Daniel Whiteson

And when he came back, for reasons I never understood, he was like, hmm, let's develop these plates and see what's on them.

He didn't do the experiment he planned.

He did some other thing he never expected to reveal anything.

And what he saw is, oh, the uranium salts are emitting.

They left a shadow on the photographic plates.

Huge surprise to him.

He was not expecting the uranium to emit without the sunlight.

And only because it was cloudy in Paris that weekend did he do this and discover radiation from uranium onto these plates.

And then he deduced, oh, there's something coming out of this uranium.

And that's a happy accident.

He discovered, I think, actually just a few days before somebody in England made a similar discovery.

And he went from doing the experiment, analyzing the data, to publishing it, to later winning the Nobel Prize.

But the whole exciting period was like a week long.

He just barely scooped his English rival.

So an amazing discovery.

And to me, it's amazing because that could have been discovered earlier.

Sure.

That kicked off our whole understanding of quantum mechanics.

You know, after that you have the Curies and their exploration of radon, their exploration of radium and, you know, understanding of the atomic structure, which led to all sorts of radical, radical new understanding of the nature of the universe.

But he could have done that 20 years earlier, 30 years earlier, right?