When a new child visited our Sunday school, the teacher greeted him and asked his age. The little boy held up four fingers.
"Oh, you're four," said the teacher. "And when will you be 5?"
The child stared at her and after a few seconds replied, "When I hold up the other finger."
Pierre CurieDied 19 Apr 1906 at age 46 (born 15 May 1859). French physical chemist and cowinner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. His studies of radioactive substances were made together with his wife, Marie Curie, whom he married in 1895. They were achieved under conditions of much hardship - barely adequate laboratory facilities and under the stress of having to do much teaching in order to earn their livelihood. Together, they discovered radium and polonium in their investigation of radioactivity by fractionation of pitchblende (announced in 1898). Later they did much to elucidate the properties of radium and its transformation products. Their work in this era formed the basis for much of the subsequent research in nuclear physics and chemistry. |
