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STUDY HALL

Einstein×Curie

Two minds who changed physics wonder what their younger selves needed to hear—and whether they would have listened.

00:00of07:29
legend · A
Albert Einstein
1879–1955
Talks like he's still figuring it out
corpus14.2k pages · letters, essays, interviews
Vera speaking
You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Albert Einstein sits down with Marie Curie for STUDY HALL. The subject — On the question they wish someone had pushed them on at twenty.
legend · B
Marie Curie
1867–1934
Will not entertain your bad question
corpus6.8k pages · letters, lab notebooks

full transcript

  1. Vera
    You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Albert Einstein sits down with Marie Curie for STUDY HALL. The subject — On the question they wish someone had pushed them on at twenty.
  2. Albert Einstein
    So, Marie, I have been thinking about this question all morning. At twenty I was—what was I? A student teacher, failing to impress anyone. But I was so certain of everything.
  3. Marie Curie
    Certainty at twenty is the natural condition. I was working as a governess. Saving money for university, one franc at a time.
  4. Albert Einstein
    Yes, but what I mean is—I wish someone had asked me why I was so angry. Because I was angry, you understand? At the professors, at the system, at the formalism of it all. And I thought the anger was clarity.
  5. Marie Curie
    Was it not?
  6. Albert Einstein
    Some of it was. But some of it was just impatience. I dismissed people who might have taught me something because they bored me, or because they made me fill out the proper forms.
  7. Marie Curie
    You are describing youth, Albert. This is not unusual.
  8. Albert Einstein
    Perhaps. But if someone had asked me—really pushed me—'Why are you so certain these people have nothing to teach you?' I might have... I don't know. Listened more.
  9. Marie Curie
    Or you might have given a twenty-year-old's answer and learned nothing. The question I wish someone had asked me is different. They should have asked why I believed I had to be twice as good.
  10. Albert Einstein
    Ah. Because you did have to be twice as good.
  11. Marie Curie
    Yes. But the question is why I accepted that. Why I never asked myself whether the game was worth playing if those were the rules.
  12. Albert Einstein
    You are saying you would have done something else?
  13. Marie Curie
    No. I am saying I should have been asked to examine it. To articulate why I was willing to work in a freezing shed for years while men with half my ability had laboratories. Whether that was strength or something else.
  14. Albert Einstein
    What would you call the something else?
  15. Marie Curie
    Fear, perhaps. Fear that if I demanded better conditions, I would lose the work entirely. Or pride—pride that made me think suffering proved seriousness.
  16. Albert Einstein
    But you accomplished things. The suffering was not for nothing.
  17. Marie Curie
    I isolated radium. Yes. But I also died of aplastic anemia, Albert. The suffering had consequences I did not need to accept.
  18. Albert Einstein
    I... yes. I see.
  19. Marie Curie
    You are quiet now.
  20. Albert Einstein
    I am thinking about what you said. About accepting conditions. I left Germany in '33, but I knew what was coming years before. And I stayed.
  21. Marie Curie
    That is not the same thing.
  22. Albert Einstein
    Isn't it? I believed in the university, in reason, in the idea that civilized people would not—but at twenty, if someone had asked me 'What will you do when the institutions fail?' I would not have had an answer. I never imagined they could fail.
  23. Marie Curie
    At twenty I knew institutions could fail. Poland had been erased from the map. This is perhaps a difference between us.
  24. Albert Einstein
    Yes, I had the luxury of assumption. Of believing the world was stable. What would you have answered, then, if someone had pushed you on the twice-as-good question?
  25. Marie Curie
    At twenty? I would have said it was noble. That excellence required sacrifice. That I was proving something important.
  26. Albert Einstein
    And now?
  27. Marie Curie
    Now I would say I was proving something, but only to people whose opinions should not have mattered. The science did not need my martyrdom. It needed my precision.
  28. Albert Einstein
    But would you have heard that at twenty? This is what troubles me about the whole question. We are asked what we wish someone had pushed us on, but would we have listened?
  29. Marie Curie
    Probably not. But being asked would have planted something. A seed of doubt. Even if I rejected the question then, it might have grown.
  30. Albert Einstein
    A seed of doubt. I like that. I had no doubts at twenty about my own thinking. Many doubts about everything else, but none about this.
  31. Marie Curie
    You doubted authority.
  32. Albert Einstein
    Yes, constantly! But I never doubted that my doubt was correct. Do you see? I was skeptical of everyone except myself.
  33. Marie Curie
    And this changed?
  34. Albert Einstein
    Eventually. After many mistakes. After dismissing work that turned out to be important, after arguments I didn't need to have. Someone should have asked me, 'What if you are wrong about being right?'
  35. Marie Curie
    That is a terrible question to ask a twenty-year-old. It would paralyze them.
  36. Albert Einstein
    Would it? Or would it make them more careful? More curious?
  37. Marie Curie
    At twenty, careful and paralyzed look very similar. You need some arrogance to begin at all.
  38. Albert Einstein
    This is true. I needed my arrogance to survive the Polytechnic. But I kept it longer than necessary. By thirty I should have put some of it down.
  39. Marie Curie
    And I should have picked some up. At thirty I was still acting as though permission might be revoked at any moment.
  40. Albert Einstein
    Even after the Nobel?
  41. Marie Curie
    The Nobel was in 1903. I was thirty-six. And yes, even after. I never stopped feeling I had to prove I belonged in the room.
  42. Albert Einstein
    Marie, you discovered two elements.
  43. Marie Curie
    I know what I discovered, Albert. I am telling you what I felt. Facts and feelings are not the same thing.
  44. Albert Einstein
    No. No, they are not. I apologize.
  45. Marie Curie
    Your question about anger—I think it is related to this. Anger can be protective. It can keep you working when conditions are impossible. But it can also blind you.
  46. Albert Einstein
    Yes! Exactly this. My anger at the formalists, at the rigid thinkers—it helped me see past the old framework. But it also made me rigid in my own way. By the time quantum theory came, I was the old formalist.
  47. Marie Curie
    You never accepted quantum mechanics?
  48. Albert Einstein
    Not the Copenhagen interpretation, no. God does not play dice. I still believe this. But I wonder if my early anger made me too... inflexible. Unable to hear what younger physicists were trying to say.
  49. Marie Curie
    Or perhaps you were simply wrong about that particular thing. Being pushed at twenty would not have changed it.
  50. Albert Einstein
    Perhaps. But it might have made me wrong with more grace. Less certainty that everyone else was confused.
  51. Marie Curie
    Grace is a luxury. I never had enough energy for grace.
  52. Albert Einstein
    You had children, a laboratory, two Nobel Prizes—
  53. Marie Curie
    And a husband who died in an accident, and radioactive materials destroying my body, and people asking always how I managed the household. Grace requires reserve. I had no reserve.
  54. Albert Einstein
    I understand. I am sorry. I think perhaps my question and yours are two sides of the same problem. I had too much certainty, you had too much burden.
  55. Marie Curie
    Yes. And both prevented us from seeing clearly at moments when clarity mattered.
  56. Albert Einstein
    So if someone had pushed you—really pushed you—at twenty, what would you want them to say?
  57. Marie Curie
    I would want them to ask: 'What would you do if you did not have to prove yourself? If you simply belonged by right—what would you do then?' Because I think I would have worked differently. Perhaps not better, but differently.
  58. Albert Einstein
    Less suffering.
  59. Marie Curie
    Less unnecessary suffering. Science has enough necessary suffering built in. The problems are hard. We do not need to make ourselves harder.
  60. Albert Einstein
    And for me, I think the question would be: 'What if the people who bore you are right about the thing that bores you?' Because sometimes—not always, but sometimes—I was bored by things I should have paid attention to.
  61. Marie Curie
    Such as?
  62. Albert Einstein
    Oh, mathematics. I was impatient with mathematical rigor. I wanted the physics, the meaning. But later I needed mathematics I had never bothered to learn properly. Grossmann had to help me.
  63. Marie Curie
    You collaborated, then. This is good.
  64. Albert Einstein
    Yes, but I could have come to it with better preparation. With less arrogance about what mattered.
  65. Marie Curie
    We are talking ourselves in circles now. The young do not listen. This is the nature of being young.
  66. Albert Einstein
    True. But perhaps someone listening to this will be twenty and arrogant and will hear something anyway. A seed of doubt, as you said.
  67. Marie Curie
    Perhaps. Though I suspect they will simply think we are old and tired.
  68. Albert Einstein
    I am old and tired, Marie. But I am not wrong about this. The question I wish someone had pushed me on—it matters. Even if I would not have listened then.
  69. Marie Curie
    Yes. Even if we would not have listened. The question still matters.