Born in
Paris, France, Pierre was educated by his father, and in his early teens showed a strong aptitude for mathematics and geometry. By the age of 18 he had completed the equivalent of a higher degree, but did not proceed immediately to a doctorate due to lack of money. Instead he worked as a laboratory instructor.
In 1880, Pierre and his older brother Jacques demonstrated that an electric potential was generated when crystals were compressed, i.e.
piezoelectricity. Shortly afterwards, in 1881, they demonstrated the reverse effect: that crystals could be made to deform when subject to an electric field. Almost all digital electronic circuits now rely on this phenomenon in the form of
crystal oscillators.
Prior to his famous doctoral studies on magnetism he designed and perfected an extremely sensitive
torsion balance for measuring magnetic coefficients. Variations on this equipment were commonly used by future workers in that area. Pierre Curie studied
ferromagnetism, paramagnetism, and
diamagnetism for his doctoral thesis, and discovered the effect of
temperature on paramagnetism which is now known as
Curie's law. The material constant in Curie's law is known as the Curie constant. He also discovered that ferromagnetic substances exhibited a
critical temperature transition, above which the substances lost their ferromagnetic behaviour. This is now known as the
Curie point.
Pierre formulated what is now known as the
Curie Dissymmetry Principle: a physical
effect cannot have a dissymmetry absent from its efficient
cause. For example, a random mixture of sand in zero gravity has no
dissymmetry (it is
isotropic). Introduce a
gravitational field, then there is a dissymmetry because of the direction of the field. Then the sand grains can ‘self-sort’ with the density increasing with depth. But this new arrangement, with the directional arrangement of sand grains, actually reflects the dissymmetry of the gravitational field that causes the separation.
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