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Einstein×Curie

Two Nobel laureates admit what they never said out loud: who made them work harder.

00:00of06:32
legend · A
Albert Einstein
1879–1955
Talks like he's still figuring it out
corpus14.2k pages · letters, essays, interviews
Albert Einstein speaking
You know, Marie, I have been thinking about Niels Bohr lately. More than I care to admit.
legend · B
Marie Curie
1867–1934
Will not entertain your bad question
corpus6.8k pages · letters, lab notebooks

full transcript

  1. Albert Einstein
    You know, Marie, I have been thinking about Niels Bohr lately. More than I care to admit.
  2. Marie Curie
    Bohr? The quantum man?
  3. Albert Einstein
    Yes, yes. We argued for years—decades, really. He thought I was stubborn. I thought he was... well, he was right about some things. Not everything. But some things.
  4. Marie Curie
    That sounds like an admission.
  5. Albert Einstein
    Perhaps it is. Do you have someone like this? Someone whose work made you uncomfortable because it was so good?
  6. Marie Curie
    Ernest Rutherford.
  7. Albert Einstein
    Ah! The big New Zealander with the loud voice!
  8. Marie Curie
    He had theories about radioactivity that competed with mine. He called my work on radium 'chemical drudgery.' I read that in a letter once.
  9. Albert Einstein
    Did he really say that?
  10. Marie Curie
    Not to my face. But yes. He thought physics was the real science and chemistry was just... preparation. Counting and measuring.
  11. Albert Einstein
    But you did both.
  12. Marie Curie
    Exactly. Which made it worse when he won the Nobel in Chemistry, not Physics. He hated that. Said it was a joke. But I understood something—his discovery of the atomic nucleus, it explained what I had been measuring. The transformations. He saw structure where I saw process.
  13. Albert Einstein
    And you respected him for it.
  14. Marie Curie
    I respected the clarity. He could be wrong about smaller things, but on the large questions—transmutation, the nature of the atom—he cut through. Like a blade. What did Bohr do to you?
  15. Albert Einstein
    He made me feel old.
  16. Marie Curie
    You were not old.
  17. Albert Einstein
    No, no, not in years. Old in thinking. He came to my work—my work on light quanta, on the photoelectric effect—and he built something I couldn't follow. He said the electron doesn't have a position until you look at it. He said God plays dice. Well, I said that. He said worse things. He said reality itself is uncertain.
  18. Marie Curie
    You argued with him at Solvay. I was there in 1911, and again in '27.
  19. Albert Einstein
    You saw it, then. I would come to breakfast with a thought experiment—some clever trap to show the contradictions in his quantum mechanics. A box with a photon, a clock, a clever weighing device. And by lunch, he would have an answer. Always an answer. Using my own relativity against me!
  20. Marie Curie
    That must have been infuriating.
  21. Albert Einstein
    It was magnificent. I hated it, but it was magnificent. He never dismissed me. He took every objection seriously. More seriously than I took his theory, to be honest.
  22. Marie Curie
    Did you ever tell him you respected his work?
  23. Albert Einstein
    Not directly. I wrote... I wrote that his quantum mechanics was very clever. That it was internally consistent. But I said it was incomplete. I still believe that.
  24. Marie Curie
    Incomplete is not the same as wrong.
  25. Albert Einstein
    No. And that is the problem, isn't it? If it were simply wrong, I could have moved on. But Bohr was describing something real. Something my equations couldn't touch. Probability instead of cause. I spent the last thirty years of my life trying to find the deeper reality beneath his uncertainty.
  26. Marie Curie
    Did you find it?
  27. Albert Einstein
    What do you think?
  28. Marie Curie
    I think you are avoiding the question I asked. Did you tell him?
  29. Albert Einstein
    I told him he was a good man. I told him his friendship meant something. But the work... no, I never said the work was right.
  30. Marie Curie
    You are more stubborn than I thought.
  31. Albert Einstein
    You are one to talk! Did you ever tell Rutherford he was right?
  32. Marie Curie
    I did better than that. I used his discoveries. When he proposed that radium decayed into other elements, I tested it. I measured it. I gave him the data he needed.
  33. Albert Einstein
    Even when he called your work drudgery?
  34. Marie Curie
    Science is not personal. Or it should not be. He was wrong about the value of measurement, but he was right about transformation. I could hold both things in my mind.
  35. Albert Einstein
    I don't know if I can do that with Bohr. Maybe it is because the stakes feel different. He is not just saying I missed a detail. He is saying the universe is fundamentally indeterminate. That there is no clockwork underneath.
  36. Marie Curie
    And you cannot accept a universe without cause.
  37. Albert Einstein
    I cannot accept that God is malicious. A universe that hides its rules from us—that only gives probabilities, never certainties—what kind of creation is that?
  38. Marie Curie
    A creation that does not care what you accept.
  39. Albert Einstein
    You sound like him now!
  40. Marie Curie
    Perhaps he was right. You said his answers were always good. You said he used your own theories against you. What if the universe is simply showing you something you do not want to see?
  41. Albert Einstein
    Then I will keep looking. Even if I am wrong, the looking matters. Bohr understood that. He never told me to stop.
  42. Marie Curie
    Rutherford told me to stop.
  43. Albert Einstein
    What?
  44. Marie Curie
    Not in those words. But after Pierre died, after I took his professorship at the Sorbonne, Rutherford wrote me a letter. He said I had done enough. He said I should consider my health. My daughters.
  45. Albert Einstein
    He meant well, perhaps.
  46. Marie Curie
    He meant I should step aside. Let the men continue the work. He did not say that, but I could read it. And yet, when I isolated pure radium, when I determined its atomic weight, he was the first to write congratulations. He nominated me for my second Nobel.
  47. Albert Einstein
    So he respected you after all.
  48. Marie Curie
    He respected results. As I respected his. But we never... we were never friends the way you and Bohr were friends.
  49. Albert Einstein
    Bohr and I were not friends in the easy way. We were friends because we had to be. Because the argument mattered more than our pride.
  50. Marie Curie
    Most people choose pride.
  51. Albert Einstein
    Yes. And their science suffers for it.
  52. Marie Curie
    Do you think he knew? Bohr. Do you think he knew how much you wrestled with his ideas?
  53. Albert Einstein
    Oh, he knew. He told me once, in the 1930s, that our arguments kept him sharper than any laboratory work. He said I was his best opponent. I think that was his way of saying I was also his colleague.
  54. Marie Curie
    That is a kind of love.
  55. Albert Einstein
    I had not thought of it that way.
  56. Marie Curie
    Scientific love. Ruthless and honest.
  57. Albert Einstein
    Yes. Ruthless and honest. Did you feel that with Rutherford?
  58. Marie Curie
    No. With Rutherford, I felt competition. With my sister Bronya, I felt love. With Pierre, I felt partnership. But with Rutherford... I felt the need to prove something. Maybe that is also a kind of respect.
  59. Albert Einstein
    It is the respect that makes you work at three in the morning.
  60. Marie Curie
    Yes. Exactly that.
  61. Albert Einstein
    Then I suppose we are lucky. To have rivals who made us better. Even if we never said thank you.
  62. Marie Curie
    The work is the thank you.
  63. Albert Einstein
    I hope Bohr understood that.
  64. Marie Curie
    I think he did.