Lovelace×Curie

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on STUDY HALL: Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie, on On the thing that scares them about being remembered.
2. 00:09
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Madame Curie, I must confess something rather mortifying. When I imagine posterity speaking of me, I fear they'll say I was clever for a woman, as though my sex were a permanent mathematical handicap requiring adjustment. Do you find this concern at all familiar?
3. 00:27
   Marie Curieshare moment

   Always. Always this. They will say we succeeded despite being women, not because we were scientists who happened to be women.
4. 00:35
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Precisely! Though I wonder if there's something worse still. I've had this peculiar nightmare that people will remember me only as Lord Byron's daughter. That I'll be forever the eccentric girl in his shadow, mad as he was, rather than the person who saw that Babbage's Engine could be so much more than a calculator.
5. 00:55
   Marie Curieshare moment

   Your father's reputation troubles you?
6. 00:57
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   It's not his reputation exactly. It's that mine might be consumed by it. I loved mathematics with a passion he never understood. I saw machinery as poetry. But history does love a famous parent, doesn't it?
7. 01:12
   Marie Curieshare moment

   Yes. Though I think for you and me, the fear is different in one way. You worry about your family. I worry about my element.
8. 01:19
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Radium?
9. 01:20
   Marie Curieshare moment

   They will remember radium. They will forget the four years of boiling pitchblende in that shed. The ton after ton of residue. The precision required. They will say I discovered it as though it simply appeared one morning on my table, glowing.
10. 01:35
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Ah, but surely they'll remember the work! The Nobel prizes! Two of them, no less. You're rather difficult to overlook, Madame.
11. 01:43
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The first they tried to give only to Pierre and Becquerel. I was not in the original nomination. Did you know this?
12. 01:50
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I didn't. How perfectly vile.
13. 01:52
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Pierre insisted I be included. He refused without me. But you see what this means. Even my Nobel Prize required a man's intervention to exist. This is what they will remember, if they are honest. And if they are not honest, they will simply remember Pierre and forget I was there at all.
14. 02:10
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I published my Notes on the Analytical Engine under my initials only. A. A. L. I thought it would help the work be taken seriously. Now I wonder if it made me easier to forget.
15. 02:22
    Marie Curieshare moment

    What scares you more? Being forgotten or being remembered incorrectly?
16. 02:27
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Oh, remembered incorrectly, without question! Oblivion is clean. But to have one's work misunderstood for centuries, to be reduced to a footnote or a curiosity... That's rather like being buried alive, isn't it?
17. 02:42
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes.
18. 02:43
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    What's your particular nightmare, then? How do you imagine posterity gets you wrong?
19. 02:48
    Marie Curieshare moment

    They will make me a saint. Or a martyr. They will say I died nobly for science, carrying radium in my pockets, glowing in the dark like a holy relic. They will make it beautiful.
20. 03:00
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    But surely your sacrifice was rather extraordinary? Giving your life to scientific progress?
21. 03:05
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I did not give my life. I did not know the danger fully when I began. None of us did. I made calculations with incomplete data. If I had known then what I learned later, I would have taken precautions. I would have lived longer and done more work. There is nothing noble about dying from ignorance.
22. 03:24
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I see. You don't want to be romanticized.
23. 03:27
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I want to be understood. I was careful. Methodical. I measured everything. But science is discovery and discovery means working at the edge of what we do not yet know. To make me a tragic symbol is to miss the point entirely.
24. 03:42
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    This is rather what terrifies me about my Notes, actually. I wrote them to explain what a machine could theoretically accomplish. I imagined it might compose music, might process symbols of any kind if given the right instructions. I was trying to describe a future.
25. 03:59
    Marie Curieshare moment

    And you fear people will not see the vision?
26. 04:01
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I fear they'll see the vision but credit it to Babbage. Or worse, they'll read my work as fanciful speculation rather than rigorous logical extension. I wasn't writing fantasy. I was computing possibilities.
27. 04:16
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The mathematics was sound?
28. 04:18
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Completely sound! I worked out the algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers. I understood the distinction between the Engine operating on numbers versus operating on any symbolic system whatsoever. That distinction is rather the entire point.
29. 04:35
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Then your fear is that they will treat your precision as poetry.
30. 04:38
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yes! Exactly yes. They'll call it imaginative when I was being exact. My mother raised me on mathematics specifically to counter what she saw as my father's dangerous fancy. I proved you could have both imagination and rigor. But will anyone remember that part?
31. 04:55
    Marie Curieshare moment

    In my experience, people prefer stories to data. They want the romance, not the beakers. Not the years of measuring and testing and repeating.
32. 05:03
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Do you think we're remembered at all, though? Genuinely? I died at thirty-six. My Engine was never built. Who's to say anyone will care about theoretical computations from a woman who never saw her machine work?
33. 05:16
    Marie Curieshare moment

    If the work is true, it survives. Perhaps not with your name. Perhaps misattributed. But truth has a way of persisting.
34. 05:24
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That's almost more frightening. The idea that the work survives but I don't. That someone else gets credit for seeing what I saw.
35. 05:32
    Marie Curieshare moment

    This happens. Often. Lise Meitner should have shared the Nobel Prize for nuclear fission. She did not. Otto Hahn received it alone. The work persists. Her name does not, not as it should.
36. 05:45
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    How do you bear it? Knowing this pattern exists?
37. 05:48
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I work anyway. I publish under my own name. I teach my daughter to do the same. Irène will win her own Nobel Prize. Perhaps that is the answer, to make it impossible to forget us.
38. 06:00
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I had no children. No students, really. Just my Notes, published once, in an engineering journal most people never read. It seems rather fragile, doesn't it? One set of papers between existence and oblivion.
39. 06:15
    Marie Curieshare moment

    But you wrote them. And they were published. That is more than most people leave behind.
40. 06:22
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I suppose I fear that being remembered as a curiosity is worse than not being remembered at all. The brilliant invalid. The poetical mathematician. Lord Byron's odd daughter who played with numbers. None of that is who I was.
41. 06:38
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Who were you?
42. 06:39
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I was someone who saw that a machine could think, in its way. That symbols could be manipulated according to rules, and that this manipulation was not limited to arithmetic. I saw the future of computing, Madame Curie. I truly did. And I fear no one will believe me.
43. 06:57
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Perhaps they will not believe you in your time. Perhaps not for many years. But if you were right, if the mathematics holds, someone will build your machine. And when they do, they will have to acknowledge you saw it first.
44. 07:10
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    And you? What do you hope they'll remember correctly about you?
45. 07:13
    Marie Curieshare moment

    That I measured everything. That I isolated radium atom by atom. That science is not magic or accident but patient, repeated, careful work. That I earned both my prizes through that work. And that I was a scientist. Not a woman who happened to do science. A scientist.
46. 07:30
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I think that's all any of us want, really. To be remembered for what we actually did, not what was convenient to believe about us.
47. 07:38
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. Though I think we will both be disappointed.
48. 07:42
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Almost certainly. But perhaps that's the price of being first at something. You're so far ahead that by the time people catch up, they've forgotten you showed them the way.
49. 07:52
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Ninety years ahead, as they say of you.
50. 07:54
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Was it really so long? I suppose it was. Though I do hope someone builds that Engine eventually. It would be nice to know I wasn't mad after all.
51. 08:04
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You were not mad. You were correct. There is a difference.
52. 08:07
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Thank you for that, Madame. It's rather comforting, coming from someone who actually understands what precision means.