By Pat Sheil
SCIENCE
The Elements of Marie Curie
Dava Sobel
4th Estate, $34.99
Dava Sobel is one of the world’s most successful, and accessible, science writers. Known for 1995’s best-selling Longitude, here she beautifully elaborates the life and work of the most famous female scientist of all time.
Indeed, the subtitle of the book, How the glow of radium lit a path for women in science, tells us that we are not here just to be reminded of the trials and triumphs of Curie, but to meet, if only en passant, many of the dozens of women she nurtured and encouraged throughout her astonishing career.
The imaginative structuring of the book, with each chapter named after a chemical element and a girl or woman who was to benefit from Marie’s benevolence and encouragement, makes her management of these inspiring character sketches seem effortless.
Chapter 10, for example, is titled “Sybil (Thorium)“. This clever textual architecture allows Sobel to chart out Curie’s career – she is, after all, the star of the show – while bringing to life many of the brilliant young women she hired and inspired over decades. Women who, like her, had to work twice as hard as their male counterparts for recognition.
Marie Curie was born Marya Salomea Sklodowska in 1867, in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. A precocious child, leaving school at 15 and top of her class and with the annual gold medal, by the age of 17 Marya was conducting private lessons in French, arithmetic and geometry. As a governess in the countryside, teaching the children of a family of well-to-do beet farmers, she spent her evenings reading anything and everything to do with science and mathematics that she could lay her hands on.
Curie, one of only two women, at a physics conference in Brussels in 1933.Credit: Getty
“When I feel myself quite unable to read with profit, I work problems of algebra and geometry … which get me back on the right road,” she wrote to a friend in 1887. She taught the children of the beet farm’s peasant workers to read and write in Polish in her spare time, a dangerously patriotic pursuit when Russian was the only language permitted in a classroom.
A fierce pride in her Polish heritage – a trait inherited from her high-school maths teacher father – was much later to be carved in perpetuity into that perennial map of nature that adorns every science classroom, the periodic table of the elements, when she discovered and named polonium, in 1898.
Author Dava Sobel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2012.Credit: Fairfax Media
Finding this new element had only been possible because in 1896 she’d also discovered and named (with French physicist Henri Becquerel) the property of radioactivity, a word that first appeared in the Curies’ announcement of polonium, and again just months later, while unveiling radium.
But young Marya Sklodowska was never going to make these discoveries, and go on to be the only person to win two Nobel prizes in different disciplines – physics (1903) and chemistry (1911) – by staying in Russian-occupied Poland.
It was the invitation to Paris to share an apartment from her elder sister Bronya, a doctor who had married an expat Polish medico and set up a practice there, that changed everything. In November 1891, as one of 23 women in a class of nearly 2000 men, she enrolled in the Sorbonne’s Faculté des science. Two years later, again at the top of her class, she was awarded her degree in science.
On enrolment, Marya had given her name as Marie Sklodowska, beginning the Gallic transformation that culminated in 1895 when she fell in love with, and married, physicist Pierre Curie.
Sobel weaves the scientific and the personal together seamlessly. The physics of the late 1890s and early 1900s was, for the Curies and many others, a period of revolutionary discovery, painstaking hard grind and flashes of theoretical brilliance. Brilliance put to the test by ingenious experiment, and the inspired interpretation of counter-intuitive results.
Trying to explain radioactivity with no real concept of the structure of the atom tested minds as flexible as Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Soddy and Becquerel (Nobel laureates all), and Curie exchanged results and ideas with every one of them, along with Albert Einstein and later, Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi. Heady company indeed, and obviously, almost exclusively male. Sobel’s book has several photographs of international congresses of the physics elite, with Marie Curie sitting at centre in the front row – one woman shining through in a bewhiskered world of wonder and wizardry.
Shining? Well, it wasn’t until the damage was done that the likes of Marie Curie and her colleagues began to understand how dangerous their fascinating work really was. The lovely glow that suffused her labs for decades was almost certainly the cause of the aplastic anaemia which eventually killed her in 1934, aged 66.
Sobel’s book is a beautifully written and elegantly structured tribute to the life and work of the pioneering woman who not only transformed modern physics, but worked tirelessly to expand the opportunities for other brilliant females to flourish, continue her work, and pursue their own unique dreams.
The Elements of Marie Curie should be on the required reading list for every high school science student in the land. And not just the girls.
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