Marie Curie
From Philosopedia
Curie, Marie (Maria Sklodowska-Curie) (7 November 1867 - 4 July 1934)
A codiscoverer of radium, Marie Curie was the daughter of a Polish freethinker but was reared by a Catholic mother. She abandoned the Church before she was twenty, and her marriage with Pierre Curie was a purely civil ceremony because, she says in her memoir of him,
- Pierre belonged to no religion and I did not practice any.
The two were co-winners in 1903 of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and when in 1911 she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry she became the first person to have won two such prizes. Some in the Swedish Academy allegedly tried to persuade her not to accept the second Nobel Prize that they had just awarded her, but she accepted it just the same. Einstein described her thusly:
- Madame Curie is very intelligent, but has the soul of a herring [Häringseele in the German original], meaning that she is lacking in all feelings of joy and sorrow. Almost the only way in which she expresses her feeling is to rail at things she doesn’t like. And she has a daughter [Irène] who is even worse - like a Grenadier [an infantryman]. The daughter is also very gifted.
But, as pointed out in Susan Quinn’s Marie Curie: A Life, what Einstein did not know was that a few years before Einstein met her, Mme. Curie, then a widow, had a love affair with Paul Langevin, a French physicist who was married and had four children. The tabloid press printed the story, and at least five duels were provoked by the scandal, one of which involved Langevin himself.
When she died on the Fourth of July, 1934, Einstein remarked that she was, “of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.”
Her funeral, arranged by her two daughters, Irène and Eve, was purely secular. Eve wrote a biography of her mother, relating that all members of the gifted family were freethinkers. Their two daughters were Irène (Mme. Joliot) and Eve. Mme. Curie (1937), by her younger daughter, repeated that all the members of the family were rationalists. The elder daughter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with Fréderic Joliot-Curie, her husband, in 1935.
In 1995, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre were enshrined in France’s Pantheon, the 70th and 71st people who are buried there. Sophie Bertholet is also buried there alongside her husband, the renowned chemist Marcellin Bertholet, but Marie Curie, according to President Mitterand, is “the first lady in our history honored for her own merits.”
