The Soul of Genius by Jeffrey Orens

Author:Jeffrey Orens [Orens, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT Marie Curie’s Impossible Dream

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, informally termed the St. Louis World’s Fair, celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of America’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French. The event took place from April through December and, though nothing on the scale of the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, it attracted close to twenty million visitors to the heart of the United States. Two such guests were Henri Poincaré and Paul Langevin, the incomparable French mathematician and his young associate, who came to give presentations at the Congress of Arts and Sciences that was held in conjunction with the fair.

On September 22, in the physics section of the meeting’s agenda, Langevin was the first speaker. He would be followed by Ernest Rutherford, lecturing on radioactivity, certainly indicating Langevin was in rarefied scientific air. He gave a paper on the physics of electrons and how this theory applied to other scientific disciplines. J. J. Thomson had discovered the revolutionary particle known as the electron in the late 1890s and subsequently Langevin investigated the phenomenon himself as part of Thomson’s ongoing efforts at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory. In his lecture’s introduction, Langevin indicated that questions about the theory of electrons existed that needed answers, much like, as he put it in an early paragraph of his paper, a “New America, full of wealth yet unknown, where one can breathe freely, which invites all our activities, and which can teach many things to the Old World.”1 The metaphor was prescient concerning understandings yet to be developed about the atomic world, not the least of which would be depicting the coming collision of newborn quantum thought with classical physics theory.

Paul Langevin was a scientific talent steadily on the rise. Five years younger than Marie Curie, she had known him for many years before they would become lovers. Pierre Curie had been Paul’s respected, if not worshipped, professor and mentor at the EPCI in the mid-1890s. Langevin next studied at Cambridge under Thomson, then spent the first few years of the new century researching magnetism. He combined his studies on para-magnetism and temperature effects that Pierre Curie had uncovered with the electron theory he had learned under Thomson to reveal that the spinning motion of electrons caused the magnetic behavior that Curie had observed, an important physics breakthrough. He succeeded Pierre as an EPCI physics professor when Curie moved into his own professorship at the Sorbonne in 1905. During that period, Langevin explored a number of the topics that intrigued Einstein as well, resulting in Langevin’s unpublished view of the special relationship of mass and energy that led him to “the idea to associate a mass… to the energy of [quanta] or electrons,” for which Einstein was to become famous.2

Langevin had an inquisitive, imaginative mind paired with a caring character. He was tall and thin, with a combination of hair on his head that blended into a rather striking look. A tiny goatee under his lower lip was overwhelmed by

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