Twain×Curie

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Mark Twain and Marie Curie, on On the only contemporary they would have wanted to argue with.
2. 00:09
   Mark Twainshare moment

   I spent forty years perfecting the art of not suffering fools, Madame, and I can tell you honestly that most of my contemporaries were fools. But there was one I would've paid good money to lock in a room with for an hour or two. Just to see if I could make him admit he was full of wind.
3. 00:26
   Marie Curieshare moment

   You assume one hour would be sufficient. I have found that some people can sustain their delusions indefinitely, like a perpetual motion machine that violates no laws because it produces nothing of value.
4. 00:38
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Now that's a scientific burn if I ever heard one. So who's your candidate? Some European gasbag with a theory about ether or phrenology?
5. 00:47
   Marie Curieshare moment

   Lord Kelvin.
6. 00:48
   Mark Twainshare moment

   The fellow who said heavier-than-air flight was impossible?
7. 00:52
   Marie Curieshare moment

   The same. William Thomson. He also declared that radioactivity was merely molecular vibration, which he pronounced with complete certainty despite never having conducted a single experiment. He was brilliant, which made his pronouncements dangerous. A fool with credentials is worse than a fool without them.
8. 01:11
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Oh, I know the type. We had a whole raft of them in America. Educated into imbecility. They'd read enough to sound smart and not enough to know they were ignorant.
9. 01:22
   Marie Curieshare moment

   But Kelvin was not ignorant. That is what made him infuriating. He knew thermodynamics better than almost anyone. He simply could not imagine that his understanding was incomplete.
10. 01:34
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Pride dressed up as physics.
11. 01:36
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Precisely. He told me once, at a conference, that X-rays would prove to be a hoax. This was 1896. Röntgen had already published photographs of bones. What does one say to such a man?
12. 01:49
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Well, what'd you say?
13. 01:50
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I showed him my hands.
14. 01:52
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Your hands?
15. 01:53
    Marie Curieshare moment

    They were already damaged from the radium. Burned, scarred. I told him that hoaxes do not typically cause radiation burns. He changed the subject.
16. 02:01
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Jesus. That's colder than anything I ever wrote. I like you, Madame.
17. 02:06
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I was not trying to be cold. I was simply presenting evidence. But yes, I would have liked very much to argue with him properly, with time and data. To make him see that certainty is the enemy of discovery.
18. 02:19
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Now that's a truth that spans disciplines. My candidate would've hated hearing it too.
19. 02:24
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Who?
20. 02:25
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Theodore Roosevelt.
21. 02:26
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Ah. I met him once, briefly. He spoke very rapidly about many things.
22. 02:31
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's diplomatic. The man never had an unexpressed thought in his entire life. Wore his certainty like a uniform. And the thing that burned my bacon was that half the time he was right, which made him absolutely unbearable the other half.
23. 02:46
    Marie Curieshare moment

    What would you have argued with him about?
24. 02:48
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Empire. Expansion. That whole bloody business in the Philippines. He thought we were civilizing the savages, bringing them the light of democracy at gunpoint. I thought we were just being Spain with better publicity.
25. 03:03
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You opposed the war?
26. 03:04
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I opposed the lying about the war. If you're going to conquer somebody, at least have the honesty to call it conquest. Don't dress it up as a favor you're doing them. Roosevelt couldn't tell the difference between helping people and standing on their necks. Or he could, and didn't care.
27. 03:24
    Marie Curieshare moment

    That is the argument you wanted to have.
28. 03:26
    Mark Twainshare moment

    In print, in person, anywhere he'd stand still long enough. Which wasn't often. Man had the attention span of a hummingbird on cocaine.
29. 03:36
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Did you ever write to him?
30. 03:38
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Oh, we corresponded some. Danced around each other. He invited me to the White House once, and I went, because I'm not stupid. But we kept it polite. That's what galls me. I wanted to really tear into him, make him defend the indefensible, watch him tie himself in knots. But you can't do that with a president. Not while he's alive and armed with libel lawyers.
31. 04:02
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I understand this frustration. With Kelvin, the problem was different. He would not argue. He would simply declare, as if the universe had consulted him personally on its operations.
32. 04:14
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Roosevelt had a touch of that. Spoke for God, country, and progress all at once. Made it real hard to get a word in edgewise.
33. 04:22
    Marie Curieshare moment

    But you wanted to. That is the important part. We choose our opponents carefully. They must be worth the effort.
34. 04:29
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Roosevelt was worth it because he mattered. Because people listened to him. If he'd been some crank on a soapbox I wouldn't have wasted the ink. But he had the whole country's ear, and he was filling it with dangerous nonsense about manifest destiny and the white man's burden.
35. 04:46
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Kelvin had the Royal Society's ear. He delayed acceptance of radioactivity by years simply by refusing to believe in it. His skepticism was not scientific. It was territorial.
36. 04:58
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Territorial. That's the word. These men stake out their little empires of thought and defend them like rabid dogs. Roosevelt had the empire of American virtue. Kelvin had the empire of classical physics.
37. 05:13
    Marie Curieshare moment

    And neither could admit the possibility that their empire had borders. That there were lands beyond their maps.
38. 05:20
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You know what's funny? Roosevelt loved science. Read Darwin, collected specimens, could talk your ear off about ornithology. But when it came to people, to politics, he went blind. Couldn't apply the same curiosity.
39. 05:36
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Kelvin was the reverse. He understood people well enough, I think. He was charming at dinner. But in his laboratory, he became rigid. He could not adapt his theories to new evidence. The mind that should have been most flexible became most fixed.
40. 05:52
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Maybe that's why we wanted to argue with them. They were both so goddamn close to being wise.
41. 05:57
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Close, yes. That is more frustrating than simple stupidity. Stupidity one can ignore. But to see intelligence waste itself on stubbornness is painful to watch.
42. 06:08
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Did Kelvin ever come around? On any of it?
43. 06:10
    Marie Curieshare moment

    No. He died in 1907, still certain that radioactivity was a minor phenomenon that would be explained away. He never accepted that matter could transform itself, that atoms were not eternal. It would have meant admitting his life's work was incomplete.
44. 06:27
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Roosevelt died in 1919. Never admitted the Philippines adventure was a mistake. Went to his grave thinking he'd done those islands a favor.
45. 06:36
    Marie Curieshare moment

    So we both lost our arguments.
46. 06:38
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Hell, we never got to have them. Not really. That's what I regret. Not that I couldn't change his mind, but that I never got him alone in a room where we could go at it honest, without the cameras and the crowds and the propriety.
47. 06:52
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I had one opportunity. At the 1903 Solvency Conference. Kelvin was there. He made a remark about women in science, something casual and dismissive. I could have responded. I said nothing.
48. 07:05
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Why not?
49. 07:06
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Because I had just won the Nobel Prize, and I was the only woman in the room, and I knew that if I argued, I would be remembered as difficult rather than correct. So I presented my paper and answered questions about radium and let his comment sit there unchallenged.
50. 07:22
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's a different kind of fighting.
51. 07:23
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. The strategic kind. But I think of that moment sometimes and wonder what would have happened if I had chosen the honest argument instead of the careful one.
52. 07:32
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You might've lost the room.
53. 07:34
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I might have won Kelvin.
54. 07:35
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You think one good argument could've turned him?
55. 07:38
    Marie Curieshare moment

    No. But it might have planted a doubt. And doubt is the beginning of science. Without it, we are only priests guarding old doctrine.
56. 07:45
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Without it, we're only patriots saluting old flags. Same principle, different church.
57. 07:51
    Marie Curieshare moment

    So perhaps we wanted to argue with them not to change their minds, but to force them to examine what they believed. To make them feel uncertainty, even for a moment.
58. 08:01
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That would've been victory enough. Just to see Roosevelt pause before answering, to see him actually think instead of just bellow. Or to watch Kelvin admit three little words: I don't know.
59. 08:15
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Those are the three most important words in science.
60. 08:18
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And in politics. And in everything else worth doing. But they're the hardest words for certain men to say. Roosevelt couldn't say them. Kelvin couldn't say them.
61. 08:30
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Could you?
62. 08:30
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Hell, I made a career out of it. Half my writing is just elaborate ways of saying I don't know what people are or why they do what they do. I just described them and hoped someone smarter could explain it.
63. 08:44
    Marie Curieshare moment

    That is more honest than most philosophers manage.
64. 08:46
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And more honest than most presidents. Or physicists who get themselves titled Lord. Maybe that's who we really wanted to argue with. Not Roosevelt or Kelvin specifically, but that whole breed of man who's so sure of himself he stops looking at the evidence.
65. 09:03
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. The argument would not have been personal. It would have been philosophical. About the nature of certainty itself.
66. 09:10
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Which is the only argument worth having, when you get down to it. Everything else is just details.
67. 09:16
    Marie Curieshare moment

    And we will never have it now. They are dead, we are dead, and the argument remains unmade.
68. 09:22
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Well, that's the tragedy of timing, Madame. All the good fights happen too late or too early, never when you're actually in the room together with nothing to lose.
69. 09:32
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Perhaps that is for the best. We might have disappointed ourselves.
70. 09:36
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Or surprised ourselves. But I guess we'll never know.