The Woman Who Found The Dying Atoms

The woman who found the dying atoms lived about one hundred years before now. She grew up in a country that bigger countries had taken — a country that was not allowed to be its own country. The schools for adults there did not allow women in. She learned in small groups, in places where the police could not see them.

When she was a young woman, she went to the country known for its good bread, to a school for adults that did allow women. She had very small amounts of money, and at times no food. But she learned more quickly than the men around her, and then she started to look very carefully at a heavy kind of atom that did something no one could explain.

What she found

She found that some kinds of atoms die. A dying atom gives out light and very small pieces of its body — at all times, and no thing can stop it. This was a very big find: before her, people thought that an atom could not change or end.

She found two kinds of atoms that no one had seen before. She gave the first one the name of her country — the one that was not allowed to be a country — because she wanted people to say that name.

The light that hurt her

The things she found made a small blue-green light in the black, and she thought this light was beautiful. She held them in her hands. She put one near the place where she slept. No one knew then that the light from dying atoms is dangerous. It hurt her body a very small amount at a time, for years, and at the end it gave her a disease in her blood, and she died from it. Her papers and books are dangerous to this day: they sit inside heavy containers, and the people who want to read them cover their bodies first and touch them very carefully.

The big thank-you

Each year, people give a very big thank-you to the people who have found the most important things. She was the first woman to be given it. Then she was given it another time, for another thing she found. No one — man or woman — had been given it two times before her.

The machines that see through bodies

When the countries around hers started hurting each other and the soldiers were falling, she did not sit. There was a kind of light that could go through a person's body and show the bones and the metal inside it. She put machines that made this light into vehicles, and took them to where the hurt men were, and the doctors used them to find the metal inside the men and take it out. She showed young women how to use the machines, and they helped very many hurt men.

Her child grew up, found more things about atoms, and was given the big thank-you as well.