"Marie Curie's 1911 Nobel Prize win, her sec­ond, for the dis­cov­ery of radi­um and polo­ni­um, would have been cause for pub­lic cel­e­bra­tion in her adopt­ed France, but for the near­ly simul­ta­ne­ous rev­e­la­tion of her affair with fel­low physi­cist Paul Langevin, the fel­low stand­ing to the right of a 32-year-old Albert Ein­stein in the above group pho­to from the 1911 Solvay Con­fer­ence in Physics."
"The fires of radi­um which beam so mysteriously...have just lit a fire in the heart of one of the sci­en­tists who stud­ies their action so devot­ed­ly; and the wife and the chil­dren of this sci­en­tist are in tears.... -Le Jour­nal, Novem­ber 4, 1911 There's no deny­ing that the affair was painful for Langevin's fam­i­ly, par­tic­u­lar­ly his wife, Jeanne, who sup­plied the media with incrim­i­nat­ing let­ters from Curie to her hus­band."
Marie Curie won a second Nobel Prize in 1911 for the discovery of radium and polonium, but the announcement coincided with revelation of an affair with physicist Paul Langevin. She attended the 1911 Solvay Conference in Brussels and was the sole woman in the group photograph. The press prioritized scandal over scientific accomplishment, publishing sensational language that compared scientific obsession to romantic passion. Langevin's family suffered, and his wife Jeanne provided incriminating letters to the media. A furious crowd gathered outside Curie's home and antisemitic papers falsely labeled her Jewish while timelines were altered to imply impropriety.
Read at Open Culture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]