Answer to Question #1113 Submitted to "Ask the Experts"

Category: Historical Issues/Applications

The following question was answered by an expert in the appropriate field:

Who exactly is the "curie" named after? The question is on a health physics quiz we give at Lakeshore Technical College, and our answer states that it is named for Pierre Curie. However, a student has found a conflicting answer on an Internet Web site, and I found a third answer while doing a Web search. Which source am I to believe? Does the HPS have an official opinion on this?

Unfortunately, the leadership of the Health Physics Society (HPS) has failed to formulate an official opinion concerning this issue. But if the HPS did have an official opinion, this is what it would be:

Politics played a major role in the selection of the name "curie." To avoid unnecessary trouble, the committee that approved the name avoided specific statements about who it was named after: Pierre, Marie, or both. Some members of the committee would have objected very strongly if it had been named in honor of Marie even though she played a bigger role than Pierre when it came to their investigations into the field of radioactivity. On the other hand, Pierre had the advantage that he was a less-controversial figure. He had something else going for him, at least when it came to receiving honors—he was dead.

In 1910, when he "announced" the new unit in a letter to the journal Nature, the chairman of the committee, Ernest Rutherford, made a vague comment that could be interpreted as implying that the unit had been named after Pierre. However, in 1913 he made a very specific statement that the unit was named in honor of both Marie and Pierre.

It seems likely that the members of the committee that approved the unit were of different opinions as to whom it was, or should have been, named after. Still, if there is a single correct answer, it would be the opinion of Rutherford, the driving force behind the creation of the unit. And his only unambiguous statement concerning the origin of the "curie" is that it was named in honor of both Marie and Pierre.

For a more complete version of the history of the "curie" refer to "How the Curie Came to Be" which appeared in the October and November 1996 issues of the Health Physics Society Newsletter.

Paul Frame, CHP, PhD

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