on
42:49
Speaker 1: in the universe and how it was born and how
42:51
Speaker 1: it came to be, and we only recently discovered it exists.
42:55
Speaker 1: And that tells us that there's almost certainly more stuff
42:58
Speaker 1: going on that we haven't yet to open and we
43:00
Speaker 1: haven't discovered. That will tell a future physicists crazy things
43:04
Speaker 1: about the universe that we cannot yet even anticipate. Yeah,
43:07
Speaker 1: and it kind of also reminds you that physics can
43:09
Speaker 1: be dangerous, you know, like you're probing the unknown, you're
43:13
Speaker 1: exposing yourself to things, yet you don't know whether or
43:16
Speaker 1: not the exist or not, or what they're doing to
43:18
Speaker 1: your body. Right, that's right. I've eaten a lot of
43:21
Speaker 1: very dangerous airline food and all of my trips to
43:23
Speaker 1: the large hage On collider. So yeah, your ashes will
43:26
Speaker 1: probably glow too, Daniel. All that swift that you're eating,
43:30
Speaker 1: it's probably radioactive, Yes, fund is probably not good for you.
43:34
Speaker 1: But it's delicious. Yeah, all right, Well that's a pretty
43:37
Speaker 1: fascinating trip down science history lane, and I hope it
43:40
Speaker 1: encourages all of you who are curious about things we
43:42
Speaker 1: don't understand, things we have not yet unraveled, to follow
43:46
Speaker 1: up those threads. If you see something you don't understand,
43:49
Speaker 1: try to figure it out. If something doesn't make sense
43:51
Speaker 1: to you, ask yourself questions until it does. Because remember
43:54
Speaker 1: that the history of science is just people being curious,
43:57
Speaker 1: trying to figure stuff out, and pushing full word on
44:00
Speaker 1: the envelope of human knowledge. Right, yeah, you two can
44:03
Speaker 1: win a Nobel prize even if you get kicked out
44:05
Speaker 1: of high school for drawing cartoons. That's not an exaggeration.
44:10
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
44:12
Speaker 1: joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening, and
44:22
Speaker 1: remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a
44:25
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio or more podcast for my
44:29
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts,
44:32
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.