A fan letter from Albert Einstein to Marie Curie launched a lifelong friendship between two of the most famous scientists of the 2oth century.
“Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say,” Einstein began. A few sentences later, he went on, “I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels.”
At the time, Einstein had just become a full-fledged physics professor at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Curie was a Nobel laureate in the middle of a media firestorm. She had just won her second Nobel Prize, but the French tabloids had also just published the torrid details of an affair between Curie and a married colleague, physicist Paul Langevin. And the public were more interested in the scandal than the science.
“I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling,” wrote Einstein, who had met Curie and Langein at a scientific conference in Brussels, Belgium just before news of the affair hit the Paris press. He described the tabloid’s readers as a “rabble” of “reptiles,” and advised Curie, “If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.”
Curie had already been a controversial figure just by being a woman who not only worked in physics, but made important discoveries and ran her own prestigious (if not exactly safe) laboratory. November 1911 debacle wasn’t Curie’s first time in the public eye: the French Academy of Sciences had recently turned down her application to join, a decision which came after months of public debate and fierce criticism of Curie in the press.
With a 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics in hand, Curie sounds like the sort of candidate who should have been able to write her own ticket to any scientific instutition in the world — but in 1911, the French Academy of Sciences had never admitted a woman into its ranks. Besides that, Curie may have lived in Paris, but she had been born in Poland. She lost her bid by two votes to Eduoard Branly, who had made a name for himself for his research on wireless telegraphs and radio signals (but who never won a Nobel Prize).
And as if being a woman in the almost exclusively male realm of physics research didn’t make her controversial enough, now she had slept with a married colleague — and carried on such a lengthy and blatant affair that the couple had rented a secret apartment in Paris for themselves.
In his November 1911 letter, Einstein described Langevin and Curie as “real people with whom one feels priveleged to be in contact.” Einstein, of course, eventually ended up divorcing his first wife after an affair he started in 1912 (with his cousin), and under the divorce settlement, the money from Einstein’s 1921 Nobel Prize went to the first Mrs. Einstein.
Curie and Einstein remained close friends until her death in 1934. Their meeting at the scientific conference in Brussels back in 1911 might have been the begin of that friendship, but it’s likely that Einstein’s letter of support in the midst of the scandal over her affair with Langevin cemented it. And the postscript on that otherwise deeply personal letter is peak science nerd friendship:
“P.S. I have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in Planck’s radiation field,” Einstein added, almost as an afterthought. “My hope that this law is valid in reality is very small, though.”
