Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - How Marie Curie’s Genius Shaped Science | Dava Sobel [Ep. 478]

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 How did Marie Curie go from being rejected by the French Academy to winning two Nobel Prizes?  In this episode of Into The Impossible, Dava Sobel, author of “The Elements of Marie Curie,” takes us on a journey through Curie’s life, from having an angry mob outside her house to making revolutionary discoveries that would change the course of history.  Dava Sobel is an acclaimed author with a particular talent for telling the stories of historical figures in science and highlighting the human elements behind their groundbreaking achievements. Through Sobel’s incredible storytelling, we gain insight into the resilience and brilliance of one of history’s most iconic figures.  Join us as we explore how Marie Curie’s legacy still shines today! — Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro 00:26 Marie Curie’s scandal and public backlash in 1911 02:07 Her wartime efforts creating mobile X-ray units 04:28 Judging a book by its cover 07:40 Marie Curie’s work on magnetism  09:52 Explaining the names of the chapters 17:14 Curie’s success in breaking gender barriers 20:22 Dangerous misconceptions surrounding radium 23:10 Marie and Pierre Curie’s work  29:15 The distinctions between physics and chemistry  30:54 Galileo’s daughter and the human side of scientists  42:26 Galilean moons and solving the longitude problem  45:02 The Pope’s argument  50:46 What’s next for Dava Sobel  56:37 Outro — Additional resources:  ➡️ Learn more about Dava Sobel: 📚 The Elements of Marie Curie: https://a.co/d/gEyX6qI  💻 Website: https://www.davasobel.com/ 📚 Galileo’s Daugther: https://a.co/d/fVkwQLW ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best heavyweight in the world, Frances Ngano versus Felipe Lenz. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. There's widespread misogyny even now.

There's a general belief that women just don't do science. Marie was certainly not the first. She was never the only. She didn't want to be. And her failure to get into the French Academy of Sciences, they themselves said immutable tradition. That's what kept her out. And it was an embarrassment.

Dave, a thank you so much for finally, we got together after years and years of trying to organize it. Yes, we did it. And I'm happy to be with you. Talk about the time in 19, in 1911 when a crowd gathered outside her door shouting, foreign woman and husband stealer. And perhaps, Deva, if you could explain,

the connection between that and the rehabilitation of her image, thanks to x-ray machines. By 1911, she was five years a widow. And a close friend of hers and her husbands, and other physicist named Paul Langevin had been confiding in her about his unhappy marriage. And their conversations turned into a love affair. It seems she really thought that he would leave his wife,

a mistake that many women have made in history, but he did not leave his wife. And letters between them got into the hands of his wife, wife's family, and then were leaked to a newspaper and published with scandalous headlines, a romance in the laboratory. And because she was a foreigner, she was Polish, married to a Frenchman and doing her revolutionary work in France, so a mob actually formed outside her house. and she was rescued by a close colleague of hers, her chief of operations in the laboratory, who took her and her two children to a safe place. And the connection with the x-ray machine is actually quite unexpected to me, yes.

X-rays were discovered the year before the uranic rays that Marie Curie investigated for her doctoral. dissertation. And when the First World War broke out, she immediately realized that this would be the first time it would be possible to X-ray wounded soldiers. She got someone to give her a car. She didn't even know how to drive yet, but she was determined to do this. She outfitted the car with portable X-ray equipment and just started driving around first to hospitals where they were wounded soldiers, but eventually to the front lines, to anywhere where there was a field hospital that needed X-ray equipment. And although X-rays had been around for a while, they were not really in common use, especially at these outposts. So her first job there would be to convince the doctors

that this was actually useful. They were very quickly convinced, as you can imagine. And so she was constantly involved going places, setting up x-ray equipment that could be left at a field hospital. She outfitted 19 of these mobile units over the course of the war. She was inspirational to the Army. They were also outfitting vans, which they called Petit Curie in her honor. and she started a course for French women to become X-ray technician. So this is during the war. It was a six-week crash course.

You learned all about electricity, X-ray theory and practice, and human anatomy. And then off you would go in one of these vans or to one of these field hospitals. 150 women went through that training program. This revived her reputation. to say the least. Among scientists, her reputation was never injured. In fact, Einstein immediately came to her defense to rail against all the salacious reports in the press and say, how can the rabble be toying with you this way? We were talking just before I hit record about this magnificent cover that your publisher did, and they've been so kind to connect us together.

And this book has this title and subtitle and this eerie image. So, could you please explain the title and the subtitle and the cover art as well, please? The title, the elements of Marie Curie, is a little play on words because she did discover two elements. So there are those elements. But then it's elements of her life story with an emphasis on the women she mentored in her laboratory. So those are also the elements of her life. That was the genesis of the title. And then the subtitle emphasizes that focus on women, the glow of radium, which was something that Maria and Pierre Curie found enchanting during their research, that they could go to the lab at night

and their containers of active material would be glowing in the dark. And it was that material that extended the new science of radioactivity and put her in a position to be an employer, not just a researcher, but someone who could make opportunities for others come real. And the glowing cover image is that meant to, The image, yes. I'm thrilled with the cover image. So it uses a very familiar photo of Madam Keri, but then doctors one side of it to make it look almost like an x-ray, which is a very important element of her life, her association with x-rays. and it has an eerie, glowing feeling that something bad is going to come out of all of this,

even though it was wonderful. But not the book itself. It's noted frequently online that Marie Curie's laboratory notebooks are still radioactive, and they're considered too dangerous to handle without protective gear. But fear not, dear reader, this book is perfectly safe, and as opposed to harming you will cause your brain to grow in ways. unthought of. Did you ever interact with those notebooks? Did you ever, you know, wear the productive gear and make your way over to the Bibliotech National in Paris?

My research for this book coincided with the pandemic. So my plans to go to Paris were immediately thwarted. And I did everything online. So you can actually read those notebooks online. You can even read her draft letters, her private journals. It's a remarkably rich resource. I was very pleasantly surprised that not being able to go there didn't keep me from really seeing her materials. Right. Of course, her name is known also in physics for her work on magnetism, which you touch on in the book. I rank, you know, her discoveries as kind of, you know, unparalleled in many ways.

And the fact that, as you point out, she's one of those rare scientists who gave prestige to the Nobel Prize. First of all, it was very new. It was only she won the third one, basically, second or third one. And there was some controversy we can get into that. But as a scientist, she made so many contributions. You know, obviously radium and all the radiological work she did. But do you think that overshadows her work in magnetism? So this finger puppet, which I'll send you tonight, you know, and has a mass.

magnet on. So you can put it on your refrigerator. But I will not. It's not because of her work on magnetism, right? Just as a magnet. Even Gallo, Gallo wrote some books on magnetism too. But tell me about her work on magnetism and her lesser known, quote unquote, work among the public, at least, not among scientists, of course. The magnetism work was early. While she was a graduate student at the Sorbonne, one of her professors got her an outside assignment so she could earn a some money. And it was work for the French steel industry. They were interested in which recipes for steel would result in truly permanent magnets. And so she did this research. She was given about 40 types of steel then being produced, all with a trade secret composition. And she

tested them all and made recommendations of the ideal formulation for steel, and also suggestions on the treatment of the finished product, so that it would be as permanent a magnet as possible. And that was published. She was paid for her work, and she was recognized for it. But I think the radioactivity were just very quickly overshadowed that so that you almost never hear about it. So the chapter names in the book are, you know, hints at elements. They are elements. Yeah, they are elements and they're also women's names. We talk about a particular one and, you know, for example, chapter six, Yuzini, and her subchapter heading epigraph title is Radio Tellerium.

How did you come to choose these? I mean, there's so many, 28 chapters, not all women, but mostly. How did you come to choose them? And is there a particular one that stands out as, you know, as especially meaningful to you or perhaps to Marie? The names of the chapters are the names of the people who helped her or whom she helped. So the first three chapters are Manja, which is her nickname in Polish. And then, Marie, which is the name she chose when she was finally able to go to Paris, to go to school, because in Warsaw where she was born, women were barred from university by the Russian authorities. It was under Russian control at that time. So chapter two is Marie. And then chapter three is Madame Curie, because by then she has decided to stay in Paris and marry Pierre. But all the other titles are other people, and they are the people who come into her life as her story goes on.

The elements relate to what is happening in that chapter. So in the one you chose, Eugenie, Fetis was one of her students when she was teaching at an academy for female teachers. She taught physics at this academy. And Eugenie not only went on to become a physics teacher and also earned a doctorate in physics, but was eventually director of the school. But at that time, Eugenie was her student and was also babysitting for one of her children. And Radio Tullurium was a supposed element proposed by another scientist who claimed that polonium didn't exist, but this material was an important new element. So she had to prove that Radio Tullurium really was Pellonium,

and since she had found it first, the name Pallonium should stick. Do you think any of that was driven by jealousy? The desire to attack somebody often in science as a scientist is almost as motivational as the desire for discovery? I don't think he meant to do anything like that. Not that those things didn't go on. It was so hard then. The traces of materials that they had to work with, you couldn't even get a spectrum on polonium for years.

So to say this is one element and this is another one was murky. Their sense of what was going on was just growing over time at the beginning. No one had any idea what these uranic rays. coming out of uranium could be. Even the notion of the atom wasn't totally accepted, let alone subatomic particles. Right. And that's something that's always kind of puzzled me as a, you know, professional physicist is what was the, you know, impact, not on the field of nuclear physics, but really on quantum mechanics. It's almost as if, you know, today everyone wants a theory of everything, but we don't even have a so-called grand unified theory. And they kind of discovered nuclear physics before we

understood atomic physics. That wouldn't really be discovered for 20 years after, you know, certainly their major work in, you know, in the transuranic regime. So how did it influence or did it influence, you know, strong nuclear force and, say, subatomic and nuclear physics? And how, if any, was that stymied by the fact that, you know, historically, we didn't discover nuclear physics until much, much later? And it, you know, did their work play a major role in the development of, say, nuclear physics itself? I think the prevailing theory is that Rutherford, who got interested in Uranic rays at the same time as the Curies, that he's really the one who carried it into the atom.

He was the first one to realize the basic correct structure of the atom. And then it was in his laboratory that the neutron was discovered. So he gets a lot more credit. What the curies were doing was first seeking other sources of this new type of radiation and then actually manufacturing the elements because it took a ton of ore to get a fraction of a gram of anything. So this was tremendously labor intensive. And Rutherford wasn't doing that. The other kind of occupational hazard, shall we say, was, of course, the danger of working with these materials, which really wasn't...

It was nowhere new at the beginning. You would have thought that they would have known because they right away were talking about how their hands got burned, the skin peeled off. And then Pierre actually did an experiment of intentionally creating a burn on his arm and published a report of how long it took to heal. So the medical community jumped on that because if radium destroyed tissue, then it could be used to destroy cancerous tissue, which it was. And because radium became the cure for cancer, that was another development that burnished Marie's reputation as a great humanitarian. And I think also that parallels the story of atomic fission,

as well as fusion later on, also with huge contributions from women, mostly unsung, but including our own Maria Gepart Mayor here at E.C. San Diego. But the kind of confusing thing to me, I guess, was, as you say, that people didn't recognize it because early on, Rentgen, you know, William Wynchon's wife, Bertha, I think her name was Bertha, you know, she had the first ever x-ray, she saw, you know, her bones and her wedding, and she said, I have seen my death. And as you point out, you know, she went on to X-rays, but not to save many people. And neither of them died. I mean, Pierre, who knows when he would have died, but he was killed tragically in an accident. I don't think you can spoil. I'm always worried about spoilers and books. No, no, I think it's well known. I think people know that. This is how her whole position happened because of his death and the remarkable decision on the part of the university to give her control of the laboratory.

his course in physics. So that made her the only woman in the world in that rarefied position. And that's what drew women from all over to her. And the fact that women could be drawn to her and become her protégés and she could mentor them, I mean, that is also somewhat surprising, right? Because it seemed like the society, you know, although probably more illuminated than America at that time, maybe even still to this day. Who now? I don't know. We're not going to get into politics.

We never talk politics here. But the point is, you know, how is it possible that, you know, that they wouldn't have recognized that and that other countries wouldn't have recognized, hey, this is a competitive advantage. We're missing out on 50% of our population. They can do just as much as men in the laboratory. You know, why were people so slow to adopt this? I mean, Herschel, as you point out in Glass Universe, I mean, Caroline, she was the first, you know,

real female scientist. That was almost 200 years before Marie, right? So why were people so slow on the uptake? There's widespread misogyny even now. There's a general belief that women just don't do science. Marie was certainly, she's the most famous, but she was not the first. She was never the only. She didn't want to be.

And her failure to get into the French Academy of Sciences, which I think you alluded to, they themselves said immutable tradition. That's what took her out. And it was an embarrassment. She was the country's highest. it's already on that topic. But there is good news. You know, I'm always thinking about my favorite subject in the universe, Deva, which is me.

So there's only one way which I have excelled, exceeded Marie, and that's I got to lecture at the Royal Institution last summer. And I did in front of my wife and my daughters and sons. She went with Pierre. He lectured because women were not allowed to. Do you think she was a better scientist than he was? Does it matter? They were a team.

They were. But, of course, she went on to even exceed and win the only. the second scientific Nobel Prize without his assistance or whatever. And it was reputed that the first Nobel Prize that she won, she was originally not intended to win it, actually. Well, they'd been nominated as a couple each year. And the year she won, for some reason, her name was not put forward with his. So when he heard about that, P. Pierre said, we've done this work together.

And if I'm nominated it, it would need to be with her as a team. Yeah, it seems like that would be the only way that someone would turn down a Nobel Prize in physics. I think other Nobel Prizes have been rejected in peace, which it turns out, I think I read in the book, that Eve, her daughter, her husband won the Peace Prize in the 60s or something. That's incredible. I mean, their legacy. One of her daughters won the Nobel Prize with her Jolet. How do you say Joliet? or Jelio, Curie.

And then, obviously, her husband. And this is just like a royal family. Well, they have, I think, five. Five, yeah. That's just incredible. It's a dynasty. And so Marie's grandchildren, who are both scientists and are both still living, they're both in their 90s, and their children are scientists.

So the dynasty continues. I mean, the book is also about society, not just the attitude and mores, you know, of, you know, French society and scientific society, but also the impact on society as a whole, again, not just because, you know, she was the first woman to get to this level of stardom, but also the sort of, you know, tragic and terrifying aspects of her work, similar to the, you know, kind of confluence of events of the, you know, World War II era and the Manhattan Project. Talk about this mixed feeling of, you know, sometimes we associate, I mean, you look at Tony Fauci or You know, someone talking about a pandemic or so, but they often get targeted, you know, for a probation or, you know, or hostility.

Was there any of that? Like, how dare you unleash this, this force, you know, that is so dangerous or at least in the minds of people at the time, lay people was this malevolent, potentially, you know, a fatal force that she had unleashed? She never advocated using this material commercially. The real tragedy began in the 1920s with the young women who were painting watch dials and instrument dials and were using a paint that actually contained radium and they were told to bring the paint brush to a point by putting it in their mouths and pursing their lips as they pulled the paint brush through. So this, because radium is similar to calcium in its chemistry, lodged in their bones, their teeth fell out, their jaws came apart, and they died. It was horrific. At the same time, radium was seen as a great boon to health and was actually in a health drink called Rathor that you could drink to be healthy, improve your sexual prowess.

And there were people drinking this stuff. And if you drank enough of it, it killed you. So the discovery was made in 1898. These horror stories didn't surface till the 1920s. So there was a long period when, yes, it was dangerous, it was hot to handle, but it was doing a lot of good all over the world. And that's mostly the focus, the way people, saw her. Yeah, I mean, I remember hearing from my father-in-law that not only would they use

x-rays to treat acne back in the 60s, 50s and 60s, but you would actually have your foot size measured for shoes using, you know. I remember those machines. Yeah. It's so terrifying, right. And you would see your foot on the screen. Talk about their working relationship. My wife and I, thank God, we don't work together. I don't think I could survive. Nor could she, more importantly. but do they have, you know, complementary skills? Were they basically two peas in the pot? How did you view them in terms of their, you know, collaboration, not just scientifically, but they were also businessmen and women, were they not?

They got along beautifully. They were together all the time and seemed to really enjoy that. And when they won their Nobel Prize in 1903, one of their major complaints was that their privacy was invaded. They had this ramshackle laboratory, but it was theirs, and they were working undisturbed. Well, that was all over now. They couldn't get anything done and resented it mightily. And they did have different tastes. When Marie began the arduous work to gather enough radium to be able to determine its atomic weight,

Pierre felt that that was not his kind of work, and he focused on other things. He kept doing other studies. So they complimented each other. They worked together. They certainly shared ideas. They shared lab notebooks. They both would write in the notebooks, so they were obviously working together. No, they didn't have the same personalities. One of the things Pierre had was a complete commitment. to her being able to work. And his father shared that, and as a widower, was willing to move in with them and take care of the children so that she could work. And even now, child care is a major problem for women scientists. Yeah, luckily, we've been able to kind of expunge most of that, at least here at UC San Diego. We've had a proud tradition with Margaret Burbage as our founding. Director of the Center for Astrophysics here. And now Allison Coyle is a director as the chair of the newly formed astronomy and astrophysics.

Department here, I think we have more than 50% women and the faculty here. And, of course, our physics department's named after Marie Gepart Mayor. So there were two Marie's in quick succession. You know, that won the Nobel Prizes, but not quickly, 60 years later. Not quickly. Talk about their industrial collaboration. You know, they work with a society general de produce. So Pierre was an inventor, and he had a few scientific instruments that were being commercially produced.

So they turned over a lot of the early breakdown of the ore to that society. And so they had a business relationship with the society. Later, they were approached by someone who made drugs for malaria, who wanted to now begin producing radium salts, and he took over the production and was really, was doing only that. They were a sideline for the first commercial affiliate, but with the radium salts, that was a real partnership. And so they were able to get materials because they had this producer. And he was able to claim affiliation with them, which was the seal of great approval. How important was financial remuneration to them? Did they lack for funding?

I mean, they won 70,000 gold francs for the Nobel Prize. I don't know what that. Then they didn't lack anymore. But before that, they did lack. And she won a couple of small grants from the Academy of Sciences, even though she was a woman. And so they would get by on things like that. And they were both working. So she was teaching at this academy for female teachers, and he was teaching at an industrial school.

And he didn't get his university appointment until after they'd won the Nobel Prize. Now, reaction wasn't fully uniformly, universally delighted, I would say, even in the scientific community. And you point out that the reaction by some of the luminaries like Mendelev himself was quite critical. And I always thought that was because he never won a Nobel Prize, which is kind of striking. I mean, Gustav Dellen won a Nobel Prize for a gas regulation system for buoys and lighthouses, which, you know, I use all the time in San Diego. It's very common to have a lighthouse, and you just have to use it to navigate up the coast. But do you think there was some jealousy regarding attention from Mendel? What do you think was behind his objection?

Oh, it was the transmutation of the elements. Radioactivity showed that one element turned into another. He couldn't accept that. That just completely went against his concept of what an element was. And with their collaboration, did they have any connection to the, the so-called New World. I know Rutherford, I think, was in McGill. Is that right? He was in Canada at first, yes. So he came from New Zealand, went to England, and then a wonderful teaching opportunity opened for him in Canada with a phenomenally well-equipped

physics laboratory. And that's why he took it, even though he was going to the provinces. And at McGill, he took as his first graduate student, a young woman who had finished first in her class, was very, very skilled at physics experiments. And he trained her to work with him in this new field. And then she went to work for Madam Curie. Was the distinction between physics and chemistry? I'm often impressed, actually, that there was this notion, because it was transmutation, and because it was chemistry that was doing it, but it was actually occurring at the nuclear level.

I'm kind of impressed that they were awarded the physics Nobel Prize, but then later she won the Chemistry Nobel Prize, right? And Rutherford won the chemistry Nobel. Right, he never won't. That was ridiculous. Right, Martston and Geiger, yeah. The Nobel Committee had transformed him into a chemist, and he joked about that.

Well, now my, you know, chat GPT can win a Nobel Prize in physics, too. No, not quite. I mean, we did have AI winning a lot of Nobel Prize, this year, but that's besides the point. Was it really appreciated, you know, the relationship between, you know, the chemistry of the nucleus or the physics of the nucleus and chemistry? Or were those really seen as disparate, you know, sciences as they are now? I can't, you know, set foot in a chemistry lab without, you know, injuring myself and others. It's very different from experimental physics. So how are they viewed back then? They really came together.

You had to know about both. And if you didn't, you formed a collaboration. So when Marie and Pierre wanted to break down this ore to get at, which she predicted, would be one and probably two new elements, they called an chemist to help them develop a system for digesting this ore. And Bertram Boltwood at Yale, who was a chemist, collaborated with Rutherford. So there was a lot of that marriage of physics. and chemistry. I like to think we can pivot now to Galileo's daughter, which is an extremely meaningful book, just celebrated, I think, 25 years, right, since you published it, the first edition of it. How do you see these two individuals, Marie Curie and Galileo himself in some sense?

These are both love stories, you know, not only a love story, but their unique descriptions, as said, the beginning of scientists as human beings, which we don't often hear about, right? I know, and this really troubles me. I've been noticing this most of my life, the way scientists, especially when I was young, scientists would always be portrayed as men in lab coats without any social skill, weird, socially inept and weird. And then if you read articles about science and anything was said about the scientist, there would be an emphasis on. some quirky thing that was maybe irrelevant to the research or the story, but that furthered this idea that scientists were not really human beings. And I just don't get it, and I've been fighting it for 50 years. Scientists are extremely passionate about what they do. That's all to the good and sometimes to the bad. There's a lot of skullduggery goes on, has always gone on. Galileo had huge fights with contemporaries. So yes, they are human beings. It shouldn't be

a surprise, but it is. Even it's still, it's still a surprise. I've had people tell me that, you know, with the humanity of the character that came through as though what, you know, the, the Martian nature, I don't know. Like I said, I'm just trying to show what they really are people. I think people. want to assume that scientists are so otherworldly, intellectually, robots, walking Wikipedia's. And sometimes that's like, so that they can be relieved of the obligation to pursue the science. To understand anything about it. Yeah. If you understood those things, you must be a different species. I'm fascinated by Galileo. Actually, yeah, wear this shirt almost every day. Yeah, that's not my book. That's just book.

I'm testing my friend Greg. He says he listened to the podcast. He got me the shirt for my birthday. and he knows I'm a Galileo file. I actually have the honor of doing the first ever audiobook of Galileo's with my friend Carlo Rovelli and Fabiola Gianate. She read the introduction, Galileo's introduction. Frank Wilcheck read Einstein's introduction to the book. So we made an audiobook in 2022

because I was doing a project on Galileo and I was like, oh, I love audiobooks. I listen to your books on audiobooks. I listen to my own books on audiobooks. And I was like, oh, you know, let me just download the audio book. And it doesn't exist. So we made it from the Stillman Drake translation. And it was one of the highlights of my life to have my, you know,

he goes author Galileo and then Brian Keating. So I read the part of Sagredo. Carlo Rovelli read the part of Salviati. And my friend Lucio Picciillo, mentor from graduate school, Professor Manchester, he read part of some, yeah. So now that book I've always, you know, pointed out is a real testimony to the fact that, again, scientists or human beings. We are not these robotic walking wikipedias.

And in fact, a lot of the arguments that Galileo puts forth in the dialogue were wrong, especially the theory of the tides. And, you know, I've got my finger puppet here. You know, don't worry. I'm not going to, you know, turn on my friend Galileo. But he had as many blunders almost as he had brilliancies in Einstein, too. What do you make of the fact that we do tend to focus, you know, primarily on successes? And really it's said that, you know, a scientist only needs to be right once to have a

career, but a normal person can only be wrong once in their life. So how do you make it? Is it hagiography? Do we just put these people on such high pedestals that we ignore the fact that they were right, perhaps for the wrong reason? One of the things I've found is that there are names that stay popular no matter what, and there are stories that keep being told, even though they're not true and you try to tell people what really happened. I had that with the Harvard women, this famous tale about how Edward Pickering, who was the head of the observatory, got angry at his stupid assistants and shouted, my maid could do a better job. Well, I bet my life that never happened. So you know the story of Sur Marie Chaleste? I wasn't her original name, though, right? That was her. Her original name was

Virginia Galilei. Galileo also wasn't the greatest of marital exemplars, was he not? He had mistresses. Was Vincenzo's mother the same as Maria Chaleste or Celeste? Yes. All three of his children had the same mother. We know almost nothing about Archangela. Is that her name?

I thought of that for my daughter's name, but I thought she'd get mad at it. Yeah, that's a little much. We called her something now. Yes, there's less known because she didn't write any letters. So the beauty of the eldest child were these magnificent letters that she had written to him and that he had saved and that somehow survived. And those letters I did see in person at the library in Florence. And that that was a thrill. Letters make me simultaneously thrilled and are extremely enervating because the way that she wrote as a relatively uneducated, you know, a person of the,

of the 1600s is so in excess of what anything I could be capable of or even, you know, my colleagues in the literature department. It's, what have we lost? How is it that these, she wrote beautifully, yeah. And he was an amazing author. I mean, he, but how did she come to be such a phenomenal writer? For one thing, she was his daughter. She saw all of his work. She copied a lot of it for him. And if you got to be a nun, in those days, you had to be able to read. You were educated, and she had been in a convent from age 13 as a student and for safekeeping. So you couldn't take your vows until you were 16. But many of the nuns wrote plays and poetry. If you got married, you were mostly having

children and probably dying young because the death rate from childbirth at that time was about what the death rate from breast cancer is now. Life was hard for everybody. Were they both committed or committed or were they both, did they both become nuns because they were considered illegitimate because their parents weren't married effectively? Pretty much, yeah. What was the best thing to do with them? And also, what was the safest place with them because he started to get into trouble when they were just entering their teens. So to put them in a convent was a very normal practice. Probably half the girls in Florence were put in convents.

Not everybody got married. And it was very important to him to have the girls together in the same convent, which was against the law in Florence. But he had friends in high places. and he finessed that. He was simultaneously incredibly brilliant and worldwide, but also incredibly impolitic. I point out in some of the videos I've done just about him,

that he could be so brilliant and wise, again, making brilliant blunders, maybe that's deroguer for true geniuses, or even that their blunders are brilliant, like Einstein's cosmological constant, you know, even that is Nobel-worthy, like allegedly, considered it a blunder. I know Gamov said it wasn't, but he made up the story that he called it his biggest blunder. But anyway, the point that I'm trying to make is, you know, he, he realized that he was allowed to publish a Cedarius nuncius, and that contained the seeds of Copernican,

you know, theory and thought, but it was written in Latin, unlike the Dialogico, which is obviously written in Italian. What made him think that he could get away with not only studying it, but teaching it, which was done in the vernacular of the common folk, which was Italian. How could someone so bright realize that he had the special exemption? He got away with murder somewhat in his first work of the astronomical telescope, and then kind of forget it for 30 years and then that lead to his downfall. I think he felt he had a friend in the Pope. He really didn't perceive how dangerous that could be and didn't appreciate it,

didn't appreciate how the Pope would react to the presentation of his, the Pope's own ideas. A tragic misunderstanding. And we still think of the name, and even with my two Italian colleagues, Carlo Rovelli and Licho Petrillo, you know, that Simplicio does sound like Simpleton, but some scholars like Mario Livio said, oh, it's not really that. What was it? What's a real story? It was a scholar named Simplicius.

So, yeah. I have a second edition of Galileo's book on the military compass. That cost me a good fraction of the advance of my first book. But original first editions are, there's only a couple left, I think. And they're almost like Gutenberg Bible level and cost because they're so rare from 1601, I think. But how is it possible that, you know, that these letters survived? I mean, yes, I'm sure he kept them and it made his cockles of his heart glow or whatever they say. But how could you find me?

How were these discovered? Her letters were with his papers, so they were safe. His letters to her have all disappeared. And when I read the letters in Florence, they were bound together in a handmade book that also contained letters from his mother, his sisters, and the wife of the Tuscan ambassador. It was letters from women. The letters, you know, it also makes me think about his, you know, her mother. Do we know much about their mother? No, on the birth certificate just said she was Marina of Venice.

Obviously, there is a great deal of similarity between these two books in Curie and Galileo's daughter, but not the least of which is this unyielding love story, which, again, is so rare and so beautifully and tenderly told in both subjects. Parents and their children. Yeah, Marie's letters to her daughters have been published as books. There are two books of their letters, and that was tremendously helpful to me. I'm very drawn to stories based on letters that people saved. That really isn't the basis of the Madame Curie book, but there's a lot of that in there, because her exchanges with her daughters really reveal her as a human being.

Another fascinating commonality or tie-in between another book on Longitude, your book Longitude, is this problem of, you know, of telling time. And there are stories, you know, perhaps apocryphal, but perhaps not, where, you know, Galileo was bored in church as, you know, I'm Jewish, but I spent a brief time as an altar boy in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Isn't it true that Galileo proposed the use of the moons of Jupiter, which he discovered, named after his patron? I point out we do that the opposite now. We don't call like some discovery an exoplanet, you know, the NSF, you know, the NSF exoplanet. We name it after the satellite or whatever.

But he named it after his benefactors, right? So he proposed that you could use those as a timepiece to solve, you know, the longitude problem. He wanted to name them, the Medici and moon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we call them the Galilean moon. But talk about what was his interest in solving, you know, the longitude problem. Was he interested in? Oh, absolutely.

That's how I got to him from longitude because he was one of the many people who tried to solve the problem. And when he discovered the moons of Jupiter, he thought he had solved the problem. And he based a means for determining longitude on observing the moons of Jupiter. But it was too hard to do it at sea. It was actually used on land, and it was used to redraw the map of France. There's a famous quip that the King of France saw this new map, and it was smaller. And he complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies. Getting back to the life of Sour, Maria Celeste, Celeste.

You know, she wasn't a scientist, but it's clear she, she, she, really did, you know, appreciate what he had done. And he, you know, kind of wrote for her as an audience. And I can't help but think after having read his works for 22 hours for this audio book, getting into his mind a little bit, that some of his prose was kind of refined, perhaps. I'm asking, if this is true, by his letters to her or is that, you know, a stretch. Well, I've never seen his letters to her. They, nobody has. It's only her side of the conversation. He had a beautiful prose style. I'm sure his letters to her reflected that.

If you read the letters on sunspots, which is the whole scientific discussion completely in letters, that's gorgeous too. The guy could write. Yeah, he certainly could. My favorite quote, of course, is when he's being kind of self-effacing or humble and he says, I have merely but opened a portal so that mine's more capable than mine can peer further than I have been able. to with my meager amenities of my mind. The guy had an ego, too, right? He was not some shrinking violent. No, not at all. The dialogue, which, which, you know, obviously people have this notion that he was tortured for science. Okay, so I've been to his... He's never tortured. Never tortured.

And I've been to his mansion, his villa outside of Florence and our Chetri. It's administered by the University of Italy at Florence. And it's a, it's a magnificent place. I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried would kill to spend a few days there, you know, as opposed to some detention center where he's at now. And to think about the vineyards and the, and he did, he wrote his final book, the discourse. And he got it published, you know, smuggled out to the Netherlands, as you point out, by a publisher that's more or less still in existence else of here, right? It's crazy. We wouldn't have had it without that. And you, you know, we think about him as his martyr for science. You certainly, you know, you know, put the myth to rest that he said, and yet it moves under his

breath. I mean, that was, that would be foolish. He even apparently, you know, years later would, would kind of invade against the Copernican model at some level. Well, he had to at that point. What is it about this myth, this, you know, tortured for science? I mean, Bruno was burned at the state. That's true. But he was kind of a jerk. He was a heretic. Yeah, he was a heretic. And he knew what he was getting into, Galileo, less so. But still, I think he felt that he could put in these things at the end, you know, it's kind of like the book of Ecclesiastes, you know, which is very negative about even, you know, belief in God at some level or questioning. And then at the end it says, but beyond all this, you know, believe in God, that's the whole point of life, you know, and it seems like at

the end when he tax on this whole thing that God could basically do whatever he wants, including make it seem that the sun is the center of the universe. How religious was he? Was he really a believing, you know, Catholic and practicing Catholic? That was the Pope's argument. You know, with that argument, you can't do science. Yes, right. Because whatever you find, well, maybe it isn't really that way. It just God makes it look that way. That was in Pope's belief.

But I do definitely feel that Galileo was a believing Catholic. And that was what really, I mean, I'm not Catholic either, but that was what interested me when I first learned of these letters and read one of them. and, you know, the idea that Galileo had two daughters who were nuns, that just floored me. And then I wondered what life was like for this young woman to be in a convent and to have her father on trial for heresy. So that's what drew me in happily to that story. And fortunately, I had studied Italian in college so I could actually read. the letters and use them as the basis.

As we wrap up, you do mention, you know, sort of that they did spend time after Galileo's trial. He did get to see his daughter. I mean, he did, was he there when she passed away? No. He was on his way home because he was detained in Siena. You mentioned that it seemed to Galileo, at least, that the discourse was superior, you know, quality or superior importance to science. And that was. his legacy. What do you make of that? We know him a lot for the dialogue and the Stedarius of course had on Neil deGrasse Tyson the week ago and he made another book called The Story Messure. So we don't think of the discourse typically. But is that wrong? Should we really

revere the discourse above all as he did seemingly? No shoulds. That was his opinion. And I think he felt that if he hadn't made the telescopic discoveries, then somebody else would have. whereas in the discourses, it all came out of his head. I think Jay Passacoff, the late great friend of mine and yours, Jay Passacov, told me that the same day that Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, there was an English astronomer who did the same thing, but kind of didn't publish it or something. It didn't make a big deal of it. And so, yes, we know it as. Yeah, and we know that several people invented the telescope. Yeah.

You couldn't get a patent on it because there were too many people who claimed to have invented it. And even, you know, his, as I say, his blunders were quite incredible. Even there is a, there's a rumor that Galileo even accidentally discovered Neptune. It's not a rumor. He drew diagrams of his observations. And something that he labeled a fixed star has since been shown to be the position of Neptune at that moment. So he saw it. He just didn't know what it was. was. So does that constitute a discovery? Well, it's serendipitous, right? I mean, we discovered the cosmic microwave background, didn't really know what it was. And then later on, the theories came about to explain it. And hopefully we'll continue to make many more discoveries. Last question, just as a nerd on

Galileo, you mentioned at the end of the book, that there was another, there was a third trialogue. You know, we should really call them trialogs that Gallo was working on, I think he may have explained it to Torcelli or somebody. But talk about that there's some unpublished you know, third, I would love to take this on. If you know, if you want another co-author on a book about Galileo, I would love that, David. But tell me more. What about this final unfinished manuscript?

He was thinking of reviving those characters again. I don't think there's a whole lot to it. No, it's our next book. What is your next book? I know you're going, you're still postpartum, as you said. Postpartum on. But tell me, what would you love to work on next? I'd like to find another story about women in science.

Or I would like to do my poet, my science, poetry anthology. Well, I'm very good friends with a Pulitzer Prize winner, Ray Armand Trout. Yes, she has contributed to my poetry column in Scientific America. Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. I didn't know that. She wrote a poem. She says it's inspired by me. Once about 10, 12 years ago, I got an email. And I get a lot of these, you know, Professor Keating. I've got some ideas about quantum mechanics or the theory of everything. You know, could I take you out for a coffee? And, you know, I'm like, I can buy my own coffee and I get six of these a week. And I said, oh, by the way, won the Pulitzer Prize last year. Okay, fine. We tracked that from the waistbin, and we've developed

a great friendship. She wrote this poem called Accounts, and it's allegedly inspired by me, and it won one of the best poems of 2012 in American poetry. Great. How nice. The both of you. Yes, we did co-teach a class called Poetry for Physicists, because there's too much physics for poets out there. We need physicists to develop a keen interest in poetry. There is a book, by the way, by Joseph Conlin. Have you read that yet? It's called Origins. I have it here somewhere. He writes a poetry book. He's a physicist, a string theorist in the UK, and he wrote a book about poetry as it applies to physics. I think he did submit a poem to me and then took it back to something. Something went on. Well, Dave, I have a tradition on this podcast.

It's named after the namesake of the center that I co-direct called the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human imagination. And it's his famous statement that the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. He said many things, including the name of podcast comes from Arthur C. Clark. Did you know that? No. Yeah. So there was an engineer at Apple named Vinnie Ticharelli in 2000. And he invented, you co-invented the iPod. And you know, the iPod, the original iPod had the circular eye-like thing on it. And it was white and gleaming like the pods in the Pod Bay Door in 2001 of Space Odyssey. But getting back to that quote, into The Impossible, what I want to ask you as a sort of a thought experiment, a Godunkin experiment, if you could go back

in time with a 20-year-old, 30-year-old Deva and spend 30 seconds with her, what advice would you give her, if any, to go into the impossible? Gosh, didn't I go there? Didn't I wind up getting to write these books that I couldn't have dreamed of? I was just lucky. What is your process like? Do you have a muse? Do you have the, what do you, how do you actually, you know, can I ask you your daily routine? When you're in the midst and you're in that, that muck and mire of writing a book as authors know, it's like sitting on glass and chewing barbed wire. I actually enjoy it. You do. No, a lot of writers say that they hate it. And I know that that's true. But it's not true of me. I mean, I certainly have terrible days when nothing goes right. And I can't put a sense. sentence together. But that's, that's not every day. And most of the time, it's really exciting to

try to learn about a subject to be able to write about it and to get close to characters I admire. I think if I didn't really love the people I was writing about, it might feel different. but I have chosen subjects I really admire and want to be with. And Madam Curie has, she was not only great companion during the pandemic, but her attitude about things, her commitment to action, to never just moping and complaining, no matter what happened. I find that so inspirational. I really do think about her every day.

I'm just grateful to have gotten to spend that much time in her company. Is there a danger when you have such affection for a character, whether living or dead, that maybe you won't portray them fully accurately? Sure. There's all sorts of danger in life. Well, Dave, this has been one of my favorite interviews of all time, and I look forward to it for so long, and it delivered on all my expectations. This book, another phenomenal contribution to your uvra, as the French may might say, the elements of Marie Curie, how the glow of radium lit a path for women in size, but also for men. Oh, yes, she had more men working for her than women. It's just surprising, again, because people don't think of women as scientists.

So to see that there were 45 women who worked at her lab, I thought that was an important story to tell. And also as an experimental physicist, unlike a theoretical physicist, they get a, get most of the attention, the Brian Greens, the Stephen Hawking's, the Mitchie O'Coccus. But being an experimentalist like myself, I'm not putting myself in the same categories as my beloved and your beloved Marie. But the point is, we have to be businessmen and women, too, because we have laboratory expenses, we have employees, we have supplies, we have travel, we have speech. You know, you could basically write down some string theory on the back of a napkin and publish

a napkin of some of my colleagues certainly have done. I'm not naming names. But the point is she was a businesswoman too. Oh, yeah. She was constantly agitating for bigger, better lab space. And she did manage to turn those appalling facilities into a world-renowned research institution. Yeah. And you think about the humans that are alive, you know, kind of overlapping, not quite overlapping with you and me, but who will be remembered in 500 years?

Certainly Galileo, certainly Marie Curie. And I just want to thank you for bringing these heroes of mine and millions of around the world to life as you only uniquely can do. Thank you so much, Deva. It's been such an honor and a treat. Delightful to be with you. Thanks again.