I had an epiphany this morning which compared the discovery of Radium to my seeking true love and so I’d like to share a story, elaborate a metaphor and possibly explain in more detail what I’m trying to do here with my project.
One of my greatest heroines is Dr. Marie Curie, usually referred to as Madam Curie; but I like to give her the title she worked so hard to achieve. This woman not only married a man she absolutely loved and together they raised several brilliant children, but they also worked together in a lab at a time when most women were content to stay home and tend the household duties. Marie started off as a student in Dr. Curie’s lab studying the luminescence (radioactivity) of a substance called pitchblend. They ran into a puzzle however, when after accounting for all known light giving and light reflecting sediment within the chunk of ore she was looking at, she still had extra rays of light unaccounted for. Something in the crushed up dirt was emitting a light that could not be written off as coming from any element she knew existed in the pitch. So she put her brains to use and started removing the elements she did know. She melted, boiled, sifted, filtered, etc repeatedly in an effort to remove different elements one at a time. Iron, Carbon, Magnesium, all other commonly found elements and even the two “newest found ones” Uranium and Thorium were all taken out of the pitchblend. [This process was artfully shown in the black and white movie version of Madam Curie’s biography.] And yet once Uranium and Thorium were removed there still existed some element which produced light surpassing the qualities of Uranium and Thorium together! After months of effort, they successfully separated and identified the two new elements hidden in the pitchblend: Polonium, and Radium. Dr. Marie named the first for her homeland and the second because it was a wonder to behold like the rays of the sun. The lab dish had nothing in it but left over water marks and yet at night it glowed at night like a little lightbulb amazing everyone who saw it. -So the moral of the story is that after months of work with people thinking she was crazy, questioning if she was imagining things, and generally not giving up-Dr. Marie Curie helped find something which revolutionized the way the world operated. Her discovery changed medicine, electricity, even pop culture and the world will never be the same again.
With this story in mind, I want to find my Radium. I want to find a man who is stable and full of known qualities (like the pitchblend) but will upon further observation completely surprise and delight me. I want my relationship with my special someone to have as many different kinds of love as there are elements in pitchblend. I want to be protected by him and love him as a parent and guardian. I want to advise and take care of him as if he were my child. I want to idolize him and see only the good in him like I would an older sibling. I want to tease him and joke with him like a younger sibling. I want to greet him with huge amounts of love and pick up right where we left off whenever we see each other like I do with extended family members. I want to see his flaws and yet love him the more for his imperfections like I would a friend. I want the polite and courteous little nothings we do for perfect strangers we encounter in life for no other reason than that they are fellow humans and we acknowledge the fact. And yet, after all those rationalizations and types of loves-I want one more. I want something left over which only I can discover and is meant just for me to find. Some element of love which will fill me with wonder and change the way I view the world. Something special which might take years to find but will ultimately leave an imprint on all who observe its presence. Something so small in the grand scheme of things as to go unnoticed by the regular world, but when seen up close will force you to accept the truly awesomeness of unseen forces within your life.
I want to be filled with awe. I want my soul to burn with wonder and my heart to fill with warmth from the love of my mate. I have heard the mantra that my body is a temple and the right guy will come along and one day worship me as a goddess; well, (no offense to those well-meaning souls) my present self-esteem won’t support that theory. I DO however have degrees which prove I am a chemist and my present self-esteem wholeheartedly praises that fact. So as a scientist I am declaring my body is my laboratory! J By putting on makeup, exercising to lose weight, wearing new styles of clothes, and doing other girly rites of passage, I am changing the way I think. I am recalibrating my lab instruments so when I come across that certain man, my sensors will pick up on his qualities and recognize him. By learning to love myself I will be able to better distinguish love in general and be able to ferret out which someone has that extra zing to his personality; that added element to make my heart soar with delight for decades to come.
The bottom line is: I am conducting the greatest experiment I will ever do, and so I need the best finely tuned, top of the line instruments and calibrated lab equipment. I need my mind, heart and soul to be able to measure down to the smallest range so I can properly determine when I’ve met my someone-my personal radium. Because I’ve done the math: radium exists as 1/7th of a gram within each ton (900000g!) of uraninite. Assuming I have the same chance at finding true love as Dr. Marie Curie did of finding radium, and having found out the world’s population is ~7.094 billion….my “radium” is one soul. Apparently science proves there really is just one person for everyone, and the margin for error is very small. Feel free to check my math, I believe with sig figs it rounds out to one, but I included the tenths for the look of the thing and to give myself more wiggle room! ;)
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