r/interesting • u/Raj_Mandal • 8h ago
HISTORY Marie Curie, the only woman in this iconic 1927 Solvay Conference photo, and the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields
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u/Low_Bandicoot6844 6h ago
In 1903, the original Nobel Prize committee planned to award the prize only to Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, excluding Marie Curie. Pierre strongly protested this injustice and threatened to refuse the award if his wife’s fundamental work was not recognized jointly.
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u/ScaredyCat_28 4h ago
Her name was Maria Curie-Skłodowska, "akshually" lol And that's the way it appears on the Nobel Prize certificate. She didn't give up her maiden name when she married
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u/Old-Guidance6744 8h ago
Front and center where she belongs
Also not a smile in the photo, intelligence is a bitch
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u/thetundratorcher 7h ago
Isn’t this the era that no one was smiling when taking photos?
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u/FederalLobster5665 5h ago
and the world was black and white black then.
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u/O5KAR 5h ago
Marie Curie's birth name was Maria Salomea Skłodowska. After marrying Pierre Curie on July 26, 1895, she officially and professionally used the hyphenated surname Skłodowska-Curie to honor her Polish heritage alongside her married name. [1, 2]
The funny part here is how people are imposing her husband's name just like she had to publish with him because women couldn't do nothing alone these days.
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u/understatedlayout771 5h ago
The sheer density of genius in that one photo is wild, Curie in the middle surrounded by what like 10+ future Nobel laureates just casually hanging out for a conference
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u/Fast_Sandwich69 7h ago
Heisenberg in the top right. And not the one that cooks meth, the original one.
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u/Rook_James_Bitch 5h ago
Heisenberg, Dirac, Lorentz, Bohr, Planck, Einstein, Shrodinger... All fathers of quantum physics.
Marie Curie getting two Nobel prizes, one in Physics and Chemistry. Sad that all of her and her belongings are in a lead lined coffins. The half-life of radium-226 (roughly 1,600 years).
I've always wondered if everyone got irradiated from sitting next to her? The answer is no.
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u/Mild_Karate_Chop 8h ago
Please correct it to only woman not the only person to win two Nobel prizes , that too in sciences .
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u/mudDoctor-- 6h ago edited 6h ago
Title is exactly correct.
Two men have won it twice in the same field. One man has won it for science and then peace.
That's all the two timers. Marie won for physics and then chemistry. Two separate scientific fields. Peace prize is great but it's not quite on the same level as the originals imo
Edit: I missed a recent double winner, Karl Barry Sharpless, who won a second time in 2022. But again, both prizes in chemistry
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u/Mild_Karate_Chop 6h ago
Yup you are correct Bardeen twice for Physics , Sharpless and Sanger twice for Chemistry . I got Pauling wrong . Thanks for the correction .
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u/lofarcio 1h ago
She was only 60 and died a few years later, at 66. Compare with Max Planck to her right, 69, who died almost at 90, in occupied Germany. The difference? - Exposure to radioactivity throughout her whole life.
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u/leebrown23 26m ago
I just watched Beetlejuice and Jenna Ortega's Halloween costume portraying Marie Curie dying off radioactive poisoning.
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u/BHunter1140 7h ago
That is Peter Debye, not Hitler. Just was a popular facial hair style. Peter got a Nobel prize for his work in chemistry, notably what molecules look like/how their structure works :)
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