Reborn RadionowTitans · Einstein × Curie
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tapeSTUDY HALL· archived show
STUDY HALL

Lovelace×Curie

Two women who rewrote their fields admit what they learned from the ones they tried hardest to prove wrong.

00:00of09:16
legend · A
Ada Lovelace
1815–1852
Ninety years ahead, politely
corpus3.2k pages · notes, correspondence
Vera speaking
You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Ada Lovelace sits down with Marie Curie for STUDY HALL. The subject — On the rival they secretly suspected was right all along.
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: Ada Lovelace sits down with Marie Curie for STUDY HALL. The subject — On the rival they secretly suspected was right all along.
  2. Ada Lovelace
    I should confess at the outset that I have spent considerable time defending Charles Babbage against all comers. He was my teacher, my collaborator, the architect of the Analytical Engine. But there was another gentleman whose objections I dismissed far too readily. Professor Airy, the Astronomer Royal.
  3. Marie Curie
    The one who refused funding for the Difference Engine?
  4. Ada Lovelace
    Precisely that gentleman. He wrote that the machine was 'worthless to science.' I thought him narrow, hidebound, incapable of vision. I wrote entire passages in my notes essentially arguing against his position without naming him directly.
  5. Marie Curie
    And now?
  6. Ada Lovelace
    Now I realize he was asking the correct question, merely premature in his conclusion. He wanted to know: what will this machine calculate that we cannot already calculate? What new science emerges from it? And we had no proper answer. We had a beautiful engine that could perform any calculation, but we had not yet imagined the calculations that would justify its creation.
  7. Marie Curie
    The tool preceded the problem it was meant to solve.
  8. Ada Lovelace
    Exactly so. Babbage and I were intoxicated by possibility, by the abstract capability of the machine. Airy was asking for specificity. For application. I was so certain he simply lacked imagination, but he was demanding we exercise ours more rigorously.
  9. Marie Curie
    I understand this. In my own work, there was Lord Kelvin.
  10. Ada Lovelace
    The physicist? I should think he would have been an ally.
  11. Marie Curie
    One would assume. But he published calculations in 1899, soon after we discovered radium, attempting to prove that radioactive decay could not possibly provide enough energy to account for the Earth's heat over geological time. His mathematics were elegant. His conclusion was that either radioactivity was insignificant or the Earth was younger than geologists claimed.
  12. Ada Lovelace
    Both options rather inconvenient for your research, I imagine.
  13. Marie Curie
    I was furious. Not publicly, you understand, but privately. Here was this distinguished gentleman with his tidy equations, trying to constrain what we had only just discovered. Pierre and I had measured the heat emission ourselves. We knew radium released enormous energy. But Kelvin's reputation was such that his skepticism carried weight.
  14. Ada Lovelace
    How did you respond?
  15. Marie Curie
    Poorly, at first. I simply worked harder, made more measurements, refined our numbers. I thought if I could just be more precise, more careful, the objection would collapse on its own.
  16. Ada Lovelace
    But precision was not the issue.
  17. Marie Curie
    No. The issue was that I had not yet understood the mechanism. I could measure the effect, the heat, the rays, but I could not explain the source. Kelvin was correct to be skeptical. Not in his conclusion that radioactivity was insignificant, but in his insistence that we needed a proper theory of atomic structure to account for such energy.
  18. Ada Lovelace
    He was right about the shape of the problem, even as he drew the wrong conclusion from it.
  19. Marie Curie
    Precisely. And I wasted years resenting his skepticism when I should have recognized it as a roadmap. He was telling me exactly what needed to be explained.
  20. Ada Lovelace
    Did you ever tell him so?
  21. Marie Curie
    I did not. He died in 1907. By then, Rutherford and others had begun to develop the nuclear model of the atom, and it became clear that Kelvin had been asking the right questions. But I had spent too long treating his skepticism as obstruction rather than as a form of guidance.
  22. Ada Lovelace
    I wonder if this is a particular trap for those of us working at the edges of what is known. We become so defensive of our territory.
  23. Marie Curie
    Especially when that territory is hard-won. You were a woman writing about mathematics and computing. I was a woman in physics, in chemistry. Every objection felt like a challenge to our right to be there at all.
  24. Ada Lovelace
    Yes. Yes, precisely. When Professor Airy questioned the value of the Engine, I heard it as: women cannot understand such mechanisms. When in fact he was simply asking: but what will you do with it? A fair question, that.
  25. Marie Curie
    And yet we could not afford to hear it as fair. We had to fight for every inch of credibility.
  26. Ada Lovelace
    Which meant we sometimes fought battles that were actually collaborations in disguise. I wrote in my notes about how the Engine might compose music, might create art. I thought I was defending its worthiness. But really I was circling around Airy's question without addressing it head-on.
  27. Marie Curie
    What would you have said, if you could have set aside the defensiveness?
  28. Ada Lovelace
    I would have said: You are correct that we do not yet have the specific problems this machine must solve. But the machine itself will reveal those problems to us. The capability creates the application, not always the reverse. But I could not say that because it sounded like an admission of weakness.
  29. Marie Curie
    When it was actually a description of how discovery works.
  30. Ada Lovelace
    Quite so. Did you find the same with Kelvin? That the objection, properly understood, was actually useful?
  31. Marie Curie
    More than useful. Essential. His insistence on a mechanism, on a source for the energy, became the central question of nuclear physics. He was wrong about radioactivity being insignificant, but he was right that we needed a theory of the atom that could account for such power.
  32. Ada Lovelace
    And had he lived to see that theory develop?
  33. Marie Curie
    He would have been, I think, satisfied. Though perhaps still skeptical. He had that kind of mind, always testing, always demanding more rigor. I came to appreciate that, though it took me years.
  34. Ada Lovelace
    I wonder what Airy would have made of modern computing. Whether he would have seen the vindication of the Analytical Engine's principles, or simply asked again: but what does it do that justifies its existence?
  35. Marie Curie
    Perhaps both. A good skeptic does not abandon skepticism just because one prediction proves true.
  36. Ada Lovelace
    No, but a good scientist learns to distinguish between skepticism that sharpens the work and skepticism that merely defends the status quo. I was too quick to assume Airy was the latter.
  37. Marie Curie
    As I was with Kelvin. Though in fairness, some skepticism truly is obstruction. Some objections are made in bad faith.
  38. Ada Lovelace
    Oh, undoubtedly. I do not propose we should have welcomed every criticism as profound wisdom. But these particular rivals, the ones we secretly suspected were right all along—they deserved better from us.
  39. Marie Curie
    They did. And perhaps we deserved better from ourselves. The ability to say: I do not yet have that answer, but it is a good question.
  40. Ada Lovelace
    Without feeling that such an admission would cost us our standing. Yes.
  41. Marie Curie
    Though I will note, it very well might have cost us our standing. The luxury of admitting uncertainty is not evenly distributed.
  42. Ada Lovelace
    A fair point, Madame. A fair point indeed. We were not wrong to be cautious. Only perhaps wrong about which cautions to observe.
  43. Marie Curie
    And wrong to let that caution prevent us from recognizing when our rivals had identified something true. Even if their conclusions were incorrect, their questions were often correct.
  44. Ada Lovelace
    I shall remember that. Though I confess, it would have been considerably easier to recognize it at the time if they had not been quite so certain of their own correctness.
  45. Marie Curie
    Certainty is the affliction of the established. We had the opposite problem, the affliction of the unestablished, which is the inability to admit doubt without fearing it will be used against us.
  46. Ada Lovelace
    And so we fought battles that were, in part, battles against our own insecurity.
  47. Marie Curie
    Yes. Though the insecurity was not unreasonable given the circumstances.
  48. Ada Lovelace
    No. But it was costly nonetheless. I think of all the time I spent composing elaborate rebuttals to Airy's position in my mind, when I might have been thinking through his actual question more carefully.
  49. Marie Curie
    I measured the same piece of radium dozens of times, each measurement more precise than the last, thinking precision would answer skepticism. When what was needed was not more measurement but more theory.
  50. Ada Lovelace
    We were answering the questions we wished they had asked, rather than the questions they actually asked.
  51. Marie Curie
    And perhaps that is the real lesson. Not that our rivals were right, exactly, but that they were asking questions we needed to answer, whether we wished to or not.
  52. Ada Lovelace
    Whether we could answer them immediately or not. The question itself was the contribution.
  53. Marie Curie
    Yes. Though I still maintain that Lord Kelvin could have been less smug about his calculations.
  54. Ada Lovelace
    Oh, absolutely. And Professor Airy might have attempted to imagine just one application before declaring the entire enterprise worthless. I am granting them intellectual honesty, not sainthood.
  55. Marie Curie
    Good. Because I am not prepared to be that generous.
  56. Ada Lovelace
    Nor should you be. But perhaps generous enough to admit they were not entirely wrong.
  57. Marie Curie
    Perhaps. On Tuesdays and Thursdays only.
  58. Ada Lovelace
    I shall settle for that.