Pierre Curie’s papers are still so radioactive they are kept in lead-lined boxes. This deep dive explores the homeschooled Parisian physicist who, with his brother Jacques, discovered piezoelectricity, the effect behind the quartz oscillators that keep time in modern electronics.

We cover his torsion balance, Curie’s law, the Curie temperature and his dissymmetry principle, then his partnership with Marie, the electrometer that made their radioactivity research possible, and the discovery of polonium and radium. We also explore his insistence that Marie share the 1903 Nobel Prize, his scientific investigation of seances, his sudden death in 1906, and the toll of radiation on his family.

• How squeezing a crystal generates electricity
• The Curie temperature and its uses in geology and medicine
• How the quartz electrometer unlocked radioactivity research
• Radium’s heat and the separation of alpha, beta and gamma radiation
• Seances, a fatal street accident and a family of Nobel laureates