Marie Curie
Non-fiction , 2020
Debate
Pages: 329
The hidden story of Marie Curie, the mother of modern physics. Who was Maria Sklodowska Curie? A great scientist or an ambitious woman who took advantage of her husband's talent? A mass idol or a pathologically introverted person? A selfless wife or a passionate lover who destroyed a family?
Admired after being awarded her first Nobel Prize, commiserated after the death of Pierre Curie and fiercely attacked after the Langevin scandal, she was both revered in her native Poland, acclaimed by the Americans and the French for the development of radiotherapy, and undervalued by some scientists because of her status as a woman. Marie Curie has been recognized in history as the discoverer of radioactivity, a phenomenon on the frontier between physics and chemistry that revolutionized science. She was a jealous defender of her discoveries, but at the same time so detached that she did not patent any. Although her mother tongue was Polish, she studied in Russian, celebrated her marriage in French and delivered her most important speeches in English. However, polyglot and cosmopolitan as she was, she never lost her Polish identity. She named the first chemical element she discovered, polonium, after her native country. Nature lover, she walked through the mountains, swam in the seas and toured her life riding a bicycle. She worked, loved and lived passionately until the glow of the radio she had discovered stole her last breath.