Chapter Title: Strange Rays

Book Title: Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences

Book Subtitle: From Heresy to Truth
Book Author(s): James Lawrence Powell
Published by: Columbia University Press

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 •പ•പ•പ•

Strange Rays

Serendipity

The decade of the 1890s was a time of great progress in science. No year
in that decade was more eventful than 1895. In Sweden, Svante Arrhe-
nius was calculating the effect of atmospheric CO2 on global tempera-
ture, while in Britain John Perry was exposing the fallacy of Kelvin’s
assumptions. The Scottish chemist William Ramsay discovered helium,
previously known only from the Sun’s spectrum, in an earthly mineral.
Helium would not only help explain what had eluded Kelvin—the true
source of the Sun’s energy—but help refute his claims about the age of
the Earth. In the town hall at Sceaux, France, a young Polish chemist
named Marie Sklodowska married her sweetheart, Pierre Curie.
That same year, at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, Wilhelm
Röntgen (1845–1923) was investigating the properties of cathode rays.
These mysterious beams, discovered in 1876, appeared when scien-
tists applied a voltage across the electrodes in an evacuated tube. As
sometimes happens in science, Röntgen made a serendipitous discov-
ery. After enclosing the cathode-ray tube in a black box to exclude all
light, then turning off the lights in the laboratory, Röntgen switched
on the current in the vacuum tube. To his surprise, a spectral shimmer
appeared on his benchtop a few meters away. He lit a match and saw
that the glow had come from a paper plate that he had coated with a
barium compound. When he switched off the current, the glow disap-
peared. He recognized that the cathode-ray tube must give off invis-
ible rays that had somehow excited the barium. Röntgen named them
X-rays, X for unknown. He found that when he placed a solid object
between the cathode-ray tube and a photographic plate, a ghostly im-
age of the object appeared on the plate. Röntgen used X-rays to make
a famous image of his wife’s hand, her bones and ring clearly visible.

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 STR A N G E R A Y S പ • പ 33

Some substances, like Röntgen’s barium compound, glow or “fluo-

resce” when irradiated with X-rays. Others, including some uranium
minerals, “phosphoresce”: they continue to glow for a while even after
the irradiation is turned off. In 1896, the French physicist Henri Bec-
querel (1852–1908), suspecting that sunlight might also trigger phos-
phorescence, wrapped a photographic plate in black paper so that no
light could reach it, placed a specimen of a phosphorescent uranium
mineral called pitchblende on top of the wrapped plate, and sat the
whole thing in the sunlight. Sure enough, when he developed the
plate, he found that it had captured the image of the uranium crystal.
But when the Sun failed to shine for a few days, Becquerel temporar-
ily suspended the experiment, storing the crystal atop a photographic
plate inside a drawer where no light could reach it. When he later
developed the plate, expecting to find at most a faint impression from
the residual phosphorescence of the uranium mineral, he found in-
stead an image of the crystal that was as sharp as it had been after the
mineral had sat in the sunlight. Becquerel realized that phosphores-
cence does not depend on sunlight but instead comes from within the
crystal itself. Like cathode-ray tubes, some minerals also emit strange
rays. Unlike the tubes, the minerals do so spontaneously.
Becquerel suggested that his student Marie Curie (1867–1934) take
up the study of the new rays, thus launching one of the most pro-
ductive careers in the history of science. For her Ph.D. thesis topic,
Marie Curie set out to discover whether other substances also emit the
uranium rays, a process that she and Becquerel had named radioac-
tivity. Instead of a photographic plate to detect radiation, she used a
sensitive instrument called an electrometer, invented by her husband
Pierre and his older brother. Her work soon disproved a scientific belief
that went back to the Greeks: that the atom is the smallest particle of
matter.
Marie Curie (and independently a German scientist) soon found
that the element thorium is also radioactive. She then discovered that
pitchblende emitted radioactivity at four times the rate of pure ura-
nium. She deduced that pitchblende must contain another element
or elements more radioactive than uranium. She and Pierre set out to
identify those elements and soon found two: one they named one po-
lonium, after her native Poland; the other they named radium.

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 34പ • പ D E E P TIME

FIGURE Ϥ.ഩMarie Curie (ϣϪϨϩ–ϣϫϥϦ). Nobel Portrait, c. ϣϫϢϥ. Source: Photograph by Gene-
ralstabens LitograĮska Anstalt, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives.

In 1903, Marie Curie, her husband, and Becquerel each received the
Nobel Prize in Physics for these discoveries. In 1911, she won the No-
bel Prize in Chemistry, making her the only person to win the prize in
two different sciences.
Having no idea of the dangers of radiation, Marie Curie conducted
her work without the safety measures that we take for granted today.

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 STR A N G E R A Y S പ • പ 35

This was a time when workers would lick the tip of a paint brush, dip it
into a pot containing radium, and use it to coat the hands on a watch
so that they would glow in the dark. Then they would repeat the pro-
cess. Just as Kelvin had carried around a specimen of a radioactive min-
eral, so too did Madame Curie carry test tubes of radioactive material,
storing them in her desk drawer. In 1934, she died from leukemia, one
year before her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie and Irene’s husband Fredric
Joliot themselves won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Half Lives

Physicists and chemists leapt on the exciting new discoveries and be-
gan feverishly to explore the strange new rays. The most productive
was a young New Zealander named Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937).1
If any career personifies the benefits to society of providing educa-
tional scholarships to deserving students, it is Rutherford’s. How else
would this young man have made the journey from a small family
farm to the Nobel Prize? His first scholarship award allowed Ruth-
erford to attend Nelson College, close to the family farm on the
South Island. Having excelled there, he next received a scholarship
to Canterbury College of the University of New Zealand. Excelling
once again, in 1895 he won a scholarship to Cambridge University,
where his intellect and gifts as an experimentalist again made him
stand out. Rutherford went from Cambridge to the chair of physics
at McGill University in Montreal. In 1918 he became director of the
famous Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, where he had done his
postgraduate work.
Ernest Rutherford ranks not only as one of the greatest experimen-
talists in the history of science but as one of the most inspiring men-
tors. Not only did he win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for his
work on radioactivity, under his direction four scientists at the Cav-
endish Laboratory themselves became Nobelists. Some of his students
would go on to lead the discovery of plate tectonics in the 1960s. Just
as the emissions from radioactive atoms induced radioactivity in other
nearby atoms, so proximity to Rutherford inspired his students and
colleagues to reach beyond themselves.

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 36പ • പ D E E P TIME

While a student at the Cavendish, Rutherford and his thesis profes-

sor, J. J. Thomson (no relation to Kelvin), discovered that when X-rays
pass through a gas, they engender a host of charged atoms or, as Mi-
chael Faraday had named them, ions. Rutherford wondered whether
Becquerel’s new uranium rays would also ionize air. He found that they
did but also discovered that the uranium rays were not X-rays. Bec-
querel had already found that when the uranium rays pass through
a magnetic field, some veer to one side, indicating that they have a
negative charge, while others swerve to the opposite side, showing that
they have a positive charge. Rutherford named the negative rays beta
and the positive rays alpha, the names by which we know them today.
(The French chemist Paul Villard discovered gamma rays in 1900 while
studying radium.) The beta rays turned out to be the electrons that
J. J. Thomson had discovered in 1897.
One of Rutherford’s McGill colleagues found that air currents could
waft the radioactivity emitted by thorium about the laboratory: the
thorium rays were a gas. Rutherford drew the gaseous rays, which they
called “Thorium Emanation,” into a tube and, using an electrometer
like the one that Marie Curie had employed, found that no matter how
much of the thorium gas was present at the start, every 54.5 seconds its
radioactive emissions would decline by one-half. In the next 54.5 sec-
onds, the activity would decline by half again, and so on. Other radio-
active substances also lost half their activity in a given amount of time,
but the amount differed for each. Thus was born the concept of half-life:
the amount of time it takes for half of any starting number of radioactive
atoms to decay. Plotted on a graph, radioactive decay is exponential.
(“Thorium emanation” turned out to be an isotope of radon: Rn-220.)
Another component of thorium, which they called Thorium X, de-
cayed with a half-life of 3.6 days, but the radioactivity built up again
at the same rate. (“Thorium X” turned out to be Ra-224.) Rutherford
and his research partner Frederick Soddy (1857–1956) deduced the pro-
cess: “The normal or constant radioactivity possessed by thorium is an
equilibrium value, where the rate of increase of radioactivity due to the
production of fresh active material is balanced by the rate of decay of
radioactivity of that already formed.”2
Soddy went on to discover that elements are composed of varieties
with the same chemical properties but different atomic weights, which

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 STR A N G E R A Y S പ • പ 37

he named isotopes. For this discovery Soddy won the 1921 Nobel Prize
in Chemistry. In his remarks at the ceremony, Soddy gave a succinct
description of isotopes: “Put colloquially, their atoms have identical
outsides but different insides.”3
Rutherford and Soddy had found a strange new world: substances
decay so as to lose exactly half their original activity in a fixed amount
of time, but in so doing they transmute themselves into other sub-
stances, which also die away but with a different half-life. Atoms, far
from being eternal, immutable, and the smallest subdivision of mat-
ter, may spontaneously split into pieces and vanish while atoms of an
entirely different element arise in their place. In a sense, the ancient
alchemists were right: one element can be transformed into another.
But although lead cannot be changed into gold, as the ancients had
hoped, lead did turn out to be the most important element in discover-
ing the age of the Earth.
In a series of classic papers, Rutherford and Soddy explained that
radioactive decay obeys the law of probability.4 If we could observe
a particular atom, say of radon-220, we could not predict when that
atom would decay. It might happen within the first millisecond of
observation, or take hours, days, weeks, or years. We can speak only of
the probability that the atom will decay. But if the number of atoms
observed is large enough, the laws of probability dictate that in one
half-life, exactly one-half that number will decay.
A law of probability also governs the outcome of tossing a coin,
with its 50-50 chance of landing on heads. Toss an honest coin only a
few times, and you might get several heads in a row, or several tails, or
any combination: the exact outcome is unpredictable. But as you toss
the coin over and over, the percentage of heads approaches and finally
reaches 50 percent to whatever number of significant figures you have
the patience to achieve. Toss the coin 1023 times, for example, and the
number of heads will be 50 percent to a mind-numbing number of sig-
nificant figures. Ten raised to the twenty-third power is approximately
the number of molecules in only a single gram-mole of any chemical
element (Avogadro’s Number: 6.02 x 1023). Even minute traces of a
radioactive element contain so many atoms that they obey the law of
radioactive decay with complete fealty.

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