
Einstein's Letter to Marie Curie (1911) - anacleto
http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol8-trans/34
======
not_that_noob
Amazing 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
Very inspiring documentary. Thank you for sharing.

------
antognini
This 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.

------
devnonymous
Interesting. Some context about the matter:
[http://www.iflscience.com/physics/albert-einstein-told-
marie...](http://www.iflscience.com/physics/albert-einstein-told-marie-curie-
ignore-haters)

------
sukilot
Sigh, 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.

------
eliben
Brief 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
You forgot the best part! "...by means of a comical witticism"

~~~
schoen
The 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
I 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
I 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.

------
xchip
The 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
According to [http://www.iflscience.com/physics/albert-einstein-told-
marie...](http://www.iflscience.com/physics/albert-einstein-told-marie-curie-
ignore-haters): "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.

~~~
ptaipale
Apparently the affair was too quick for the tastes of that time, anyway.

------
te_platt
What is the comical witticism referred to in the post script?

~~~
schoen
The 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".)

------
vinhboy
It 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
Why? Huge amounts of knowledge areost whenever someone dies. This is always
going to hold back human progress.

~~~
Retra
In 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.

------
einie
gotta love the PS.

------
marvel_boy
Summing up: Haters gonna hate.

~~~
ape4
@MarieCurie You go gurl

~~~
drdeadringer
@Einstein This new element, so hot right now

------
ctdavies
What!? This correspondence doesn't correspond at all to their love affair as
depicted in the film Young Einstein.

