From: Ralph Gates <frkenn@comcast.net>
Subject: Fantastic Young Ladies
Date: May 15, 2014 11:11:21 PM MDT
To: lpeek@kpcw.org, Ethel Preston <epreston@kpcw.org>
Cc: Dan Schweikert <danschweik@email.com>, Emily Norton <emsy246poo@earthlink.net>, ed kneller <knellerew@gmail.com>
HI Lynn!
Ethel suggested I tell you about this. It refers to your interview this morning involving the two remarkable young ladies who are in the running for honors at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. I wanted to call the station during the interview but was driving up to Elk Meadows to pick up a couple of other fantastic elder ladies to take them to the Senior Center for lunch and socializing.
If I had had the chance to comment on the air I would have done my best to let other young girls know more about the great contributions that women have made in science and engineering. In particular I would have talked about two ladies who made two of perhaps the three most important discoveries leading to the development of the atom bomb first, and then nuclear power.
Marie (Sklodowska) Curie --
Born 1867 in Warsaw Poland, she was an outstanding student in college there but was a bit of a young revolutionary against Tsarist Russia who controlled Poland at the time. She wanted to pursue her technical studies but could not get financial help there. So she applied for a job and studies at the famous Sorbonne University in Paris. She was accepted in about 1890 and was mentored (?) by Henri Becquerel who was recognized for his work with X-Rays (originally called "Becquerel Rays", I think). You have probably enjoyed having your teeth x-rayed on occasion. You may have noticed that after the assistant has placed the machine agains your jaw, she goes into another room and flips a switch which momentarily causes development of the x-rays. it's important at this moment to remember that she had to "flip the switch" to develop the x-rays that made it work.
I am now going to bore you (I hope not!) with somewhat of an anecdotal story about Marie Sklodowski as part of my talk about my personal experience with the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during WWll.
Marie S. was working in1891 with Uranium (which as an element had been discovered some years earlier) learning how it reacted with other chemicals. She had made uranyl sulphate, a solid material, that was totally inert as far as she knew at the time, when late in the afternoon, she closed up the lab for the day. She put the little sample in a cabinet for the night, turned out the lights and went home. This is probably apocryphal but I like to speculate she went home to fix dinner for her new boy friend, Pierre Curie, who also worked in that lab. Perhaps she was also an excellent cook! At any rate she became Marie Curie a couple of years later.
Now the plot thickens! In that cabinet there was nothing other than the supposedly inert uranium compound and several unexposed photographic plates, carefully wrapped up in a protective covering to prevent any exposure to light. The next morning Marie wanted to do something with the unexposed photograph plates and found them all glossed over and exposed! She expected the culprit must have been the uranium compound and, without any switch to turn on, she quickly realized this inert stuff had given off, on its own, enough energy in the form of rays to expose the plates through all their protective sheath.
She gave this phenomenon the name "RADIOACTIVITY". And for this, in 1902, she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics (and a few years later, with Pierre, she became the only women, so far, ever to receive two Nobel Prizes!)
Now for Lise Meitner --
a Jewish lady physicist born in Vienna in 1878, called the Mother of the Atom Bomb in some circles, while Oppenheimer is called the Father of the AtomBomb. She reportedly regretted that moniker later on. Like Marie she was stigmatized at the time as a woman who had no legitimate place in the world of science.
After graduating from the University of Vienna in 1906, Meitner went to Berlin to attend lectures by Max Planck, later winner of the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics. This existence of the the atom had only recently been discovered and the study of radiation was new and exciting --and Berlin was where these sciences were being advanced most vigorously. She decided to stay.
"A WOMAN'S PLACE
At the University of Berlin, Meitner had to ask permission to attend classes. Planck was reluctant to allow a woman in, but begrudgingly gave his permission, saying, "It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that Nature itself has designated for woman her vocation as mother and housewife, and that under no circumstances can natural laws be ignored without grave damage." Planck later recognized that Meitner had great talent, and she became his assistant."
Lise stayed in Germany for 31 years until near the end of 1938 when Hitler's purge of Jews became so intense that she had to escape to Denmark and finally to Sweden where she became a citizen and stayed the rest of her life. About the time she left Germany she published a paper describing her work in bombarding uranium with neutrons, resulting in splitting the nucleus into new elements with a total of less mass and with release of energy, according to Einstein's famous postulate (E=MCsquared) that matter and energy are the same thing, just in different form. She called this "FISSION" and raised fear among physicists around the world that Hitler might be ahead of everyone in developing a powerful bomb. This lead rather quickly to the start of the Manhattan Project by the US and eventually to the end of WWll with the atomic bombing of Japan.
With Einstein's postulate (announced around 1909) being the third of the three important most important discoveries, I would like to say in common vernacular that these two gals who spent there whole lives working with radiation were really "Hot".
I hope I may be excused for "political incorrectness" if it be judged that way but I come from the generation right after WWll that worked in a corporate world that typically required women employees to wear dresses and long stockings. As I recall it was at least 1965 before pants suits were acceptable and the so-called "glass ceiling" began to crack. Back in Curie's and Meitner's time it was more like a "glass enclosure"!
So I hope many girls will be intrigued and enthused by the excitement that technology offers and will find just reward and personal satisfaction for their contributions.
We are surely proud of our young scientists, Elizabeth Prucka and Maddie Reed, and whether-or-not they win first place this time, their future is bright and exciting!
