Marie Curie

Physics is awesome. Just saying. The new accelerator in Europe, imo, is an amazing accomplishment, and morons thinking it will create a black hole and suck up the earth are completely wrong. I can't wait to see what kind of data they can get from it. That being said, the turn of the 20th century was an amazing time in physics. After the first industrial revolution, technology had begun its exponential climb towards the HD scoiety we have today. Essentially the same thing happened in physics. We began to discover the whole microscopic world around us, radiation, atoms, protons, all that good stuff that very few people enjoy studying in school. And Marie Curie's contributions to the evolution of physics are amazing.

She helped discover 2 new elements, Polonium, and Radium. Polonium is useless, but Radium is commonly used as a source of neutrons for physics experiments. Both of the elements are extremely heavy, and radioactive, which lead to several lawsuits involving Radium. So it is sort of sad to say that both of the elements she found were, well, sort of useless, but none the less!! At the time, her new discoveries helped map the periodic table of elements, and increased our understanding of radiation, isotopes, and how these phenomena exist all around us in nature.

According to our Wiki-experts, her largest contribution to the scientific community was not the discovery of these two elements, rather her discovery that the more of these elements you collected, the greater the radiation. This helped prove that the radiation was coming from the atoms themselves, and that it was based on quantity, and not some random reaction that they were unable to examine. Apparently she also found out that thorium was radioactive, and for those of you interested in alternate nuclear fuel sources, I would recommend watching this video, otherwise known as the future of nuclear power:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk

Continuing on, she would be awarded a Nobel prize, the first women to receive one, and then a second Nobel prize, and she is still the only women to have ever received 2 Nobel prizes. \o/ physics!