Background
French physicist Jean Frederic Joliot was born in Paris. He was the youngest of six children in the family of a prosperous merchant Henri Joliot and Emilia (Roderer) Joliot, who came from a wealthy Protestant family from Alsace.
French physicist Jean Frederic Joliot was born in Paris. He was the youngest of six children in the family of a prosperous merchant Henri Joliot and Emilia (Roderer) Joliot, who came from a wealthy Protestant family from Alsace.
Frederic Joliot was born in Paris on Mar. 19, 1900, and graduated from the ÉcoleEcole de Physique et de Chimie in that city in 1923.
In 1925 he became assistant to Marie Curie at the Radium Institute.
Joliot-Curie was appointed professor at the CollègeCollege de France in 1937.
During the occupation of France by German troops in World War II he continued his work and became a leading figure in the resistance movement that was centered about the University of Paris.
In 1946 Gen. Charles de Gaulle appointed him French high commissioner for atomic energy and he was the French delegate to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in New York City in this period.
He reported the discovery in 1948 of a new particle in the atom nucleus, called the "mesatron lambda. "
He was the recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951.
He obtained his Doctor of Science degree in 1930, having prepared a thesis on the electrochemistry of radio-elements, and became lecturer in the Paris Faculty of Science in 1935. At this time he carried out considerable research on the structure of the atom, generally in collaboration with his wife, Iréne Joliot-Curie. In particular they worked on the projection of nuclei, which was an essential step in the discovery of the neutron (Chadwick, 1932) and the positron (Anderson, 1932). However, their greatest discovery was artificial radioactivity (1934). By bombardment of boron, aluminium, and magnesium with alpha particles, they produced the isotope 13 of nitrogen, the isotope 30 of phosphorus and, simultaneously, the isotopes 27 of silicon and 28 of aluminium. These elements, not found naturally, decompose spontaneously, with a more or less long period, by emission of positive or negative electrons. It was for this very important discovery that these two physicists received in 1935 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
He joined the French Communist Party in 1940.
Because of his outspoken affinity for the Communist cause he was forced to resign in April 1950 as French high commissioner for atomic energy.
In 1956 Joliot-Curie became a member of the French Communist Party's Central Committee and was in the same year appointed to the chair of nuclear physics at the University of Paris.
Quotations:
"I have always attached great importance to the manner in which an experiment is set up and conducted . .. the experiment should be set up to open as many windows as possible on the unforeseen. "
"Some months ago we discovered that certain light elements emit positrons under the action of alpha particles. Our latest experiments have shown a very striking fact: when an aluminium foil is irradiated on a polonium preparation [alpha ray emitter], the emission of positrons does not cease immediately when the active preparation is removed: the foil remains radioactive and the emission of radiation decays exponentially as for an ordinary radio-element. We observed the same phenomenon with boron and magnesium. "
"The farther an experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize. "
"We bombarded aluminum with alpha rays … then after a certain period of irradiation, we removed the source of alpha rays. We now observed that the sheet of aluminum continued to emit positive electrons over a period of several minutes. "
Joliot-Curie was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the Medical Academy of France, as well as a foreign member of many scientific societies, including the USSR Academy of Sciences since 1949. He was also a corresponding member since 12. 06. 1947.
Frederic Joliot-Curie was characterized as a sensitive, kind and patient person.
Working as an anatomist in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris he met there his wife Irène Curie, the elder daughter of Madame Curie, who pursued her research at her mother's laboratory. They married in 1926 and Frédéric Joliot-Curie added his wife's surname to his own. The couple had a son and daughter, and they both became scientists.
