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Figure 9 - Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867-1934)

The triumph of Maxwell’s theories was undermined by inadequacies that had already begun to appear. The Michelson-Morley experiment failed to detect a shift in the speed of light, which would have been expected as the earth moved at different angles with respect to the ether. The possibility explored by Hendrik Lorentz, that the ether could compress matter, thereby rendering it undetectable, presented problems of its own as a compressed electron (detected in 1897 by British experimentalist J. J. Thomson) would prove unstable. Meanwhile, other experimenters began to detect unexpected forms of radiation: Wilhelm Röntgen caused a sensation with his discovery of x-rays in 1895; in 1896 Henri Becquerel discovered that certain kinds of matter emit radiation on their own account. Marie and Pierre Curie coined the term “radioactivity” to describe this property of matter, and isolated the radioactive elements radium and polonium.

Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy identified two of Becquerel’s forms of radiation with electrons and the element helium. In 1911 Rutherford established that the bulk of mass in atoms are concentrated in positively-charged nuclei with orbiting electrons, which was a theoretically unstable configuration. Studies of radiation and radioactive decay continued to be a preeminent focus for physical and chemical research through the 1930s, when the discovery of nuclear fission opened the way to the practical exploitation of what came to be called “atomic” energy.

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