Half Lives (eBook)

The Unlikely History of Radium

Lucy Jane Santos

'Half Lives shines a light on the shocking history of the world's toxic love affair with a deadly substance, radium. Unnerving, fascinating, informative and truly frightening.' Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five

Lucy Jane Santos presents the surprising history of radium in everyday life.

Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the 19th century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination and entrepreneurial zeal.

Half Lives tells the fascinating, curious, sometimes macabre story of the element through its ascendance as a desirable item – a present for a queen, a prize in a treasure hunt, a glow-in- the-dark dance costume – to its role as a supposed cure-all in everyday 20th-century life, when medical practitioners and business people (reputable and otherwise) devised ingenious ways of commodifying the new wonder element, and enthusiastic customers welcomed their radioactive wares into their homes.

Historian Lucy Jane Santos – herself the proud owner of a formidable collection of radium beauty treatments – delves into the stories of these products and details the gradual downfall and discredit of the radium industry through the eyes of the people who bought, sold and eventually came to fear the once-fetishized substance.

She reveals a new history of radium, one in which the stories of those previously dismissed as quacks and fools are brought to life, as part of a unique examination of the interplay between science and popular culture.

Lucy Jane Santos, author of Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium and Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium, is an expert in the history of the twentieth-century with a particular interest in the cultural history of all things nuclear. She is the Executive Secretary of the British Society for the History of Science. Lucy lives in England.

Origins of the Universe (eBook)

The Cosmic Microwave Background and the Search for Quantum Gravity

Keith Cooper

The quest to find a theory of quantum gravity that could potentially explain everything.

Nearly 60 years ago, Nobel Prize-winners Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson stumbled across a mysterious hiss of faint radio static that was interfering with their observations. They had found the key to unravelling the story of the Big Bang and the origin of our universe.

That signal was the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the earliest light in the universe, released 379,000 years after the Big Bang. It contains secrets about what happened during the very first tiny increments of time, which had consequences that have rippled throughout cosmic history, leading to the universe of stars and galaxies that we live in today.

This is the enthralling story of the quest to understand the CMB radiation and what it can tell us of the origins of time and space, from bubble universes to a cyclical cosmos – and possibly leading to the elusive theory of quantum gravity itself.

Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor, and author of The Contact Paradox: Challenging Assumptions in Our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Bloomsbury Sigma). He is the Editor of Astronomy Now, and has edited the website Astrobiology Magazine.