MARIE AND PIERRE CURIE’S NOBEL LECTURES: THE GENESIS OF RADIOACTIVITY IN CLASS

Abstract

In the present article, the possibility of the educational use of the Nobel Lectures is discussed. These lectures are essentially pedagogical, written by the scientists themselves in fairly comprehensible language and are available at the Nobel Prize homepage. Their educational effects of motivational, epistemological and conceptual natures are the object of this research, in the specific examples of  Pierre and Marie Curie’s lectures on radioactivity. The lectures are associated historically and epistemologically to the categories of teacher’s perspectives about the nature of science and the scientific knowledge mapped by Gil-Pérez et al (2001), and two of the common points between the post positivist epistemologies – global coherence and investigation on the divergent thought – also studied by the authors. The notion of a scientific discovery and its legitimation is worked on the very example of radioactivity, in an association of the lectures to Badash (1965) and Martins (1990, 1997, 2005). Conceptually, the researches on the development of radioactivity and atomic models by Kragh (1994, 2001) and Martins (2003) are chosen to be treated.