{"id":177,"date":"2023-10-27T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2023-10-27T10:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/physicsworld.com\/?p=110339"},"modified":"2023-10-27T12:00:41","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T10:00:41","slug":"what-can-postage-stamps-tell-us-about-the-history-of-nuclear-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hadamard.com\/c\/what-can-postage-stamps-tell-us-about-the-history-of-nuclear-physics\/","title":{"rendered":"What can postage stamps tell us about the history of nuclear physics?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In December 1942 US president Franklin D Roosevelt signed the Manhattan Project into existence. A scientific endeavour that culminated in the dropping of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs three years later, the project was \u2013 for better or worse \u2013 the most significant development in the long history of nuclear physics. What is perhaps surprising, though, is that this pioneering field of discovery is captured forever through the medium of postage stamps.<\/p>\n

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Marie Curie has appeared on more than 600 postage stamps and holds the record as the physicist with the most stamps ever issued in their name<\/p>\n

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Our story begins with Marie Curie<\/a>, who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics<\/a> with Pierre Curie for their studies of radioactivity. This phenomenon had been discovered in 1896 by Henri Becquerel<\/a>, who won the other half of that year\u2019s prize, but it is Marie Curie who is easily the most famous of the three scientists. She has appeared on more than 600 postage stamps and therefore holds the record as the physicist with the most stamps ever issued in their name. My favourite is the 1938 Afghanistan 15 pul stamp, which is the only one featuring Curie with her electrometer and was also the first stamp to depict a female scientist.<\/p>\n

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From her lab in Paris, Curie famously studied the radiation emitted by pitchblende<\/a> \u2013 a glowing mix of uranium oxide and lead, which hailed from the J\u00e1chymov mine<\/a> in Bohemia, now part of Czechia. Known for its production of silver, the ore was delivered to Curie, who also used it to discover the elements polonium and radium. The mine\u2019s fame as the birthplace of nuclear science was commemorated by the former Czechoslovakia in 1966 with a 60 hal\u00e9\u0159 stamp (click here to view<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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Ernest Rutherford \u2013 the New-Zealand-born physicist who discovered the atomic nucleus \u2013 is also commemorated on several stamps. One I particularly like was issued by New Zealand in 1971 to commemorate the centenary of his birth. The 1 cent stamp of the set includes a portrait of Rutherford along with a diagram of the Rutherford atomic model<\/a>, which \u2013 correctly \u2013 envisaged electrons surrounding a dense central nucleus. The stamp nicely shows alpha particles being scattered back from the nucleus \u2013 the famous \u201cgold-foil\u201d experiment<\/a> found in every school physics syllabus.<\/p>\n

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