> Marie Curie worked here from 1914 until 1934, the year of her death, handling radioactive elements including radium, which she and her husband Pierre Curie had discovered in 1898. For most of her life, she did this with bare, increasingly radium-scarred hands.
This almost sounds medieval to my ears. It’s kinda freighting how far we’ve gotten in merely 100 years.
The ~15% infant mortality at the time was spectacular progress and yet by modern standards unbearable. Medieval would have been closer to 50%. So on this measure about a third of the way back to the Middle Ages.
Louis Pasteur's work establishing germ theory happened in the 1860's, and germ theory as the cause of disease wasn't really widely accepted until roughly this time period.
Blood letting (and its foundation the four humors) was still a thing when the Curies discovered radium.
I've recently come around on bloodletting. It seems barbarous, but there are some ailments that it really does help with. It wasn't a wild extrapolation for our ancestors to think it helped with other things. For example, gout: I recently had an appointment to give blood during a pretty bad gout flare, but I didn't want to reschedule so I hobbled over there, cane and all. By the time I was done, I felt better than I had in days. Looked it up, and turns out there's a not-insignificant amount of research on the subject.
I can totally imagine one of my gout-ridden relatives incidentally discovering that after losing a good chunk of blood (maybe a hunting accident, or a fuckup in a pottery workshop) that their foot stopped stabbing in pain. And then going "what else can I cure this way?".
And there's some new things that bloodletting is the only known treatment for. Like PFAS accumulation.
I just read The Radium Girls, about the ̶w̶o̶m̶e̶n children who were hired to paint clock faces and military instruments with radium paint. 100s of young girls who died in their 20s and 30s because they were carelessly exposed to the radiation. It struck me that they were born around the same time as my own grandmother. We really have come a long way in a fairly short amount of time.
You're leaving out the horrific part where they weren't told about the known dangers and we routinely licking/shaping their brushes to get finer points which was a big source of the radium exposure.
Inhaling/ingesting concentrated radioactive substances is a big danger with that kind of thing. There are so many variables and it's hard to measure. Health effects depend on where it ends up within the body.
I live in Sceaux, bit south of Paris, where she lived some years. I once visited her house (now owned by someone who worked with one or more descendants of her) at some special occasion. One of the bedroom has a radiation sticker, and is officially controlled by the authorities, as some radiation were found. She obviously used to bring some work home :)
You're focusing only on "Marie", whereas the greater emphasis should arguably be on "Skłodowska".
AFAIK, in 19th century France, a woman's legal name did not change after she married. She adopted her husband's name as a matter of usage, however. FWIW, I, too, have heard that Marie Skłodowska-Curie wished to make prominent her maiden name, perhaps in the double barrelled form (which is the way I've seen it many times in other languages).
She even wanted to be Skłodowska, but then she wouldn’t be able to work as scientist and be respected. Curie is her husband's and that was the only way to be someone back then.
"Contrary to the practice of some other countries, French women do not legally change names when they marry; however, it is customary that they adopt their husband's name as a "usage name" for daily life." [0]
The BBC are quite poor at this kind of thing, preferring their style guide to official names. The still use Czech Republic for Czechia, Republic of Ireland for Ireland, and Turkey for Türkiye.
why single it out? even the countries that use (mostly) latin alphabet don't necessary have the same name in english - Poland is Polska, Lithuania is Lietuva, Estonia is Eesti, Finland is Suomi, etc. And latinizations/romanizations are often wildly inaccurate - Ukraine is actually Ukraina, Russia is actually Rossia, and the english pronunciations are completely wrong. Japan is Nihon. etc etc.
>Republic of Ireland for Ireland
there are two irelands, fyi
>Türkiye
no one can type that u on a keyboard without googling and copypasting it. you might as well insist on using hieroglyphs for CJK things
From my limited knowledge, itwould be very hard to make it react to all types of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma) since they penetrate differently and interact with forces differently. You could potentially make a magnetic "lens" that would interact with alpha and beta particles, but gamma rays would ignore it.
The best way I can think of to make a "radiation camera" is similar to how you can make a "wifi camera", by hooking up a radiation detector to a pan-tilt mechanism, and moving it around very slowly and sampling the amount of radiation detected at each point. Essentially a single pixel "camera" that you have to move around to take a full picture. However, you'd also have to shield the detector from any radioactivity coming from directions that it's not pointed in, which is especially hard if you're trying to capture gamma rays, since they like to penetrate through everything. Its like if light could leak into the side of a normal camera, you'd get rubbish photos
Why would it have to be a single pixel instead of an array of sensors like any digital camera?
Sure, we probably can't make Geiger counters in a form factor that allows an array of a million of them in a handheld device, but maybe 20x16 or something?
Depends on the energy ranges and particle types you are interested in.
For instance we routinely take plenty of x-ray images, though there is fortunately not a lot of stuff just lying around that are bright enough x-ray sources to properly expose standard x-ray detectors.
Detecting electrons or protons (beta and alpha radiation) in such a way that you can work out their arrival direction is also doable, but the equipment is fairly bulky and you tend to have to wait a long time to accumulate enough detections to see anything.
While a sensor array of tiny/microscopic Geiger–Müller tubes sounds practical, focusing the particles to generate an image on that sensor is not. There is no lens that can simultaneously focus all the different types of particles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation#Directly_io...
You could make a pin-point camera with an array of detectors that will receive thus only the radiation coming from the direction fixed by the positions of the aperture and of the detector.
However that might not work well because the material around the pin-point aperture might not absorb sufficiently the rays coming from different directions and it cannot be made thick.
So what may work better is to make the detector array in the form of a compound arthropod eye, where each detector is at the bottom of a long tube whose walls absorb the rays coming from any other direction except its axis.
In practice, besides trying to absorb the rays coming from different directions, preventing them to reach the detector, for high-energy rays there is the alternative to use 2 or more collinear detectors for each direction (corresponding to an image pixel). A high-energy particle or photon will pass through all collinear detectors, causing simultaneous pulses at their outputs. Whenever such pulses are not simultaneous, they are discarded, because they correspond to rays coming from another direction than intended for that pixel. The accumulated count of filtered pulses per some time interval will give the luminosity of the corresponding image pixel.
> Marie Curie worked here from 1914 until 1934, the year of her death, handling radioactive elements including radium, which she and her husband Pierre Curie had discovered in 1898. For most of her life, she did this with bare, increasingly radium-scarred hands.
This almost sounds medieval to my ears. It’s kinda freighting how far we’ve gotten in merely 100 years.
The ~15% infant mortality at the time was spectacular progress and yet by modern standards unbearable. Medieval would have been closer to 50%. So on this measure about a third of the way back to the Middle Ages.
https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demograph...
Modern rates range from 0.15% (Slovenia) to 10% (Afghanistan):
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortalit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...
Louis Pasteur's work establishing germ theory happened in the 1860's, and germ theory as the cause of disease wasn't really widely accepted until roughly this time period.
Blood letting (and its foundation the four humors) was still a thing when the Curies discovered radium.
We have come a long way indeed.
I've recently come around on bloodletting. It seems barbarous, but there are some ailments that it really does help with. It wasn't a wild extrapolation for our ancestors to think it helped with other things. For example, gout: I recently had an appointment to give blood during a pretty bad gout flare, but I didn't want to reschedule so I hobbled over there, cane and all. By the time I was done, I felt better than I had in days. Looked it up, and turns out there's a not-insignificant amount of research on the subject.
I can totally imagine one of my gout-ridden relatives incidentally discovering that after losing a good chunk of blood (maybe a hunting accident, or a fuckup in a pottery workshop) that their foot stopped stabbing in pain. And then going "what else can I cure this way?".
And there's some new things that bloodletting is the only known treatment for. Like PFAS accumulation.
2 replies →
I just read The Radium Girls, about the ̶w̶o̶m̶e̶n children who were hired to paint clock faces and military instruments with radium paint. 100s of young girls who died in their 20s and 30s because they were carelessly exposed to the radiation. It struck me that they were born around the same time as my own grandmother. We really have come a long way in a fairly short amount of time.
You're leaving out the horrific part where they weren't told about the known dangers and we routinely licking/shaping their brushes to get finer points which was a big source of the radium exposure.
2 replies →
They would also paint their faces with it, so when they went out at night they would glow. Crazy
I agree with your point, but describing women in their 20s & 30s as "children" is rather demeaning.
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Someone has to find out the hard way. It was a time when people to Röntgen pictures for fun.
Medieval? The 19th century was not a good place.
My dad had childhood shoe shopping helped by xrays on the high street.
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Nearly everything you find in nature has such low levels of radioactivity that handling them isn't dangerous.
It's only when you start refining and enriching natural things that they become really risky. Unfortunately thats what Curie did.
> It's only when you start refining and enriching natural things that they become really risky.
It’s a big factor, but not only. You don’t need to refine or enrich anything to have radon poisoning, for example.
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Inhaling/ingesting concentrated radioactive substances is a big danger with that kind of thing. There are so many variables and it's hard to measure. Health effects depend on where it ends up within the body.
Oh, we're going back there baby.
I live in Sceaux, bit south of Paris, where she lived some years. I once visited her house (now owned by someone who worked with one or more descendants of her) at some special occasion. One of the bedroom has a radiation sticker, and is officially controlled by the authorities, as some radiation were found. She obviously used to bring some work home :)
*Maria Skłodowska-Curie, as she herself insisted on being called. BBC should know better.
any source on this? It's difficult to find any primary source on her opinion
All her written texts i can find after she moved to France she referred to herself as "Marie"
In her biography of Pierre Curie, she herself wrote of herself before she married "Mon nom est Marie Sklodowska"
here's a letter she wrote to the president and signed simply "Marie Curie" https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/letter-from-mar...
You're focusing only on "Marie", whereas the greater emphasis should arguably be on "Skłodowska".
AFAIK, in 19th century France, a woman's legal name did not change after she married. She adopted her husband's name as a matter of usage, however. FWIW, I, too, have heard that Marie Skłodowska-Curie wished to make prominent her maiden name, perhaps in the double barrelled form (which is the way I've seen it many times in other languages).
1 reply →
She even wanted to be Skłodowska, but then she wouldn’t be able to work as scientist and be respected. Curie is her husband's and that was the only way to be someone back then.
This sounds false.
"Contrary to the practice of some other countries, French women do not legally change names when they marry; however, it is customary that they adopt their husband's name as a "usage name" for daily life." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_name
Regardless.
She is far more widely known as Marie Curie in the English speaking world. Using any other name would be confusing for most readers.
As long as the "Curie" is kept the confusion is small, however serves as a vehicle to teach more about her and the time.
And after a while it won't be confusing at all.
The BBC are quite poor at this kind of thing, preferring their style guide to official names. The still use Czech Republic for Czechia, Republic of Ireland for Ireland, and Turkey for Türkiye.
> The still use Czech Republic for Czechia
Naive question but is Czechia a new name? The UN lists "Czech Republic" as official name and "Czechia" as the short name.
> Republic of Ireland for Ireland
To be fair, I don't think this is partisan, but rather just a way to differentiate the state from the island.
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> The still use Czech Republic for Czechia
Czech Republic is sill the formal name, right? Last time I checked it was overly formal, but not wrong to use it.
> Republic of Ireland for Ireland
Brits do this because of Northern Ireland (mostly for bad reasons, but still).
Countries are called differently depending on language and context. It’s fine.
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Maybe we can at least fix the headline here, on hacker news
I’m pretty sure they prefer “Kyiv”, though.
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>Czech Republic for Czechia
why single it out? even the countries that use (mostly) latin alphabet don't necessary have the same name in english - Poland is Polska, Lithuania is Lietuva, Estonia is Eesti, Finland is Suomi, etc. And latinizations/romanizations are often wildly inaccurate - Ukraine is actually Ukraina, Russia is actually Rossia, and the english pronunciations are completely wrong. Japan is Nihon. etc etc.
>Republic of Ireland for Ireland
there are two irelands, fyi
>Türkiye
no one can type that u on a keyboard without googling and copypasting it. you might as well insist on using hieroglyphs for CJK things
20 replies →
Would it be possible to make a radioactivity camera? I guess not because it doesn’t refract?
From my limited knowledge, itwould be very hard to make it react to all types of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma) since they penetrate differently and interact with forces differently. You could potentially make a magnetic "lens" that would interact with alpha and beta particles, but gamma rays would ignore it.
The best way I can think of to make a "radiation camera" is similar to how you can make a "wifi camera", by hooking up a radiation detector to a pan-tilt mechanism, and moving it around very slowly and sampling the amount of radiation detected at each point. Essentially a single pixel "camera" that you have to move around to take a full picture. However, you'd also have to shield the detector from any radioactivity coming from directions that it's not pointed in, which is especially hard if you're trying to capture gamma rays, since they like to penetrate through everything. Its like if light could leak into the side of a normal camera, you'd get rubbish photos
Why would it have to be a single pixel instead of an array of sensors like any digital camera?
Sure, we probably can't make Geiger counters in a form factor that allows an array of a million of them in a handheld device, but maybe 20x16 or something?
1 reply →
There's viable optics up through x-rays; though they don't refract, they can still reflect at shallow angles,
https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/technical-details-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolter_telescope
Depends on the energy ranges and particle types you are interested in.
For instance we routinely take plenty of x-ray images, though there is fortunately not a lot of stuff just lying around that are bright enough x-ray sources to properly expose standard x-ray detectors.
Detecting electrons or protons (beta and alpha radiation) in such a way that you can work out their arrival direction is also doable, but the equipment is fairly bulky and you tend to have to wait a long time to accumulate enough detections to see anything.
While a sensor array of tiny/microscopic Geiger–Müller tubes sounds practical, focusing the particles to generate an image on that sensor is not. There is no lens that can simultaneously focus all the different types of particles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation#Directly_io...
You could make a pin-point camera with an array of detectors that will receive thus only the radiation coming from the direction fixed by the positions of the aperture and of the detector.
However that might not work well because the material around the pin-point aperture might not absorb sufficiently the rays coming from different directions and it cannot be made thick.
So what may work better is to make the detector array in the form of a compound arthropod eye, where each detector is at the bottom of a long tube whose walls absorb the rays coming from any other direction except its axis.
In practice, besides trying to absorb the rays coming from different directions, preventing them to reach the detector, for high-energy rays there is the alternative to use 2 or more collinear detectors for each direction (corresponding to an image pixel). A high-energy particle or photon will pass through all collinear detectors, causing simultaneous pulses at their outputs. Whenever such pulses are not simultaneous, they are discarded, because they correspond to rays coming from another direction than intended for that pixel. The accumulated count of filtered pulses per some time interval will give the luminosity of the corresponding image pixel.