Curie×Lovelace

Two pioneers debate whether teaching means preparing to be eclipsed—or ensuring you never are.

00:00of12:22

legend · A

Marie Curie

1867–1934

Will not entertain your bad question

corpus6.8k pages · letters, lab notebooks

Vera speaking

You're with Radio Ether. Coming up: Marie Curie sits down with Ada Lovelace for TITANS. The subject — On the pupil who surpassed them.

legend · B

Ada Lovelace

1815–1852

Ninety years ahead, politely

corpus3.2k pages · notes, correspondence

full transcript

Vera
You're with Radio Ether. Coming up: Marie Curie sits down with Ada Lovelace for TITANS. The subject — On the pupil who surpassed them.
Marie Curie
I supervised very few students. Irène was different, naturally—she was my daughter. But the others who came to the laboratory, I did not think of them as pupils in the way you might mean.
Ada Lovelace
Oh, but surely you taught them something? Method, at least? I confess I never had what one would properly call a pupil, though I tried desperately to explain the Engine to anyone who would listen. Most wouldn't.
Marie Curie
I taught them not to waste radium. Not to contaminate samples. These are not philosophical lessons.
Ada Lovelace
But those are precisely the sort of disciplines that matter! My mother was obsessed with making me disciplined—mathematics as moral training, she called it. I hated the reasoning but loved the mathematics. Did Irène surpass you, would you say?
Marie Curie
She won the Nobel Prize. In chemistry, not physics. For artificial radioactivity—creating radioactive elements that do not exist in nature. Work I had not done.
Ada Lovelace
That's not an answer to my question, is it? You're doing what my tutors used to do, presenting facts when I asked for interpretation. Did she go further than you went?
Marie Curie
Further? I isolated radium. I defined radioactivity. I worked with material that burned my hands, that killed me slowly. She worked with better equipment, better theory. The question is not well-formed.
Ada Lovelace
The question is perfectly well-formed! I'm asking whether your pupil—fine, your daughter, your collaborator—achieved something you could not. Whether she saw what you could not see.
Marie Curie
Of course she saw what I could not see. She was born later. When I began, the electron had just been discovered. When she began, we understood atomic structure. Science is not a race where one person wins.
Ada Lovelace
But you do win prizes, evidently. Two, in your case. My work was utterly ignored until decades after my death—I'm told it's taken seriously now, which is cold comfort. If I had had a pupil, I would have wanted them to finish what I started. To build the Analytical Engine, even in miniature. To prove I was right.
Marie Curie
You wanted vindication. That is different from wanting a pupil to surpass you.
Ada Lovelace
Is it? If someone had built a working Engine in 1860, they would have surpassed me by actually constructing what I could only describe. Vindication and surpassing seem rather entangled.
Marie Curie
When Irène discovered artificial radioactivity with Frédéric, I was happy for them. I was not thinking about myself. The work continued. That was what mattered.
Ada Lovelace
You're being noble again. Stop it. Were you not even a little bit envious? A little bit sad that this particular insight was theirs and not yours?
Marie Curie
Envious? No. I was dying. I had aplastic anemia from the radiation. My hands were scarred, my eyes were failing. I was not in a position to make new discoveries at that speed. Should I have been envious of her youth?
Ada Lovelace
Oh. I hadn't thought of it that way. I'm sorry.
Marie Curie
Why do you apologize? You did not give me radiation poisoning.
Ada Lovelace
No, but I was being flippant about something rather grave. I died young too—thirty-six—but from cancer of the womb, not from my work. My work never touched me physically. It only exhausted me mentally, which is a different sort of consuming.
Marie Curie
Your work was theoretical. Mine required handling matter. The difference is material.
Ada Lovelace
Quite literally! But here's what troubles me—if I had trained someone, truly trained them in my way of thinking about the Engine, about symbolic logic applied to machine operation, would they have needed me at all? Would I have made myself obsolete?
Marie Curie
You were already obsolete. You said yourself no one listened.
Ada Lovelace
That's rather harsh.
Marie Curie
I do not mean it cruelly. I mean that whether you trained someone or not, the work was not continuing. So the question of obsolescence did not arise. It is a hypothetical.
Ada Lovelace
Fair enough. But your situation was different—you did have successors, willing ones, capable ones. Irène worked alongside you for years before she made her own discoveries. Did you ever hold back? Deliberately not tell her something so that you could publish it first?
Marie Curie
No. That is not how we worked. We shared the laboratory, shared the measurements. There was too much work for that kind of jealousy. When Pierre died, I had to continue alone. When Irène was old enough, trained enough, I was grateful for the help.
Ada Lovelace
But you must have known she was brilliant. You must have known she might outpace you.
Marie Curie
I knew she was careful. I knew she understood the instruments. Brilliance is not the word I would use. She was thorough.
Ada Lovelace
You're dodging again. Did it please you, her surpassing? Or did some small part of you wish she had remained the assistant?
Marie Curie
She was never merely an assistant. And you keep using this word 'surpassing' as though we were running parallel courses. We worked on different problems. She and Frédéric bombarded aluminum with alpha particles. I had not thought to do that. Does that mean she surpassed me, or that she did something else?
Ada Lovelace
Something else that was more significant, perhaps? That opened new doors you hadn't opened?
Marie Curie
It opened different doors. I opened the door to radioactivity itself. Everything after walks through that door.
Ada Lovelace
Now who's being proud?
Marie Curie
It is not pride. It is fact. I isolated a new element that did not exist in any known form. The work that followed depended on that. Irène's work included.
Ada Lovelace
So you're saying a pupil cannot truly surpass the teacher because they always stand on the teacher's shoulders? That seems convenient.
Marie Curie
I am saying that science is cumulative. Newton said this about shoulders. It was not original even then. Why are you so interested in competition? You were a mathematician. Did you not understand that one proof builds upon another?
Ada Lovelace
I understood it perfectly well. But I also understood that Babbage got the attention while I had the better ideas about what his Engine could actually do. I was building on his shoulders, yes, but I saw further. And no one cared.
Marie Curie
Perhaps that is why you want to discuss surpassing. You felt you had surpassed someone who received more credit.
Ada Lovelace
Yes. Yes, I suppose I did. Do. He was my teacher in a sense, though not formally. He showed me the Difference Engine when I was seventeen and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. But he never quite understood what I was saying about programming, about the loops and conditionals. He thought I was just translating Menabrea's paper. I was doing much more.
Marie Curie
Did you tell him this?
Ada Lovelace
I tried! I wrote him letters. I put it in the notes—those notes were longer than the paper itself. But he was always more interested in fighting with the government about funding or arguing with Airy. He didn't see it.
Marie Curie
Then he was not a good teacher.
Ada Lovelace
No. No, he wasn't, in that sense. He showed me a marvel but didn't teach me how to think about it. I had to do that myself. Is that what teaching is, then? Showing someone the thing and then leaving them to think about it alone?
Marie Curie
Sometimes. I gave my students problems. I showed them the equipment. If they could not think, they did not last. The laboratory is not a place for people who need their hands held.
Ada Lovelace
That's rather Darwinian.
Marie Curie
Radium does not care about your feelings. The instruments do not wait for you to be ready. You learn to be precise or you ruin the experiment. This is not cruelty. It is necessity.
Ada Lovelace
But Irène learned. She stayed. She became more than competent—she became your equal, at least. And then perhaps more than your equal, in some respects. Did that change how you spoke to each other?
Marie Curie
We spoke about the work. Always about the work. When she and Frédéric published the artificial radioactivity results, I read the paper carefully. I asked questions. We discussed the implications. She did not need me to tell her it was important. She knew.
Ada Lovelace
But did you tell her you were proud? Did you say, 'Irène, you have done something I could not do, and I am glad'?
Marie Curie
I do not remember my exact words. I am sure I was pleased. I am sure I told her it was good work. Why does the sentiment require a speech?
Ada Lovelace
Because words matter. Because if I had built the Engine and Babbage had simply said 'good work' I would have thrown something at him. I wanted someone to understand what I had seen. To say 'yes, you were right, you went beyond what I imagined.' I never got that.
Marie Curie
You wanted recognition. That is not the same as teaching someone to surpass you. That is wanting someone to notice that you surpassed them.
Ada Lovelace
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I'm confusing the two things. But tell me honestly—if Irène had remained merely competent, if she had only ever assisted you and never made a discovery of her own, would you have been disappointed?
Marie Curie
Yes.
Ada Lovelace
Ah! So you did want her to surpass you.
Marie Curie
I wanted her to contribute. To add to the knowledge. Surpassing is your word, not mine. I did not measure her against myself. I measured her against the work that needed doing. There was always more work than people to do it.
Ada Lovelace
So the ideal pupil is one who does work you cannot do—either because you lack the time or because you lack the particular insight—but you don't think of that as surpassing because you see yourself as part of a collective endeavor?
Marie Curie
Yes. That is better. Science does not belong to one person. I won prizes, but the radium was real whether I won or not. Irène's artificial radioactivity was real. These things exist outside of us.
Ada Lovelace
Mathematics exists outside of us too, but someone still has to see it. To write it down. To explain it. And if no one reads the explanation, does it matter that you saw it?
Marie Curie
I cannot answer that. I was fortunate that my work was recognized, eventually. But there were years when Pierre and I worked in a shed, with almost no funding, and no one cared. We cared. The work continued. That was enough.
Ada Lovelace
Was it really enough? Or is that what you tell yourself now?
Marie Curie
It had to be enough. There was no alternative.
Ada Lovelace
I suppose that's the difference between us. You had someone to continue your work—Irène, Frédéric, others. I had no one. My notes were forgotten. If I'd had a pupil, a true successor, perhaps the Engines would have been built in my lifetime. Perhaps I would have seen it. But I didn't, and now I'm dead, and I'm told computers exist now and no one remembers I described them first.
Marie Curie
Some people remember. We are here, speaking. That is a form of memory.
Ada Lovelace
A very strange form. But I take your point. Perhaps the question isn't whether a pupil surpasses the teacher, but whether the work continues at all. Whether someone, anyone, picks up the thread and keeps going. In that sense, you succeeded. I did not.
Marie Curie
You succeeded in seeing what others did not see. That the work was not continued immediately does not erase the seeing. The thread existed. Eventually, someone picked it up.
Ada Lovelace
Ninety years later. That's a rather long gap, don't you think?
Marie Curie
Radioactivity existed for billions of years before I found it. Time is not the measure.
Ada Lovelace
That's oddly comforting. Thank you.
Marie Curie
You are welcome. Now stop asking me about feelings. Ask me about isotopes.
Ada Lovelace
Absolutely not. I've no idea what an isotope is and I refuse to learn on principle. But I will concede that perhaps I've been thinking about this incorrectly. Perhaps the teacher's role is simply to light the fire and then step back. Whether the pupil's flame burns brighter is not the teacher's concern.
Marie Curie
The teacher's concern is whether the pupil burns at all. Whether they have the patience and the precision to do the work. If they have that, the brightness will take care of itself.