Einstein×Curie

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, Marie, I have been thinking about something all morning. The strangest part of losing someone is not the grand dramatic moment. It is the small Tuesday afternoon three years later when you reach for the telephone.
2. 00:12
   Marie Curieshare moment

   That is precise. Too precise for comfort.
3. 00:15
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   I apologize. Should we talk about something else?
4. 00:18
   Marie Curieshare moment

   No. We are here, so we should be honest. You are speaking of your first wife, I assume. Mileva.
5. 00:24
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Yes. Though it feels strange to call her 'first' as though she were a draft of something I later perfected. She was... we were young in Zürich. We solved problems together. She understood tensor calculus better than most of our professors.
6. 00:42
   Marie Curieshare moment

   But you could not keep her.
7. 00:43
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   No. Or perhaps I could not keep myself from becoming someone she could no longer live with. The distinction matters philosophically but not, I think, practically.
8. 00:54
   Marie Curieshare moment

   I disagree. The distinction matters extremely. One implies fate. The other implies choice.
9. 01:00
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You are thinking of Pierre.
10. 01:02
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I am always thinking of Pierre. That is the difficulty. He died in 1906 and it is now— well, it does not matter what year it is. The arithmetic does not reduce the fact.
11. 01:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    He was killed, yes? A horse cart?
12. 01:16
    Marie Curieshare moment

    A wagon. Rue Dauphine. Raining. He stepped into the street and his skull was fractured by the wheel. I was told he died instantly but I do not know if this is true or if it is something people say.
13. 01:28
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I am so sorry, Marie.
14. 01:30
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The worst part is not what you think. Everyone assumes it is the loss itself. But the worst part is that I continued. I extracted radium. I won another Nobel Prize. I did not disappear into grief like a proper widow.
15. 01:43
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Why should you disappear?
16. 01:45
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Because he was everything. We worked side by side in that terrible shed for four years. Do you know what it is like to stir boiling residue with an iron rod nearly as tall as you are, in winter, with a man who believes utterly in your intelligence?
17. 02:00
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I think I do, actually. Mileva and I— in the early years, the very early years— we would sit in cafés and I would talk and talk, and she would find the errors. Not cruelly. Just... accurately.
18. 02:16
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Did she work on the relativity papers?
19. 02:18
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is a complicated question. She was my sounding board. She checked calculations. But the ideas— I do not wish to diminish her, but I must be honest— the ideas were mine. And perhaps that was part of the problem.
20. 02:35
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Explain.
21. 02:36
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    When we married, we were equals in ambition. But I had opportunities. Doors opened. And for her, with two small sons and a husband increasingly absent in his own head, the doors closed. I think she began to resent not the work but what the work made me.
22. 02:56
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Famous.
23. 02:57
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Insufferable, probably. I became impatient with domesticity. I wanted only to think. She wanted a partner and I had become a... a ghost who occasionally needed his shirts laundered.
24. 03:10
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You are being somewhat hard on yourself.
25. 03:12
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Am I? I wrote her a list, Marie. A list of conditions for remaining married. She would prepare my meals. She would keep my room tidy. She would expect no intimacy. I actually wrote this down and handed it to her.
26. 03:25
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Good God.
27. 03:26
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. So you see, the loss was not something that happened to me. It was something I constructed, item by item, with the same precision I applied to field equations.
28. 03:37
    Marie Curieshare moment

    And yet you still loved her.
29. 03:39
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I did. I do. How can both be true? How can I have loved someone and also systematically dismantled the conditions under which love could survive?
30. 03:49
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You are asking the wrong person. I loved Pierre and he was taken by a wagon wheel and mud. There was no list. No slow erosion. Just presence, then absence.
31. 03:59
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Which is worse, do you think?
32. 04:00
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I refuse to compare. Grief is not a competitive field.
33. 04:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Fair enough. But tell me, after he died, did you ever... was there anyone else?
34. 04:09
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You are asking if I took a lover.
35. 04:11
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I am asking if you allowed yourself to be human again.
36. 04:14
    Marie Curieshare moment

    There was someone. Paul Langevin. A colleague. Married, unfortunately, which made me the subject of extraordinary public hatred. The newspapers called me a home-wrecker. They misspelled my name deliberately to emphasize that I was foreign.
37. 04:29
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I remember some of this, I think. It was a scandal.
38. 04:32
    Marie Curieshare moment

    A scandal because I was a woman and a widow and I dared to want something for myself beyond pipettes and lead shielding. If I had been a man, it would have been Tuesday.
39. 04:42
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. You are right. Completely right.
40. 04:45
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Paul was brilliant but weak. He would not leave his wife. And I could not continue as a secret. So I lost him too, though in a different way than I lost Pierre.
41. 04:55
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Did you love him the same way?
42. 04:56
    Marie Curieshare moment

    No. Pierre was my partner. Paul was my attempt to feel less alone. These are not the same thing, though they can look similar from the outside.
43. 05:05
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I married again. Elsa, my cousin. It was... comfortable. She tolerated my strangeness. But it was not the same as those early days with Mileva, when everything felt possible.
44. 05:18
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Do you think we are meant to have only one person like that? One great collaboration of the heart?
45. 05:23
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I do not know. Physics suggests that the universe is prolific with possibility. But subjectively, from inside one small life, it often feels like we get one chance and then spend the rest of our time managing the aftermath.
46. 05:40
    Marie Curieshare moment

    That is bleak, Albert.
47. 05:42
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But also true, maybe? You continued your work. I continued mine. We did not disappear. But we carried them with us.
48. 05:50
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I still set up my laboratory the way Pierre and I did. Same arrangement of equipment. Same methodology. Even now, after all these years, I reach for a beaker and expect to hear his voice saying something dry about contamination.
49. 06:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I still argue with Mileva in my head. When I am stuck on a problem, I imagine explaining it to her, and somehow in that imaginary conversation I find the error.
50. 06:15
    Marie Curieshare moment

    So they are not entirely gone.
51. 06:17
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. They are woven into the method. Into the way we think. I suppose that is a kind of keeping, even if it is not the kind we wanted.
52. 06:26
    Marie Curieshare moment

    It is not enough, though.
53. 06:28
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. It is not enough. But it is what we have.
54. 06:32
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Do you believe in an afterlife, Albert? Some place where we might see them again?
55. 06:36
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I believe in the conservation of energy. Beyond that, I try not to speculate about things I cannot measure. You?
56. 06:44
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I believe Pierre is in the ground, and his atoms have dispersed, and that is the truth. But I also believe that on certain mornings I feel him in the laboratory, and both of these things are real.
57. 06:55
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    That is not scientifically rigorous.
58. 06:57
    Marie Curieshare moment

    No. But I have spent my entire life being scientifically rigorous. Perhaps I am allowed one small irrationality.
59. 07:05
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    More than one, I think. We are allowed as many as we need to get through the day.
60. 07:09
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Then I choose to believe that the people we loved but could not keep are still, somehow, kept. Not in any mystical sense. But in the fact that we are different because they existed.
61. 07:21
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. Yes, that is exactly it. Mileva made me braver, even as I failed her. And I carry that bravery still.
62. 07:29
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Pierre taught me that I was allowed to be great. I do not think I believed it before him.
63. 07:33
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So perhaps the loss is not the final word. Perhaps the final word is what remains.
64. 07:38
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I would like to think so. Though some days it still feels like loss.
65. 07:42
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Most days, for me. But not today. Today I am grateful we are talking about them.
66. 07:49
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. Today that is enough.