This Month's Winner of the Coveted Award!

OCTOBER 2012

Just getting ready to start my unit on atomic theory I have selected Marie Curie (1867-1934) as this month's Featured Scientist winner.  She was born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland to well-know teachers.  While growing up in Poland the young Maria was sent to a boarding school for primary education.  Because most higher educational institutions at the time did not admit women, Maria and her sister attended a Flying University which operated in Poland.  In 1891 she along with her older sister went to Paris.  Once there, she took classes at the University of Paris (Sorbanne) and tutored eventually earning a degree in Physics in 1893 and Mathematics in 1894.  

Around this time she became romantically involved with French physicist Pierre Curie and eventually married him.  At first they worked on separate projects, however, they soon took up interest in the work of Henri Becquerel, a French physicist who discovered that uranium casts off rays.  Marie theorized the rays were due to the atomic structure of the element.  This opened the new field of atomic physics and she coined the phenomena radioactivity.  She and Pierre would later discover the elements Polonium and Radium.  Marie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Henri Becquerel making her the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.  Unfortunately Pierre was killed in a horse carriage accident 1906.  In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry.  During World War I, Marie and her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie set up portable X-ray machines to be used in the field.  

  

sources:

wikipedia 

the biography 

Former winners of the Featured Scientist

Am I Joking?

I just got done making a big stink about why we need to use the Metric System and my choice for Featured Scientist of the Month is Daniel Fahrenheit.  Actually Fahrenheit was a brilliant dedicated scientist who understood the need to develop a universal scale for thermometers.  See post below...

SEPTEMBER 2012

Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) was born into a German merchant family in Gdansk, Poland.  He was a scientist who is best known for making the modern day alcohol thermometer and mercury thermometer.  His parents died from eating poisonous mushroomswhen he was fifteen.  After spending time in foster homes, apprenticeships, and studying natural science, Fahrenheit become a  glassblower making barometers and thermometers. 

Early thermometers had arbitrary scales and he as well as Isaac Newton years earlier recognized that thermometers based on materials that change at certain temperatures would make them reproducible.  Newton was not a thermometer maker and did a couple of other things anyway.  Fahrenheit choose a mixture of ice, water, and ammonium chloride (a salt) for zero.  He used 32 degrees for the freezing point of water and 96 degrees for body temperature.  The funny numbers come from his original idea of have a 12-point scale where zero, four, and twelve are the three constants.  He then separated each point by eight gradations.  The result, multiply each constant by eight: 4 X 8 = 32, 12 X 8 = 96.  Body temperature is normally measured at 98.6 degrees but he was close.

sources:

John Lienhard: http://inventors.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=inventors&cdn=money&tm=6&f=10&su=p284.13.342.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.uh.edu/engines/epi1300.htm 

wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit 

Unfortunately Fahrenheit's constants were not as simple as the constants Anders Celsius chose for for his scale who used the freezing point and boiling point of pure water.  

Also, for those interested in the where the following conversion formulas comes from:

        F to C where C = (F-32)*5/9     

        C to F where F = C*9/5+32

Notice the difference between 0 and 100 (100) on the Celsius scale and their corresponding Fahrenheit temperatures 32 and 212 (180).  The ratio is 100 to 180 which reduces to 5 to 9.  Whether it is 5/9 or 9/5 and if you have to add or subtract 32 depends on which scale your looking for.