All his wonderful successes, that looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French thought. Chesterton described it this way in “The Blue Cross”: “Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French and the French intelligence is intelligence specially and solely…he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the same time. The young French thinkers of the Enlightenment thus were relieved of any need to consider the practical consequences of their new ideas, and so they kept asking deeper and more daring questions, getting down to basic principles. A new educational establishment had grown up, and scientists no longer had to support themselves from their own resources or with a “day job.”īefore the Revolution, the ancien régime had refused to allow anything new. The nation was midway through the Third Republic, relatively stable and prosperous. It was good to be a scientist in France in the 1890s. We need to take a closer look at how Marie and Pierre Curie discovered polonium and radium before we can decide whether she was right or if, perhaps, it might have been better that the discoveries that ushered in the Atomic Age had never been made. As Marie Curie once said, “I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.” Polonium’s discoverers, the Curies, would have been horrified. In November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who had been granted asylum in the United Kingdom, took 3 weeks to die of radiation poisoning from polonium.
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