Monday, February 4, 2008

JEE Revision - Radioactivity

The phenomenon of spontaneous emission ofactive radiations from certain substances is called radioactivity and the substances which emit such radiations are called radioactive substances.

In 1896, Henri Becquerel expanded the field of chemistry to include nuclear changes when he discovered that uranium emitted radiation.

Soon after Becquerel's discovery, Marie Curie began studying radioactivity and completed much of the pioneering work on nuclear changes. Curie found that radiation was proportional to the amount of radioactive element present, and she proposed that radiation was a property of atoms (as opposed to a chemical property of a compound).

Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win two (the first, shared with her husband Pierre and Becquerel for discovering radioactivity; the second for discovering the radioactive elements radium and polonium).

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