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Publisher Summary This chapter describes the work of Pierre Curie on symmetry. Pierre Curie is well known to the wide scientific community as an author of outstanding works on radioactivity but almost unknown as an author of deep investigations on symmetry and its applications in physics. Pierre Curie was the first to single out the symmetry groups, which is currently called the limiting point groups especially important in physics. Altogether, there are seven such groups. They can readily be remembered if one wishes to consider the simplest figures possessing such symmetry. Using the limiting symmetry groups, Pierre Curie has established for the first time one of the most important features, distinguishing an electric field from a magnetic one, and thus managed to explain why, contrary to the case of positive and negative charges, north magnetism cannot be distinguished from south magnetism. Physicists before Pierre Curie were interested mainly in the similarity rather than in differences between the magnetic and electric fields. This standpoint was supported even by mathematicians. Pierre Curie was really ahead of his contemporaries when he discovered an essential difference between the symmetries of magnetic and electric fields overlooked by the others. |
