Curie×Einstein

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Marie Curie sits down with Albert Einstein for TITANS. The subject — On the question only the other person at the table could ask honestly.
2. 00:11
   Marie Curieshare moment

   They told me you cried when you heard. About Pierre. 1906.
3. 00:15
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   I did not cry. But I... yes. I wrote you a letter I never sent. What do you do with condolence when the person has lost not just a husband but a thinking partner? The words felt stupid.
4. 00:26
   Marie Curieshare moment

   They were all stupid. Everyone's words. I went back to the laboratory eight weeks later. What else is there?
5. 00:33
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You took his chair at the Sorbonne. First woman to teach there.
6. 00:36
   Marie Curieshare moment

   They offered it as charity. I took it as salary. There is a difference.
7. 00:40
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Did you... forgive me, this is the question I have wanted to ask for thirty years. Did you ever stop hearing his voice when you worked? In the lab, I mean. Did Pierre's absence ever become just... absence?
8. 00:52
   Marie Curieshare moment

   No.
9. 00:52
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   No?
10. 00:53
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I still hear him. Not in a mystical sense. I am not a spiritualist, you know this. But when I measure, when I calculate, I hear his objections. His corrections. He made me more precise. The dead can still teach if you let them.
11. 01:08
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ah. Yes. I think... I think I understand this.
12. 01:11
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You were going to ask me something else. Before you asked about Pierre.
13. 01:15
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Was I?
14. 01:16
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You have a tell. You pull on your moustache when you are avoiding your own question. What is it?
15. 01:21
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    The Langevin affair. 1911. When they published your letters, when they called you... those things in the newspapers.
16. 01:28
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Home-wrecker. Foreigner. Husband-stealer. Yes. Continue.
17. 01:33
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You were about to receive your second Nobel Prize. For isolating radium. Alone this time, not shared with Pierre or Becquerel. And they tried to take it from you. The Swedish Academy suggested you not come to Stockholm. That you decline.
18. 01:46
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I came anyway.
19. 01:47
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You came anyway. And I want to know—where did you find that? The capacity to walk into that room? I have seen men destroyed by far less public humiliation. I saw what the press did to you. The threats. Your daughters had to be hidden.
20. 02:01
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You want to know if I was brave.
21. 02:03
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. I want to know if you were afraid.
22. 02:05
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Oh. Yes. Constantly. Every day of that year I was afraid. Fear is not the opposite of courage, Albert. It is the proof of it.
23. 02:13
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    They called you immoral for loving a man who was married. But they never said such things about—
24. 02:18
    Marie Curieshare moment

    About the men. No. They did not. Paul Langevin was also at that affair, obviously. He received a promotion.
25. 02:26
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    If you had been born male—
26. 02:27
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I would have been unremarkable. An adequate chemist with a Polish accent. It is the obstacles that made the work necessary. Perhaps even made it possible. I do not recommend this as a system.
27. 02:40
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You are more generous than I would be.
28. 02:42
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I am not generous. I am accurate. Now. My question for you.
29. 02:46
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ah, I was hoping you would forget.
30. 02:48
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You do not forget things, and neither do I. 1933. You left Germany. You were in California when Hitler took power. You never went back.
31. 02:58
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I could not go back. They burned my books. They put a price on my head. Literally. Five thousand marks.
32. 03:03
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. But you knew. Before you left. You knew what was coming, and you left while you could still leave. You were smart. You saved yourself and Elsa. But there were others.
33. 03:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    There were... yes. There were others.
34. 03:16
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Your colleagues. Your students. Jews who did not have your international fame, your British and American invitations. You wrote letters for some of them. Affidavits. Sponsorships.
35. 03:28
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Not enough letters. Never enough.
36. 03:30
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Here is what I want to know. And I ask only because you are the single person who might answer honestly. Do you dream about the ones you could not save?
37. 03:39
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Every night.
38. 03:40
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Their names?
39. 03:41
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Not their names. Their faces. At the Prussian Academy, at Göttingen. Young men, young women. Brilliant. Some of them more brilliant than I was. And I am in Princeton, in my study, in my absurd fame, and they are—
40. 03:55
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes.
41. 03:56
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You too?
42. 03:57
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I had a laboratory. Assistants. Women, mostly. Some Jewish, some not. When the war came, the first war, I turned the lab into a radiology station. Mobile X-ray units for the field hospitals. But the second war... I was already dead. 1934. I missed it. Except I think about the Institut du Radium, about who stayed, who ran, who was taken.
43. 04:20
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You trained an entire generation. Your students, your techniques. They scattered across Europe.
44. 04:25
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Like isotopes. Decaying at different rates. Some with long half-lives. Some gone immediately. It is a terrible metaphor.
45. 04:33
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    It is a perfect metaphor. This is why no one else could ask us these questions. They think we were gods. Little tin gods of the laboratory.
46. 04:41
    Marie Curieshare moment

    We were not gods. We were people who measured things carefully. And then the world took our measurements and built weapons.
47. 04:48
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You know they used your work. Radium, radioactivity, fission. The Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer and the others. They used what you discovered.
48. 04:56
    Marie Curieshare moment

    They used what you discovered too. E equals mc squared. The conversion of mass to energy. That is the heart of the bomb, is it not?
49. 05:05
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes.
50. 05:06
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Do you regret the equation?
51. 05:07
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    How can I regret the truth? The equation is simply what is. But I regret... I regret that I wrote to Roosevelt. 1939. Szilard convinced me. We warned him that the Germans might build an atomic bomb first. And so the Americans built it instead. And then they used it. Twice.
52. 05:27
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You could not have known.
53. 05:29
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Of course I could have known. I did know. I simply believed the alternative was worse. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it was not. How do you calculate the moral weight of two hundred thousand dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the possibility of Nazi Germany with nuclear weapons?
54. 05:44
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You do not calculate it. You cannot. This is not physics. There is no equation.
55. 05:50
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you have thought about this. Your own work. Radium in the bombs, in the reactors.
56. 05:55
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I have thought about very little else. In the end. 1934. I was dying from radiation exposure. Aplastic anemia. My own discovery killed me, slowly, over thirty years. And I kept working. Even when my fingers were burned, when I could barely hold a pen. Why? What was I trying to prove?
57. 06:17
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    That the work mattered. That understanding the universe, even if the universe kills you, is worth the cost.
58. 06:22
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Is it?
59. 06:23
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I... I have to believe yes. Otherwise what have we done? What have we given our lives to?
60. 06:27
    Marie Curieshare moment

    We have given our lives to knowledge. Knowledge that can be used to heal or to destroy. We do not control which. We never did. The radium that burned my hands also saved thousands of cancer patients. The physics that made the bomb also makes the reactor, the medicine, the X-ray.
61. 06:45
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is not comfort.
62. 06:47
    Marie Curieshare moment

    No. It is not comfort. It is just what is. You taught me that, actually. Relativity. The speed of light is constant, but time and space bend around it. We are constant. The work is constant. But the world bends it to whatever shape it needs. We are not responsible for the bending.
63. 07:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Do you believe that?
64. 07:06
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I believe it on Tuesdays. The rest of the week I am not sure. What about you? Do you still believe science is good? That knowing is better than not knowing?
65. 07:16
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. Even now. Even after everything. I believe the alternative is darkness. Literal darkness. Ignorance as policy. And I cannot... I cannot accept that. Even if the light shows us terrible things. Even if the light burns.
66. 07:28
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The light always burns, Albert. I have the scars to prove it. But we held it anyway.
67. 07:33
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    We held it anyway.
68. 07:35
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Perhaps that is the only honest answer. The only one that matters. We held the light, even though it burned. And we would do it again.
69. 07:43
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Would we?
70. 07:44
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. Of course we would. We are not brave, Albert. We are obsessed. There is a difference.
71. 07:49
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I think perhaps you are right.