A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

756 Ch. 19 • Rapid Industrialization and Its Challenges

Further Scientific Discoveries: “A Boundless Future”
and Its Uncertainties

The astonishing advances of late nineteenth-century science led one
researcher to exude that “science strides on victoriously towards a bound­
less future.” The creation in 1883 of a worldwide system for patenting
reflected a veritable torrent of new inventions. Scientists had already con­
cluded that cells form the basis for life. This knowledge led scientists to
understand more about the principles of heredity. At the same time, new
discoveries revealing nature’s complexity began to temper the infectious
optimism of the age. Fin-de-siecle scientists realized that the more they
understood about the world, the more there was left to know about such
basic principles as matter, light, and energy. Mathematicians and especially
physicists began to rethink fundamental assumptions about the universe.
Radioactivity was discovered in Paris in 1896. Marie Curie (1867—1934),
a Polish-born chemist carrying out research with her husband, Pierre Curie
(1859—1906), isolated radium, a radioactive element, in 1910. Marie Curie,
who was refused entry to the French Academy of Science because of her
gender, won two Nobel Prizes. Her rival, Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), a
New Zealander, discovered two kinds of radiation, which he called the
alpha and beta rays. He posited the disintegration of radioactive atoms,
which is the phenomenon of radioactivity. Rutherford used this discovery to

(Left) Pierre and Marie Curie. (Right) Ernest Rutherford, who is holding the appa­

ratus that he used to break up the nucleus of the nitrogen atom.