Marie Curie - Tumblr Posts
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
—Marie Curie
“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”
—Marie Curie
“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.”
—Marie Curie
“All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.”
—Marie Curie
Unknown - Marie Curie (Warsaw)
Amazing science art by Florida artist Megan Lee. Purchase prints here
“ I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. ” ~ Marie Curie; (Born 145 years ago today, November 7, 1867)
Marie Curie’s century-old notebooks are still radioactive, so they’re kept in lead-lined boxes for protection against radiation exposure.
Photo via: Wellcome Library, London
Anyone wishing to handle her notebooks, personal effects, or other items have to wear protective gear and sign a liability waiver, just in case. She basically walked around carrying radium and polonium in her pockets, so… yeah.
Photo via: Amanda Macias/Business Insider
Marie and her husband Pierre are buried in Paris’s Panthéon, a mausoleum in that contains the remains of distinguished French citizens — including philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire.
Source
(I made a speech and rlly messed it up so I'm putting it on here. It's basically about cool women being left out in history/school curriculums)
Historical Acknowledgement of Women
By @humblefryingpan
Good [morning/afternoon] and thank you for coming to listen. I have brought you here to talk about the absence of female lives, achievements and inventions from the school curriculum.
Over the course of history, women have been valued less than men. Even now, while we’re much closer to equality than ever before, women continue to be forgotten and undervalued. This is a huge problem for multiple reasons.
Firstly, we are receiving a tainted version of the past that changes key information. A common example of this would be Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of the double-helix DNA structure being credited to Watson and Crick. Instead of teaching us about Franklin, exam boards focus on the people who stole her work. While this fact is becoming more recognised lately, it is still not on school curriculums. Plus, in standardised tests, she will not be mentioned in any question about her discovery.
And secondly, the presence of women in history is important because children and teenagers often look to historical figures for inspiration. This can shape lives and change how kids see the world and for women there is an extremely limited choice of role models.
When I was a child, I idolised Marie Curie because she was one of the only women I had heard of that invented something. I don’t want to be a scientist, but there weren’t many female achievements that would be known to children. I knew of a few artists, because of my family. I knew some authors, because I liked to read. But most of these women were women I had found outside of school, I hadn’t actually been taught about them.
People try to make science more appealing to young girls. People think that if there is a problem, it’s that women don’t want to do science. People think that because you never hear about female scientists’ discoveries, but this isn’t because women don’t want to be scientists, its because when they are, they might as well be invisible.
Without the internet would you know that without the actress Hedy Lamarr inventing frequency hopping during World War two, we wouldn’t have Wi-Fi, GPS or Bluetooth? Her invention is currently valued at around $30 billion but she didn’t get paid anything for her patent. We never learn about her despite the fact she changed how the world currently runs. Without women we wouldn’t have dishwashers, circular saws, car heaters, lifeboats, windscreen wipers or even home security. And most people don’t know about any of those women.
Women’s work gets credited to men. And when it isn’t, it doesn’t get recognised at all. There are women who have done incredible things, invented things that changed the world, done things that saved thousands of lives. But nobody knows who they are. A study has shown that women in science are 13% less likely than men to receive authorship credit for their work. Additionally, women are 59% less likely to be named on patents, even when they work on the same projects.
During the second world war a woman called Irena Sendler worked in the Warsaw ghetto so that she could sneak children and infants out in burlap sacks. She was able to save over 2500 children before the Nazis caught and severely injured her. She had kept the names of every single child in a jar buried under a tree in her backyard, and after the war she located all the parents that had survived, the other kids being placed in foster homes or getting adopted.
In 2007, Sendler was nominated to win the Nobel Peace Prize but lost to a man named Al Gore who created a slideshow on global warming. Without her risking her life and safety, all those children would have been killed but she still got less recognition than a man’s slideshow.
Women have always been doing things as remarkable as men have, but we only ever learn about the male side of the past. When we learn what women’s roles were, we learn about housewives and mothers and while these are also valued lifestyles, we don’t get the full truth of what women have been doing since.
If we only knew the women we learnt about in school, we’d probably believe they never left the house. That they weren’t as clever, weren’t as brave, weren’t as interesting as men and that isn’t true. Women have always been working as hard as men do and when people say they were working ‘behind the scenes’ it is simply because historians pointed the cameras away from them.
Women deserve to learn about other women. Everyone deserves to see somebody like them that is presented the way men got presented. More female achievements need to appear on the school curriculum. Thank you for listening.
Marie Curie