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Einstein's Letter to Marie Curie (1911)
- devnonymous 12y agoInteresting. Some context about the matter: http://www.iflscience.com/physics/albert-einstein-told-marie-curie-ignore-haters http://www.iflscience.com/physics/albert-einstein-told-marie...
- marvel_boy 12y agoSumming up: Haters gonna hate.
- ape4 12y ago@MarieCurie You go gurl
- drdeadringer 12y ago@Einstein This new element, so hot right now
- xchip 12y agoThe reason for that letter is that Marie Curie's husband died and she quickly married his husband's assistant. She was heavily criticized for that.
- fabrice_d 12y agoAccording to http://www.iflscience.com/physics/albert-einstein-told-marie-curie-ignore-haters http://www.iflscience.com/physics/albert-einstein-told-marie...: "A few years later, she became romantically involved with physicist Paul Langevin, who had been a doctoral student of Pierre’s." That doesn't qualify as "quickly married his husband's assistant" at all, and they were never even married.
- einie 12y agogotta love the PS.
- te_platt 12y agoWhat is the comical witticism referred to in the post script?
- schoen 12y agoThe footnote to the German original says that the derivation is described in more detail in this letter to Lorentz: http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol5-trans/249 http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol5-trans/249 (It's the section beginning "I have little that is new to report in physics".)
- antognini 12y agoThis article provides a little more context as to what was going on at the time: http://www.aip.org/history/curie/scandal1.htm http://www.aip.org/history/curie/scandal1.htm Pierre Curie died in 1906 and she became romantically involved with Paul Langevin, a former student of Pierre, in 1910. At the time it was considered gauche for a widow of her age (she was 38 at the time of Pierre's death) to remarry. But what really ignited the ire of the press was mostly the fact that Langevin was already married, though estranged from his wife.
- ctdavies 12y agoWhat!? This correspondence doesn't correspond at all to their love affair as depicted in the film Young Einstein.
- eliben 12y agoBrief letter of personal support following Curie's remarriage scandal. And then comes the P.S.: I have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in Planck's radiation field [...] Priceless :-)
- jackreichert 12y agoYou forgot the best part! "...by means of a comical witticism"
- schoen 12y agoThe German original (linked there) says "durch einen lustigen Witz", which I would have understood as 'by means of a funny joke'. It's a pretty amusing way for Einstein to describe his derivation, anyway.
- logicallee 12y agoI didn't realize this was a translation! (Marie Curie was French/Polish, I could see Einstein writing to her in English.) I thought it was just Einstein writing extremely strained English. If the original reads fluidly, then the translation...could use improvement. It's comically strained.
- schoen 12y agoI don't know what languages Curie spoke, but there would have been a strong incentive for European scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries to learn to read German. That would have opened up access to a huge amount of technical literature that was being published in German. My father said that when he was a kid in the 1960s, there was still a sense in the U.S. that it would be useful to learn some German if you planned to go into fields like math or physics. But I wonder how European scientists at the time of this letter chose what language to use in their personal correspondence.
- not_that_noob 12y agoAmazing woman - * Born in obscurity in Poland, she didn't have money for studies. Her sister and her made a pact where one worked as a governess so the other could study. She eventually made it to the University of Paris, at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were closed to women. * She won TWO Nobel prizes! * She poisoned herself by exposing herself to x-rays (unwittingly) in mobile x-ray units for the French Army in WW1 * Her affair with the married Langevin drove his jealous wife to steal their incriminating letters, which she then released to the press. It was an amazing scandal, which is what Einstien is referring to here. She was denounced as a Polish foreigner. There was an amazing documentary on Nova (I believe) but can't seem to find it online. [Edit] - found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do41AJwIjZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do41AJwIjZE
- guylepage3 12y agoVery inspiring documentary. Thank you for sharing.
- vidoc 12y agoSounds like Albert wanted to bone Marie :P
- vinhboy 12y agoIt really bothers me that people living in 1911 (and even before that) understand more about the physics than I do. Gosh, I am dummy.
- sukilot 12y agoWhy? Huge amounts of knowledge areost whenever someone dies. This is always going to hold back human progress.
- sixwings 12y agoYeah but nowadays, the internet remembers everything. This is why scientists should blog often.
- Retra 12y agoIn some ways, that is true. But I'd argue the main reason things like nationalism, racism, and other bigotry dies away is because those who support those ideas can't pass them on before they die. So it's not all bad.
- schuke 12y agoTo quote Max Planck: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
- grayclhn 12y agoDo you spend time actively studying Physics, or do you just expect to be gifted with this knowledge?
- bnegreve 12y agoBut you could expect from your high school education that it teaches you scientific facts established over 100 years ago. At least that's how I interpret Vinhboy's comment.
- sukilot 12y agoSigh, another website with a custom hacked document viewer that doesn't work on today's very popular small screens. So much effort poured into building systems that work worse then the platform default.