How Marie Curie’s Genius Shaped Science | Dava Sobel

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 took her out and it was an embarrassment Dava 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 1911 when a crowd gathered outside her door shouting foreign woman an husband stealer and perhaps Dava if you could explain the connection between that and the rehabilitation of her image thanks to x-ray machines by 1911 she was 5 years a widow and a close friend of hers and her husbands another physicist named Paul Lan had 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'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 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 curri 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 and 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 whether it 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 of 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 van which they called petite curri in her honor and she started a course for French women to become x-ray technicians 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 you how how can the Rabel 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 this Eerie image so could you please explain the the title and the subtitle and the cover art as well please the title The Elements of Marie cury 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 Marie and Pierre curri found enchanting during the 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 be the image yes I'm thrilled with with the cover image so it uses a a very familiar photo of Madame Cy 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 her association with x-rays and it has a 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 uh frequently online uh that Marie C'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 previously unthought of did you ever interact with those notebooks did you ever uh you know wear the productive gear and make your way over to uh to the bibliotech National Paris oh 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 from really seeing her materials right of course her name is known also in physics for her work on magnetism which 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 all the radiological work that she did but do you think that overshadows her work in in magnetism so this this mag uh this finger puppet which I'll send you tonight you know and has it has a magnet on it so you can put it on your refrigerator but I will not not because of her work on magnetism but has the magnet even G well galileia wrote some books on magnetism too but tell me about uh 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 what while she was a graduate student at the sorban one of her professors got her an outside assignment so she could earn 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 um you know hints at elements they are elements yeah they are elements and they're also women's name let talk about a particular one and you know for example chapter six e and her um her sub chapter heading um epigraph title is Radio tarium how did you come to choose the I mean there's so many 28 chapters um not all women but 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 Mar the names of the chapters are the names of the people who who helped her or whom she helped so the first three chapters are Mana which is her nickname in Polish and then uh Marie which is the name she chose when she was finally able to go to Paris to go to school because in warsa where she was born women were barred from University uh by the Russian authorities it was under Russian control at that time so chapter 2 is Marie and then chapter three is Madame cury because by then she has decided to stay in Paris and Mary 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 Eugene Fus was one of her students when she was teaching at an academy for female teachers she taught physics at this Academy and Eugene 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 uh euen was her student and was also babysitting for one of her children and radio torium was a supposed element proposed by another scientist who claimed that bonium didn't exist but this material was an important new element so she had to prove that radio torium really was polonium and since she had found it first the name polonium should stick do you think any of that was driven by jealousy and you know the desire to attack somebody often in science as a scientist is almost as 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 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 at over time at the beginning no one had any idea what this 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 you know kind of puzzled me as a you know professional physicist is is what was the you know impact not on the field of nuclear physics but but really on quantum mechanics it's 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 and that wouldn't really be discovered for 20 years after you know certainly their their major work in uh you know in the transuranic regime so how did it influence or or did it influence you know strong nuclear force and and say subatomic and nuclear physics and how if any was that styed by the fact that you know historically we didn't discover Nuclear Physics until much much later um 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 cues that he's really the one who carried it into the atom he was the first one to realized 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 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 lay labor intensive and Rutherford wasn't doing that the other kind of occupational hazard shall we say was was of course the you know the danger of working with these materials which really wasn't no one knew at the beginning you would have thought that they 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 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 parallel the story of atomic fion uh as well as Fusion later on also with huge contributions from women mostly unsung um but uh including our own Maria Gart mayor here EC San Diego but the kind of confusing thing to me I guess was as you say you know that people didn't recognize it because early on renin you know William William renan'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 and as you point out you know she went on to x-rays went on to save many people and none neither of them died I mean perer who knows when he would have died but but uh he was killed tragically in an accident I don't think you can spoil you know I'm always worried about spoilers and books I think it's well known that I think people know that this is how the whole her whole position happened because of his death and the remarkable decision on the part of the university to give her contr control of the laboratory and his course in physics so that made her the only woman in the world in that rarified 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 proteges and she could Mentor them I mean that is also somewhat surprising right because it seemed like the society you know although probably more um more illuminated than America at that time maybe even still to this day who knows 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 it and that other countries wouldn't have recognized hey this is a competitive Advantage we're missing out on 50% of our population uh they can do just as much as men in the laboratory you know why were people so slow to adopt this I mean hersel as you point out in glass univ I mean Caroline she was the first you know real female scientist that was almost 200 years before Marie right so 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 her out and it was an embarrassment she was the country's highest auor on that topic but there is good news you know I'm always thinking about my favorite subject in the universe daa 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 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 they were a team they were but of course she went on to even exceed and win the only you know second scientific Nobel Prize you know without without his uh assistance or whatever and it was reputed that the first Nobel Prize that she won she was originally not uh intended to win it actually and that well they'd been nominated as a couple each year and 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 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 I read in the book that Eve her daughter her her husband won the Peace Prize in the 60s or something that's incredible I mean their their legacy her her one of her daughters won the Nobel Prize with her jolet how do you say jolet or jolia C and then obviously her husband and this is just like a royal family uh well they have I think five five yeah it's just incredible it's a dynasty and 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 not just the attitude in mores you know of of uh you know society and scientific Society but but also the the impact on society as a whole again not just because you know she was the first woman to get to this level of of stardom but also the the sort of you know tragic and and terrifying aspects of her work um similar to to the you know kind of Confluence of events of of the uh you know World War II era in the Manhattan Project talk about this mixed feeling of you know sometimes we associate I mean you look at Tony fouchy or you know someone talking about a pandemic or something but they often get targeted you know for appr probation or you know or hostility was there any of that like how dare you unleash this this Force you know that that is so dangerous or at least in the minds of people at the time lay people was this malevolent potentially you know uh 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 paintbrush to a point by putting it in their mouths and pursing their lips as they pulled the paintbrush through so this because radium is similar to calcium in its chemistry lodged in their bones their teeth fell out their jaw came apart and they died it was horrific at the same time radium was seen as the great Boon to health and was actually in a health drink called rathor that you 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 189 8 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 I remember hearing from my father-in-law that um Not only would they use x-rays to treat acne uh back in the 60s 50s and 60s but you would actually have your your foot size measured for shoes using you know I remember those machines yeah it's so terrifying right you see your foot on the screen talk about their their working relationship my my wife and I uh thank God we don't work together I don't think I could survive um and nor could she more importantly but do they have you know complimentary skills were they basically twps in a 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 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 presented it mightily and they 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 they complimented each other they worked together they certainly shared ideas they shared lab notebooks uh 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 uh you know uh 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 as a director as the chair of the newly formed astronomy and astrophysics uh Department here I think we have more than 50% women and the faculty here and of course our physics department is named after Marie um Gart mayor so there were two Marie 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 the society General de yes so was an inventor and he had a few scientific instruments that were being commercially produced so they turned over a lot of the early break down of the ore to that society and so they had a 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 you know they were they were a sideline for the um 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 uh producer and he was able to claim affiliation with them which was a seal of great approval how important was Financial remuneration to them they did they lack for funding I mean they won 70,000 gold old Franks for the Nobel Prize I don't know what that then they didn't lack anymore but before that they 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 they would get by on 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 till after they'd won the Nobel Prize now reaction wasn't fully uniformly universally uh 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 which is kind of striking I mean Gustaf delen won a Nobel Prize for a gas regulation system for buoys and lighthouses which you know IED all the time in San Diego you know it's very common to have a lighthouse and and you just have to use it to navigate up the coast but do you think there was some jealousy uh you know regarding attention from mol what do you think was behind his objection oh it it was the 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 uh collaboration what did they have any connection to the you know so-called new world I I know Rutherford I think was in 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 Mill 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 Cy 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 so and wetherford won the chemistry won right he never thought that was ridiculous right Marston and guer yeah the Nobel committee had had transformed him into a chemist and he he joked about that well now my you know chat GPT can win a Nobel Prize in physics too uh no not not quite I mean we did have ai winning a lot of Nobel prizes 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 disperate you know Sciences as they are now I can't you know set foot in a in in a chemistry lab without you know injuring myself and and others it's very different from experimental physics so what how are they viewed back then they really came together they were you you had to know about both and if you didn't you formed to collaboration so when Marie and Pierre wanted to break down this or to get at what she predicted would be one and probably two new elements they called in a chemist to help them develop a system for digesting this this ore and boltwood Bertram boltwood at Yale who was a chemist collaborated with Rutherford so there was there was a lot of that marriage of physics and chemistry I like to think if we can pivot now to Galileo's daughter which is a 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 Murray cury and and Galileo himself uh in some sense these are both love stories you know not only a love story but but they're unique descriptions as I said at the beginning of scientists as human beings which we don't often hear about right that I 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 codes 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 aidea 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 skull dugery goes on has always gone on uh Galileo had huge fights with 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 with the humanity of the character that came through as though what you know the the Martian nature I I don't know like I said I just keep trying to show but they really are people I think people want to assume that scientists are so otherworldly intellectually robots walking wikipedias and sometimes that's like so that they can be relieved of the obligation to pursue the S understand anything about it yeah if you understood those things you must be a different species I'm fascinated by Galileo I actually you know wear this shirt uh almost every day yeah that's not my book that's his book I'm test I'm testing my friend Greg he says he listens to the podcast he got me this shirt for my birthday and uh he knows I'm a Galileo file I actually have the honor of U doing the first ever audio book of galileos with um my friend Carlo relli and Fabiola ganate she read his the introduction Galileo's introduction Frank wilch read Einstein's introduction to the book so we made an audio book in 2022 because I was doing a project on Galileo and I was like oh I love audiobooks you know 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 audiobook 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 it goes author Galileo and then Brian keing so I read uh the part of Gro Carlo relli read the part of salviati and my friend Lucho pillo Mentor from graduate school Professor Manchester he read part of simplio yeah so now that book I've always you know pointed out is a real testimony to the fact that again scientists are human beings we are not these robotic walking wikipedias and in fact a lot of the arguments that Gallo puts forth in the dialogue were wrong especially the the theory of the tides and you know I've got my I've got my finger p puppet here you know don't 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 we do tend to focus you know primarily on successes and really it's said that you know scientist only needs to be right once to have a a career but normal person can only be wrong once in their life so H how do you make it is it one of the things I 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 happen I had that with the the Harvard women this this famous tale about how Edward Pickering who was the head of the observatory got angry at his stupid assistant and shouted my maid could do a better job J well I bet my life that never happened so you the story of uh SE Marie cheste that wasn't her original name though right that was her her original name was Virginia galile and Galileo also wasn't the greatest of uh marital exemplars was he not he was had Mistresses was Vincenzo's uh mother the same as as Maria cheste or Celeste yes all all three of his children had the same mother and we know almost nothing about archangela is that her name that's a I thought of that for my daughter's name but I I thought she'd get mad at me that's a little much we called her something El 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 letters make me simultaneously thrilled and are extremely enervating because the way that she wrote as a relatively uneducated you know 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 that these she wrote she wrote beautifully yeah and 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 and for safekeeping so you couldn't take your vows till 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 childb birth at that time was 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 for them because he started to get into trouble when they were just entering their teens so to put them in a Convent was consider and it was a very normal practice probably half the girls in Florence were put in content 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 you know simultaneously incredibly brilliant and worldwise but also incredibly impolitic uh you know I point out in in some of the you know videos I've done just about him you know that he could be so brilliant and wise again U making brilliant blunders maybe that's darur for true Geniuses or even that their blunders are brilliant like Einstein's cosmological constant you know even that is Nobel worthy though he allegedly considered it a blunder I know I know gamov said gamov said it wasn't but he he made it 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 publ siderius nunus and that contained the seeds of capern you know Theory and thought but it was written in Latin unlike the dialogo 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 which was Italian how did how could someone so bright realize that he had the special exemption he got away with murder some somewhat in his first and first work with 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 and didn't didn't appreciate app how the pope would react to the presentation of of his the Pope's own ideas a tragic misunderstanding and we we still think of the name and even with my two Italian colleagues Carlo relli and Lucho pillo you know that simpo does sound like simpleton but some Scholars like Mario Olivio said oh it's not really that what what was it what's the 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 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 cockal of his heart glow or whatever they say but how could you find the 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 from women the letters you know it also makes me think about his you know her do we know much about their mother no on on the birth certificate just says she was Marina of Venice obviously there is great deal of of similarity between between these two books and and and K and uh galo's daughter but but not the least of which is this this unyielding Love Story uh which again is is so rare and so beautifully and Tenderly told in both in both subjects parents and their children yeah Mar letters to her daughters have been published as books there are two books of of their letters and that 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 cury book but there's there's a lot of that in there because her exchanges with her daughters really reveal her as a human being another you know f F inting commonality or tie in between another book on longitude your book longitude is this problem of you know of telling of telling time and there are stories you know perhaps apocryphal but perhaps not where you know Galileo was bored in in church as you know I I'm Jewish but I was I spent a brief time as an alter boy in in dobs fairy New York isn't it true that Galileo proposed the use of the moons of Jupiter which he discovered named after his Patron I I point out we do the opposite now we don't we don't call like you know the the you know some Discovery an exoplanet you know the NSF you know uh the NSF uh 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 as a Time piece to solve you know the longitude problem he wanted to name them the the mediteran moons yeah yeah yeah now we call them the Galilean moons but talk about what was his interest in in solving you know the longitude problem was he interested in oh AB absolutely that's 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 it was actually used on land and it was used to redraw the map of France there's famous CP 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 to the you know life of uh Su Maria cheste Celeste you know she wasn't a scientist but it's clear she she really did you know appreciate what he had done and 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 20 two hours for this audio book getting into his mind a little bit that some of his Pros was was kind of refined perhaps I'm asking if this is true bu his letters to her or or is that you know a stretch well I've never seen his letters to her they nobody has is only her side of the conversation he had a beautiful Pro style I'm sure his letters to her reflected that if you read the letters on sunspots which is a whole scientific discussion completely in letters that's gorgeous too the guy could write yeah he certainly could uh my my favorite quote of course is when he's being uh you know 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 violet 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 never tortured never tortured and I've been to his Mansion as Villa outside of Florence in our chetry it's administered by the University of of of Italy at Florence and it's a it's a magnificent place I mean uh Sam bankman freed would kill to spend a few days there you know as opposed to some Detention Center where he's at now and to to think about The Vineyards and the and the and he did he wrote his final book The the discourse and got it published you know smuggled out to the Netherlands as you point out um by a publisher that's more or less still in in existence El right it's crazy that we wouldn't have had it without that and you you know we we think about him as his martyr for science you you certainly you know you know put the myth to rest that he said and yet it moves under his breath I mean that would that would be foolish he he even apparently you know years later would would kind of envey against the capern model at some level but he had to that point what is it about this this myth this you know tortured for Sci I mean Bruno was burned at the stake that's true but he was kind of a a jerk I would real 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 very 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 beli in God that's the whole point of life you know and it seems like at the end when he tacks on this 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 that's 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 the 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 and read one of them and you know the idea that Galileo had two daughters who were nuns that 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 uh that's that 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 um and use them as the basis for as we wrap up you you do mention you know sort of that they they did spend time after Galileo's trial he did get to see his daughter I mean he he did was he there when she passed away no he was on his way home because he was detained in Sienna you mentioned that it 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 what do you make of that that you know we know him a lot for the dialogue and the whole cedarius nunus of course had on Neil degrass Tyson a week ago and he made another book called The Story messenger um so we don't think of the discourse typically but is that wrong should should we really rever 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 then somebody else would have whereas in the discourses it all came out of his head I think Jay pasikov the late great friend of mine and yours Jay pasikov told me that the same day that Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter there was a 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 uh and so yes we we know it as yeah and we know 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 so and even you know his uh as I say his blunders were quite incredible even there is a uh 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 that moment so he saw it he just didn't know what it 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 theories came about to explain it and uh 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 trialogues that Galia was working on I think he may have explained it to torelli or somebody but um 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 gal I would love that daa but but tell me more what about this this final unfinished manuscript he was thinking of of Reviving those characters again I don't think there's a whole lot to it I don't think it's our next book what is your next I know you're going You're Still postpartum as you said postpartum but tell me what 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 the politzer prize winner Ray Armen trout yes she has contributed to my poetry column in scientific America oh wonderful wonderful I didn't know that she wrote a poem of she says inspired by me once about 10 12 years ago I got an email and I get a lot of these you know Professor keing 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 could buy my own coffee and I get six of these a week and I said oh by the way I won the Pitzer Prize last year okay fine you know retract that from the Wast Spin and uh we developed a great friendship and she wrote this poem called accounts and it's allegedly inspired by me and it won best one of the best poems of 202 in in American Poetry great how nice to both of you yes we did co- te 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 Joseph Conlin have have you read that uh yeah it's called Origins I have it here somewhere he he wrotes a poetry book He's a physicist a string theorist in in the UK and he wrote a book about poetry in as it applies to physics I think he did submit a poem to me and then took it back to some something went on well daava I have a tradition on this podcast it's it's named after the uh 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 you know he said many things including the name of podcast comes from Arthur C Clark did you know that no yeah so there's an engineer at Apple named Vinnie chicher reallyi in 2000 and he invented you co-invented the iPod and you know the iPod the original iPod had the circular ey like thing on it and it was white and gleaming like the pods in the pod bay door in 2001 of Space Odyssey but um getting back to that quote into the impossible what I want to ask you as a as sort of a thought experiment a gunkan experiment if you could go back in time with a 20-year-old 30-year-old Dava 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 I want 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 a 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 that muck and mire of writing a book as as authors know it's like sitting on glass and and chewing barb wire enjoy it you do know a lot of writers say that they hate it and I and I know that that's true but it's not true of me it I mean certainly have terrible days when nothing goes right and I can't put a sentence together other 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 and Madam cury has she was not only great companion during the pandemic but her attitude about things her commitment to action to 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 you know well David this has been one of my favorite interviews of all time and I looked forward to it for so long and it delivered on All my expectations this book another phenomenal contrib tion to your UA as as the French M might say the elements of Maru how the glow of radium lit a path for women in size but also for men oh yeah 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 labough that was an important story to tell and also as as an experimental physicist unlike a theoretical physicist they get most of the attention the Brian greens the Steven Hawkings the Mitch oakus but 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 spe you know you could basically write down some string theory on the back of a napkin and publish the napkin as some of my colleagues certainly have done I'm not naming names but the point is uh she was a businesswoman too and and oh yeah she was constantly itating 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 curri and I just want to thank you for bringing these these Heroes of mine and and millions around the world to life as you only uniquely can do thank you so much Dava it's been such an honor and a treat delightful to be with you thanks again